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Whoa, Amazon has the BBC version of Planet Earth on sale for ~60% off…$30.49 for the DVD and $40.99 for Blu-ray.
Note: this edition features the original narration by David Attenborough
Sigourney Weaver, I’m really happy for you and I’ma let you finish but David Attenborough was one of the greatest Planet Earth narrators of all time. Of all time! (What, too late?)
I can’t get this to work (because I’m in the US?) but the BBC has put up a collection of David Attenborough’s favorite moments from his last 30 years of shooting nature documentary videos. More info here.
It has always been my hope that through filmmaking I can bring the wonder of the natural world into people’s sitting rooms, inspire people to find out more and to care about the world we share.
(via @dunstan)
Watch as David Attenborough signals his interest in mating with a male cicada. Scientists think that cicadas have 13- or 17-year mating cycles because, being prime numbers, those periods are not divisible by those periods of potential predators. From Stephen J. Gould:
Many potential predators have 2-5-year life cycles. Such cycles are not set by the availability of cicadas (for they peak too often in years of nonemergence), but cicadas might be eagerly harvested when the cycles coincide. Consider a predator with a life-cycle of five years: if cicadas emerged every 15 years, each bloom would be hit by the predator. By cycling at a large prime number, cicadas minimize the number of coincidences (every 5 x 17, or 85 years, in this case). Thirteen- and 17-year cycles cannot be tracked by any smaller number.
It’s a bit more complicated than that, but Gould’s argument covers the basics. (thx, @mwilkie)
If you liked Planet Earth, you should probably check out Nature’s Great Events. Narrated by David Attenborough and currently airing in the UK on BBC1 and BBC HD, the series consists of six 50-minute shows, each of which features a large-scale annual event, like the spring thaw in the Arctic Circle and the sardine run along the coast of South Africa. The series was shot in HD using many of the techniques seen in Planet Earth.
If you’re in the UK, you can check out the first three episodes on the BBC site. In the US, Discovery will be airing the show sometime in the spring under the title Seasons of Survival (apparently Nature’s Great Events isn’t dramatic enough for the American audience). No word on whether Attenborough’s expert narration will also be replaced as it was in Planet Earth.
In the meantime, some HD clips of the show are available on YouTube. This slo-mo video of a grizzly bear shaking the water off its fur is fun to watch but this too-short clip of an extraordinary coordinated attack of dolphins, seals, sharks, and birds on a massive school of sardines is the gem.
(via we made this, who call the series “mind-blowingly good”)
David Attenborough, the voice of several thousand hours of nature films, gets hate mail from viewers who believe he should be crediting God for nature’s beauty.
Telling the magazine that he was asked why he did not give “credit” to God, Attenborough added: “They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.”
(via cyn-c)
David Attenborough narrates a sexual encounter between two leopard slugs. I know slug sex probably isn’t your thing, but this is worth a look. Beautiful.
(thx, alex)
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