Wow, I haven’t contributed anything here for a while. My field season is coming up fast; later this week I’ll be on my way to Florida, where I’ll be spending the better part of three months in South Miami doing fieldwork and captive behavioral experiments with Anolis lizards. I study interspecific territoriality between two invasive Anolis species, A. sagrei from Cuba and A. cristatellus from Puerto Rico. As the season progresses, I’ll try to highlight some of the more interesting aspects of my research in the blog.
Believe it or not, my life isn’t the only thing happening right now (even thought it may seem that way to me!). BBC/Discovery’s Life debuted in the U.S. last weekend. Many of my friends are biologists and/or photographers, and everyone I know has been raving about the series. For me, some of the highlights in the first two episodes were the high-speed footage of chameleons capturing praying mantids with their tongues, and an incredible sequence of three cheetah brothers taking down an ostrich.
Adult Western Grebe (Aechmophorus occidentalis) in basic (winter) plumage. Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve, Huntington Beach, CA.
Despite the remarkable visuals, however, I found the script and narration a little disappointing. Part of it, certainly, is that Oprah’s voice doesn’t have the immediate believability that nature lovers have come to associate with Sir David Attenborough’s inimitable narration. But there were also some factual errors in the first two episodes. For example, the first episode, “Challenges of Life,” featured remarkable footage of grebes performing their courtship dance, in which the male and female run across the water in perfect synchrony. The problem? Oprah told us we were watching Western Grebes (Aechmophorus occidentalis), when the birds on screen were actually Clark’s Grebes (Aechmophorus clarkii), a closely related species. In “Reptiles and Amphibians,” the cinematographers used high-speed cameras to give a unique view of a basilisk lizard running across the water. The problem? The “raptor” from which the basilisk was purportedly fleeing was clearly a Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura), a scavenger that poses no threat to a basilisk.
Do these inaccuracies matter? In the end, probably not – most viewers won’t notice them, and the series still does a brilliant job of making nature captivating. Nevertheless, I find such careless mistakes irksome, especially in a series that reportedly had a £10 million budget!
On a tangential note, the Pebble Toad (Oreophrynella nigra) featured in “Reptiles and Amphibians” is an endemic resident of Venezuela’s Mount Roraima, which I described in my last two posts. Liz and I saw this tiny black toad on our first day on the Roraima, but unfortunately I didn’t come back with any photographs!
Lots more news to come, so stay tuned.
My friend and colleague Geoff Hill (Auburn University) has just published a new book, , through National Geographic Press. In 2006, Geoff and his collaborator Kevin McGraw published a by the same name, which has become a standard reference for biologists studying color in birds and other organisms. This new Nat Geo book represents the distillation of everything that’s known about the colors of birds into a single volume written for non-scientists.
