The Fish Doorbell Humanity possesses the impressive ability to mold natural elements to make our lives better. We can manipulate waterways, drive through mountains, and harness invisible forces to generate power. Today, scientists and engineers understand well how these projects might affect other species. But before we had a nuanced, non-ignorant view of the interconnectedness […]
Immortal Jellyfish One of the many features of video and computer games is the save or restart button. Make a mistake, fall down an abyss, lose a battle, and you can go anew at a previous game state. The real world doesn’t yet work that way for animate beings. Unless you’re one of a few
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Small Brains & Gunshots Some critters have all the luck. The platypus might be the strangest animal on the planet, or, at least, possess the highest number of bizarre traits. But the duckbill doesn’t have a monopoly on interesting attributes. In the project’s early days, we investigated the snapping shrimp, also known as the pistol shrimp. This Lynchian
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The Meg Jaws doesn’t own a monopoly on horror films with giant sharks. 1999’s Deep Blue Sea features a glorious death scene, where Samuel L. Jackson proselytizes in a way only he can, before being devoured by genetically modified makos. In 2013, SyFy introduced the world to the Sharknado universe, in which sharks emerge from tornados inside hurricanes. Most shark
Deep Blue & Haole Girl In the novel Jaws by Peter Benchley, the great white shark that terrorizes Amity Island in New York is approximately 20 feet long. For the film version, Steven Spielberg created an animatronic beast they dubbed Bruce, who reached 25 feet in length. As the sequels rolled in over the years, the sharks
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Shark Week In July 1988, Discovery Channel launched a programming block based on sharks. The first iteration of the theme began with a piece called Caged in Fear, about abalone divers who developed a contraption to keep them safe during their harvests. Now in its 36th season, Shark Week is the longest-running cable television event in history. The