David:

(If this is taking too long to load or is playing too jerkily, go here.)

Oprah:

Actually, it’s even worse than this in the version I saw in “Challenges of Life” episode: they cut the sound effects (stopwatch and slamming noises), altered and dumbed down the narration further, and cut the scenes of the flies suffering at the end. Apparently, in addition to subbing Oprah for David, they rewrote the script in many places and replaced it with a hack job a freshman biology student appears to have penned. (Sample dialogue: “The thing about mating is, that it has some fairly predictable consequences.” ) Worse, they replaced the beautiful soundtrack with the cheesiest Musak they could find, changed the sound effects, and cut, changed the tone, or destroyed the narrative of some of the most poignant scenes (possibly for time since Discovery Channel, unlike BBC, has commercials). The American title sequence was so bad (and sooooo different from the moving yet understated British opening to Planet Earth with the sun dawning over the planet in an inky black sky) that I thought it was yet another preview or commercial. Shame on you, Discovery Channel. SHAME.

They even changed their facts in some places. In the American version, Oprah claims some grebes are Western grebes, and that they are monogamous but switch partners every season. In the British version, David says the very same grebes are Clark’s grebes and that they mate for life. So which is right? I’ll put my money on David. How many more inconsistencies are there? I only noticed these because I happened to have seen a preview of the British version of this scene.

Completing the Failure Trifecta, Netflix ONLY offers Americans the corporate pablum Oprah version. That’s right, America. You aren’t even considered bright enough to be given the option of watching the grown-up British version. Shame on you, Netflix. SHAME.

Don’t believe me? Think I’m exaggerating for effect? A (non-random) sampling of customer comments from Netflix:

Oprah Winfrey narrating Life in place of Sir David Attenborough is like having Donald Trump narrate for Jacques Cousteau. The one with the original audio will be out later, and I’ll be waiting for that one. (From a one-star reviewer)

This would be a 5+ Rating if it wasn’t dubbed over by Oprah Winfrey without any way to change it back to the original Attenborough. Epic Fail to not include the original language, and epic fail on NF for choosing this version over the original. (Yet another one-star review)

I too would give it 5 stars only if Oprah hadn’t ruined it. I’ve since purchased the Sir David Attenborough’s narrated version so that I could enjoy the rest of the series and would agree with many others, Oprah shouldn’t be narrating anything regarding the natural world – corporate explotation in my opinion. (You guessed it — one-star review)

Please bring the David Attenbourgh version to NF. I’m sure the Oprah version was cheaper (no one is buying it), but there was a reason for that. I had real trouble with the fact that the narrator cannot pronounce the words correctly.

What the heck??? I thought this was supposed to be narrated by Sir David Attenborough? Instead Oprah Winfrey sounds like she is narrating for a group of children… this is insulting. I had to turn it off, and I am going to order the Original BBC version.

You cannot substitute David Attenborough. His love and knowledge for nature is unmatched. You can’t have someone like Oprah narrate this. It’s an attrocity. I couldn’t finish watching the last bit of it because I wanted to punch Oprah.

It was so unwatchable and so unrecognizable as the original, high-quality product I’ve come to know and expect from the Beeb that I’m sending my DVD back and refusing to watch further until the powers that be at Netflix release the Attenborough version from its corporate prison. Come on, Netflix. Do the right thing.

I also love the way natural patterns are repetitive*. Similar patterns pop up in the oddest places. Look at the Charter Oak on the Connecticut quarter

and you’re looking at the search pattern of a feeding plasmodial slime mold (a giant ameoboid eukaryote), Physarum polycephalum,

http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomtruth/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

which sends out protoplasmic veins in all directions in search of its prey: bacteria, fungal spores, and other microbes.

Does math underlie that too?

____________________________________________________
*I also love how this video was for his mom. : )

In Russia, amoeba study YOU.

OK, giant deep-sea amoebae that roll around like possessed dust bunnies? AWESOME. The 411. Though this group had just been discovered in the Arabian Sea in 2000, it seems it was still a surprise to find them *leaving tracks* (although I should emphasize no one can actually see them move in real time. This sounds like a job for the BBC’s magic time-lapse camera). They are testate amoebae, or ameobae that make shells called tests (a few other deep sea protists like foraminifera also make shells called tests, and I just discovered that Chris Taylor over at Catalogue of Organisms just happens to have coincidentally published on the foram version yesterday.). This species, Gromia sphaerica, fits into the Gromiidea on this tree. Just look at all the uncharted territory and things you’ve never heard of. Space is not the final frontier. . . not by a long shot. Not yet.

The bigger, non-motile existing deep-sea protozoans Matz refers to in the video are probably xenophyophores, an outrageously bizarre group alluded to here before. You’ll just have to wait on a post about those another day. And there’s probably lots more giant deep sea protists I don’t know about yet. Readers?

The big take-home message of Matz’s discovery (or at least what they’d like us to take home) seems to be that we could really be misinterpreting Pre-Cambrian fossil trackwaves — that is, the fossil tracks of organisms that predate the blossoming of most modern animal groups in an event called the Cambrian Explosion, ca. 550 million years ago. These tracks can be found in fossils as old as 1.8 billion years (yes, that’s billion with a pinkie to the corner of the mouth). These tracks were for many years interpreted as early modern animals for whom we just didn’t happen to have fossils. But what if they were giant protists? Or something else? Possible, and probably not surprising given the fossils we do have of Ediacaran creatures, they bizarre early animal(?) forms that predate the Cambrian explosion and are the first fossils of complex multicellular organisms we have. They all seem to be soft and, for lack of a better term, pillowy. Yes, like Charmin.

Will we ever know? Probably not. But you never know. A fossil of a recognizable ancestor of a modern animal keeled over at the end of one of these tracks might settle things. On the other hand, simple tracks do tend to look alike. And with hundreds of millions of years on hand, there’s plenty of time for lots of really weird things we’ll never know about to have made them.

You know what this video reminds me of, of course . . .

Here’s a further taste of the delights that await us (with the correct Attenborough narration):

Life – Venus Flytraps: Jaws of Death – BBC One from Paulo Martins on Vimeo.

Is it just me or do those hairs remind you of the time-delayed booby traps laid for Indiana-Jones style adventurers in gold-laden caves? You know, the kind where you rest your arm on a stone projecting from the wall, and 10 seconds later it starts moving into the wall as the ceiling sprouts spikes and assumes skewering speed? Yeah. I really did feel bad for the little flies after they got trapped, though. Although their slurping of nectar with that repulsive labellum-tipped proboscis really was revolting (where has that been?) and I have no qualms about mercilessly swatting them around my home, they are living creatures too, and their little cries of despair were truly pitiful. Perhaps I’d make a good Jain after all.

Venus flytraps are in the Droseraceae, the Sundew Family, along with the sundews and a curious little package called the waterwheel plant, which is essentially an aquatic flytrap, but sadly does not occur in the western hemisphere. This family is in the Caryophyllales, a group of related plants that have evolved many ways of living in nutrient-poor and/or hot, dry soils. These include clever heat-beating photosynthetic adaptations (C4 and CAM for you biogeeks in the know), salt-secreting glands, and insect carnivory. See here for an idea of their place on the tree of life (click on the arrow to the left to back out and get a bigger picture).

In case you’re wondering, the title of this post is both a reference to the infamous “Uma, Oprah” David Letterman debacle at the 1995 Oscars and to the bird Upupa epops, the hoopoe (pronounced hupu), which happens to have the favorite scientific name of my friend and birdsong enthusiast Nathan Pieplow, who blogs over at earbirding.com.

Sigh. I’ll never forget the first time I saw leafy sea dragons (a relative of these weedy sea dragons) at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. My mom practically had to drag me out of the room.

Sea dragons are not true seahorses, belonging instead to the seahorse sister taxon (most closely related group), the pipefish. The proper name of the group is Syngnathinae, which means fused-jaw (syn-gnath), and if you look at their beaks, you can see that their jaws are indeed sealed shut. Here’s a short BBC article discussing the Life clip you just watched.

And with that, we conclude our programming for 2009. I look forward to sharing the tiny, slimy, tentacled and beautiful with you in the next decade too. Cheers, all, and stay safe this holiday season. : ) Jen

I want to show you something. Pull the slider bar across to 1:37 in this clip of the Jim Henson masterpiece and my favorite childhood film, “The Dark Crystal,” and watch until about 2:33.

Amazing, huh? It’s made even more amazing by the fact that all these creatures were real tangible things dreamed up and manufactured by the Jim Henson studio. In the making-of documentary, you can see them assembling them by hand like traditional European craftsmen (many of whose skills they used). This was a movie I watched over and over whenever I could on the gigantic early VCR owned by our neighbors down the road in rural Tennessee when I was 5 or 6. I absolutely loved it, even though the first 5 minutes of the were missing because my neighbors were slow on hitting “record”.  Even little Jen(me) was fascinated by the diversity of life – even imagined life.

Last night I saw Avatar on opening night in 3D on an IMAX screen in Denver, and I got to live this experience all over again.

Avatar is not a movie that is long on brains or wit, even by the standards of other James Cameron films. I wish they’d spent half the time on the script they spent on the visuals. You could also compile a list 20 or 25 items long of elements this movie shares with other Cameron films, from big things like a strong female lead (all films), to a soulless corporation driving evil in the name of profits (Aliens, The Abyss, Titanic; which, by the way, is a major reason yours truly has all her money in “socially responsible” investments) down to really subtle details like a supporting female character who’s really good at operating an unusual vehicle (One Night in the Abyss) or a bad guy fighting the good guy toward the end of the movie in an unbreathable environment in a machine that gets its front window cracked, thus admitting some of the deadly medium (Michael Biehn’s character in the Abyss).

But James Cameron films have their virtues, and they are a passionate attention to detail, a high sense of adventure, protagonists you want to love, and really deadly/exotic/fantastically beautiful aliens. In this film, he’s taken this latter theme, one he started with the fantastic ctenophore-inspired aliens from “The Abyss” (still my favorite Cameron film) and used it to imagine the biodiversity of another world. For those of us fascinated by life, there is a lot to see and wonder at in this film. It provides, as Manohla Dargis of the New York Times says in her review, the big WOW.

Because it’s such a magical experience, I’m not going to give much of it away, except to say it’s obvious these creatures were inspired at least in part by computer geeks, given that they all have USB ports. But Cameron takes the modus operandi of people trying to re-imagine life on other worlds – putting sea creatures on land or making plants animals, ones which Henson and legendary conceptual artist Brian Froud drew on heavily to imagine the world of the Dark Crystal – and takes it up a notch. In one of my first posts I told you the parasite Giardia resembles the love child of a squid and a kernel of corn. In Avatar, you get to find out what happens when a jellyfish and a dandelion make sweet, sweet love.

As has been pointed out by many reviewers, Cameron’s narrative breaks no new ground and simply retells some of America’s classic, and not always proud stories (Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves) with lesser dialogue and characters. Even the facial structure and ears of the blue alien Na’vi strongly recall those of gelflings, above. But oh, what a world in which to retell our stories. For people who are not biodiversity-philes, this movie takes a bit of the wonder that I easily feel crawling around the Colorado forest floor after a good rain or watching D.A. ramble on in his adorable, thick British accent about marine worms and dumps it right in their laps. Cameron was so attentive to detail there are things in “Avatar” for even lichenologists and bryophiles to love. I won’t give it away, but when you first see the rainforest of the forest moon Pandora (wait a minute . . . Endor? Pandora? ) through the avatars’ eyes there is a tiny 3D detail that will take your breath away. Though sadly, this biodiversity afficianado has never been to a real rainforest (it’s up there on my list of dreams along with traveling to the deep sea in a submersible), Avatar puts me as close as I’m likely to get for a while, and it does so in glorious 3D. I’ve never heard so many audible “wows” from an audience, myself included. Thank you, Mr. Cameron.

Isn’t it cute that they make a heart shape when they mate? It almost makes up for the fact the male has a penis from hell. Although it’s by no means the most frightening I’ve seen. There are many insects (of which bedbugs are a prime example) that mate by “traumatic insemination“, in which the male stabs the female with his often-horrible, spiky penis and injects sperm directly into the female’s body cavity. [Pause while female readers silently scream in horror.] Brought to you by the James Cameron School of Insect Adaptations Worthy of Sci-Fi Horror Flicks (TM).(Motto: “They mostly come out at night. Mostly.”)

In any case, notice that these are damselflies. Many people confuse them with dragonflies. Here is your natural history lesson for the day. This is a damselfly:

And this is a dragonfly:

Note the chief differences: Most damsels neatly fold their wings behind them when they land. Dragons hold them out like biplanes. Careful observers will also note that dragons’ wing pairs do not match as closely as damsel wings (the dragonflies’ hind wings tend to extend tailward farther) and damselfly eyes are much further separated. Almost googly, one might say.

Here’s a tree to show you how they’re related. Their clades’ (groups’) technical names are Zygoptera (damselflies) and Anisoptera (dragonflies). Notice that the uneven wings are right in dragonflies’ formal name: an-iso-ptera: “not — same — winged”.  They’re both in the insect order Odonata; back out via the little arrow on the left to see how they fit into the Insects.

Wow! Amazing, huh? Though the bit halfway when the researchers listen to the seals under the ice does have somewhat of the feel of the final scene of a local 8th grade production of Hamlet when everyone “dies”.

In case you don’t know Werner Herzog, he is the director who gave us the documentary “Grizzly Man” about Timothy Treadwell. Remember him? He was the man who lived with bears in Alaska and ended by being consumed by one along with his girlfriend while his video camera recorded audio of the whole thing. I quite recommend the film, if for no other reason than to see a portrait of a man consumed by his passion, however misguided, and of the jaw-droppingly gorgeous beauty of the vast remote region of Alaska he lives in. Would that we all could spend a few months there each summer, simply watching the grass get tossed by the wind or the streams ripple over the rocks. Of course, not so much with the getting eaten by grizzlies part.

Herzog also famously hauled a 320-ton steamship over an isthmus in Peru for the filming of “Fitzcarraldo” (a feat so Cameron-esque someone else made a documentary about it) and has produced a slew of critically-acclaimed but otherwise little known art house feature films and documentaries. “Grizzly Man” did receive some measure of success and fame, and one of his next films — “Rescue Dawn” — was shown widely enough that even my parents saw it.

This clip is from “Encounters at the End of the World”, which apparently came out in 2007, though I was oblivious. As expected, it has sterling marks on Rotten Tomatoes. It has now been added to the Netflix queue.

You can find how seals fit into the mammals here; here’s more on Weddell Seals, the composers of this unearthly music.

Why do I suddenly feel . . . melancholy? Image by Anastasia Shesterinina, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. Click image for link.

Oh, Sir David Attenborough . . . how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Blue Planet . . .  Planet Earth . . . Life in the Undergrowth . . . and a gem I just recently encountered, his 1979 BBC debut, Life on Earth. I haven’t seen it, but apparently someone rummaging through a British charity store recently encountered one of only about 100 copies of its score the composer ever pressed, and they’re now being offered for sale on CD online.

Listening to the meditative and elegant sample tracks of Gymnopedie for Jellyfish, or Arabesque for Flatworms, I am transported back to the nature documentaries that aired on the lazy Sundays of my childhood, in which the pace was slow as molasses and many long moments passed narrator-free so as to better contemplate the mystery of nature. Behold: the brook trout spawning, or the grizzly grabbing salmon.  It was a simpler time, when the TV’s four channels (CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS, which in my little remote corner of rural southeast Tennessee went snowy all night, to return to the air early the next morning preceded by the Star Spangled Banner and space shuttle lifting off) were inhabited by the likes of Marty Stouffer’s Wild America and Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom(I briefly considered naming this blog wildkingdoms.com, but it turned out the domain was already taken). How I miss them sometimes.

I also briefly considered buying the Life on Earth soundtrack, but after doing the Dollar-Pound conversion and learning it’d cost me $21 to buy and ship to Colorado, the cheapnik in me won out. And Life on Earth itself remains out of grasp for now too. Though it has been released to DVD in the UK, the US has not been so fortunate. That is a shame, because the British Film Institute ranked it 32nd in the top 100 British Television Programs of all time, ahead of Walking with Dinosaurs and the 1995 Colin Firth-Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice (Why is that ranked only 99th? Why? Why?) Wikipedia has some sort of conspiracy theory about Life on Earth never being released here because of its (gasp!) explicit evolutionary content, but plenty of other evolution-based programs have been put on DVD here no problem so I have a hard time buying that. Here’s a clip (featuring a very young David Attenborough) on the making of it to give you a taste for what you’re missing:

In any case, we will hopefully soon have the next best thing because we still have D.A. with us, and he has done a bit of a re-do of Life on Earth that is currently airing on BBC One: Life. Though all my British readers may be having a “Duh!” moment here, most of us in America are quite ignorant of it — or at least I was until about two weeks ago. Let’s hope this Life does find a way — to jump the pond.

Have any British readers seen it yet? Any early reviews? And Discovery Channel, if you are reading this, please leave David Attenborough’s narration intact in any US broadcasts. No Sigourney Weaver, Morgan Freeman, or (god forbid) Tom Cruise. Your attention to this matter is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Fungi have an überweird classification scheme I will tell you about some other time, but suffice it to say it’s based on the sexual phases of fungi, and Aspergillus ain’t it. However, when the sexual forms are known for Aspergillus species (and they aren’t always!), they are placed in the Ascomycota, or sac-forming fungi, which I have discussed before. Here’s a tree.

Discovered courtesy MycoRant.