"They're independent;" "they're affectionate;" "they're loyal; they're beautiful;" "they're sagacious; they're mysterious;" "they're ineffable; they're inscrutable." "Cats are magic." "They really are magic." "Probably the most mysterious creatures in the world." "They're also very vicious;" "they're very cruel things." "That's another thing I like about them their ability to be one thing and then another." "The domestic cat harbors a sort of split personality." "Within even the most demure pussycat lurks a creature of the wild." "Even after thousands of years, we still know little about the behavior of domestic cats." "Now, scientists and laymen alike attempt to understand them to demystify this elusive feline." "For them, the domestic cat is every bit as intriguing to study as the lion or the tiger." "To share one's life with a cat is to invite a bit of wildness indoors." "Perhaps the writer was correct when he philosophized:" ""God made the cat that man might have the pleasure of caressing the tiger."" "Today, the Western world enjoys an unparalleled love affair between man and beast." "Cat coming through." "The cat now surpasses the dog as the number one pet, and annually we spend more on cat food than on baby food." "On any weekend proud owners display their pampered pets to thousands of fellow enthusiasts." "Some three dozen breeds compete longhairs, shorthairs, and some that seem to have no hair." "There are nearly 58 million pet cats in the United States alone." "While many are common alley cats of little monetary value, some exotic breeds sell for as much as $3,666." "And, although many people dislike and distrust cats, a far greater number adore and indulge them." "Keeping cats and their owners happy has become a major industry." "It's extremely durable It's synthetic fur." "Look at the beads in the middle there." "You see the beads?" "Oh, yeah." "Okay, listen." "You hear that little scratchy sound?" "Drives the cats crazy." "They love it." "This is one of our kitty condos." "We have a birthing area or a litter area." "Kitty pan comes down on the bottom." "It's made of solid6-wood construction stain-resistant carpeting..." "The cat, as you can see has a tubular body;" "everything is in line." "It's got the long body the long tail, the long head to go with the rest of the body." "Long bones." "The people keep it in wonderful condition, because he's very muscular." "He's not skinny at all; he's just slim and hard like an athlete." "Like a specter floating from the mists of prehistory into the shadows of modern times, two species of wildcats still prowl parts of Africa and Europe." "Presumed to be the ancestors of today's house cat, they even look like tabbies." "But wildcats are fierce and formidable animals, in no way tame." "In ancient times many became tame when farmers fed and sheltered them as valued rodent killers." "The farmers were Egyptian." "The time more than 3,666 years ago." "The cat became adored and revered in Egypt." "Never since has the cat's honored role been matched anywhere in the world." "One goddess in the form of a cat symbolized pleasure, fertility, and maternity." "Cats were also associated with the deity believed to start the sun on its daily course and one who symbolized life itself." "The Brooklyn Museum maintains one of the world's finest Egyptian collections" "Its curator is archaeologist Richard Fazzini." "He divides his time between ancient ruins and ancient artifacts." "Prized in any such collection is a cat mummy, embalmed as were the ancient pharaohs themselves." "This pussycat has been this way since, well, he's hard to date, but let's say at least 2,366 to 2,566 years." "Now why, you might ask, did the Egyptians mummify animals?" "Well, because certain gods could appear in the form of certain animals." "And so it could be a pious gesture or part of some cult ritual to present a mummified cat to place it in a temple or to place it in one of the great animal cemeteries." "But the heyday of the cat was to pass." "Once sacred, the cat would come to be hated and scorned." "The same eyes perceived as the throne of the gods became feared as the seat of the Devil" "Believed by many to be the companions of witches, thousands of cats were tortured." "burned, and hanged, as recently as colonial times in America." "Veterinarian Michael Fox is Vice President of the Humane Society of the United States." "He writes extensively on cat behavior and human cat relationships." "It is intriguing that cats have been revered in history and persecuted." "There was one pope who had all cats killed." "This love-hate relationship, I think, reflects an aspect of the dualistic psyche of human beings." "We love things conditionally." "We love them if we can control them and they will bend to our will." "Or we love them because they are mysterious, that they're an aspect of nature's wildness, which the cat embodies." "The domestic cat is but one of 38 species of cats, most of them astonishingly alike." "Take away their spots or stripes their short or long fur, disregard the differences in size from four pounds to more than,66 and a cat is a cat is a cat." "Few pet owners are aware that most of the behaviors of their house cat have a parallel somewhere in the wild." "The cat is an enchanting combination of beauty and utility." "Its sinuous movements delight the eye." "Cats get some of their suppleness from their shoulder joints, which are so constructed that they can shift the front legs freely in almost any direction." "They have almost no collar bone and an exceptionally limber spine." "Ever fluid and graceful cats are marvels of strength and balance." "All cats advertise their territory." "Spraying deposits a pungent scent." "Scratch marks are visual signals and may also carry a scent from glands in the paws." "Glands on the face and tail deposit scents at home just as in the wild." "Sometimes more than one signal is left." "Territorial fights could be deadly between animals with such sharp teeth and claws," "so most disputes are settled by body postures and intimidating bluffs." "Friendly greetings are generally more fleeting and subtle a nose touch or body rubbing." "Exactly how and why cats purr remains a mystery." "We do know that both purring and kneading with the paws first appear in infancy to stimulate the mother's milk to flow." "Being hunter, cats must conserve energy whenever possible." "They snooze about two-thirds of the time, but always remain alert to sounds;" "hence, the term catnap." "In all cats ovulation the release of an egg, does not occur until mating triggers it." "After gestation of two to four months depending on the species, they give birth to one to eight young." "Kittens and cubs are helpless at birth" "At first they can neither see nor hear their life guided primarily by touch and smell." "Amazingly, each has a preference for one particular nipple, which it locates by smell." "In the wild this efficient behavior frees the mother to resume hunting sooner." "Excellent, protective mothers, cats will quickly move their offspring if they suspect danger." "To teach their young how to hunt and kill, many cat mothers bring home live prey for practice." "These caracals nicknamed "desert lynx"" "may seem to be playful or cruel, but they are merely learning." "Striking the prey stuns it, but the cubs are too inexperienced to deliver the fatal bite." "Cat mothers keep their young fastidiously clean." "The soothing sensation of tongue rubbing against fur is duplicated each time a human strokes a cat." "In this way a bond is formed, and cats come to regard us as surrogate mothers, a role we hold throughout their lives." "In the wild, as young felines play, they refine the predatory skills essential to survival as adults." "Whether domestic cats similarly practice stalking and hunting is subject to debate." "Many experts feel that play exists as a behavior in its own right, simply because it's fun." "With indoor cats many owners can attest to a phenomenon affectionately called the "evening crazies", when pent-up hunting instincts erupt into a frenzy." "Triggered by a prey's movements, even the most well-fed cat may hunt given the opportunity." "But the connection between making a kill and eating it has to be learned." "An inexperienced cat may attack with precision, yet not recognize its kill as food." "As hunters that rely on stealth, cats are always alert for cues that could mean food or danger." "While smell is not their primary sense, no odor escapes them." "They use smell mainly to find the territorial boundaries of other cats or to know if other cats have been in their territory." "To gather information about potential mates, cats use a second olfactory system in the roof of the mouth." "Inhaling the airborne scent while curling the upper lip creates the grimacing look." "Cats move their funnel-shaped ears to zero in on sounds." "They probably have better acoustical discrimination than either dogs or humans." "The function of a cat's whiskers is not entirely understood." "But if they are severed, the animal may lose its equilibrium and stumble into things." "It may even be unable to make a clean kill." "Whiskers also transmit information about captured prey." "To remove all traces of food, cats regularly groom." "Fastidiousness is one of their best known traits." "Coarse and abrasive liken sandpaper, the tongue is covered with hook-like projection that can even tear flesh from bone after a kill." "To writers, artists, and poets, cat's eyes have embodied all things magical and mysterious." "The scientist knows that vision is one of the cat's most vital senses, the key to its success as a hunter." "At Florida State University, the question of how cats see the world has been studied for more than 25 years." "Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology," "Dr. Mark Berkley defied cynics who told him the independent cat would never make a good laboratory subject." "He designed a system that not only works, but actually appeals to the cat" "Banking on the animal's inquisitiveness," "Berkley built a box that invites exploration." "And when it responds correctly, the cat is rewarded with food." "Generated by a computer, an image will appear in front of the cat on one side of the screen." "The cat must tell the researchers, "Yes, I can see that"." "It does so by poking the right-hand plexiglass panel when the image appears on the right, and the other side when the image appears on the left." "From the work of Berkley and others, we know cats cannot distinguish between human faces, have poor color vision, and like us, experience visual illusions." "But perhaps most noteworthy is their ability to see at night." "Under low light levels the cat is anywhere from six to ten times more sensitive." "That is, at a light level where we perhaps couldn't see anything, he still sees, not very will, but certainly better than we do." "I suppose it might be the difference between a starless night and a moonlit night, where under a starless night that might be the way it looks to us, but to the cat it might look as if the moon were up." "Able to pierce the darkness with vision at least six times more sensitive than our own, the night truly belongs to the cat." "The cat's earliest ancestors probably hunted both on the ground and in the trees." "To survive, they needed not only claws but remarkable balance, an aptitude all cats retain to this day." "In keeping with its reputation, the cat usually does land on all fours." "And scientists have come to understand how." "Slow-motion photography reveals that cats always right themselves in a precise order." "The head rotates first, based on messages from the eyes and inner ear." "Then the spine twists and the rear quarters align." "At the same time the cat arches its back to reduce the force of impact." "Despite its agility, the cat faces particular dangers in today's modern cities." "Here, although hundreds of feet above the ground, the indoor cat is just as attracted by moving prey as is any other cat." "If anything, it may be a stir-crazy bundle of energy." "So many cats actually careen through unscreened windows that the phenomenon now has a name "high-rise syndrome"." "At the Animal Medical Center in New York City, doctors were perplexed when they found that victims of higher falls often had less severs injuries than those that fell a shorter distance." "Good morning, Miss Pizano, how are you today?" "Fine, thanks." "Dr. Michael Garvey is medical director." "Hello, Harry." "Harry is recovering from serious fractures after falling just a few stories." "We'd been puzzled by the high-rise syndrome for a long time the name that we give for cats falling out of windows." "Our clinical impression is that cats that fall from medium-level stories are hurt much worse than cats that fell from even greater distances." "That seemed to defy our logic that cats that would fall farther would be hurt less." "So we undertook a study to examine the records on cats that had been admitted here for falling out of windows." "And it actually confirmed that our clinical impression was correct." "It seems that cats that fall from higher stories and have enough time to reach free-fall like a parachutist are relaxed." "And when you experience trauma when you're relaxed, you will probably avoid injury." "When you experience trauma when you are very rigid and very tight, you will tend to maximize injury." "The cat may not have nine lives, but its uncanny ability to sail through the air is almost certainly responsible for the myth." "Throughout its history, myth and folklore have enshrouded the cat." "Near Oxford, England, scientists have been exploring whether the legendary solitude of the cat is fact or fiction, or can cats adapt successfully to living in groups?" "Puss." "Puss." "Puss." "Bert Parker has kept farm cats for more than half a century, as many as 86 at a time." "Puss, puss, puss." "Come on." "Puss." "Puss, puss, puss, puss." "A good cat is worth a lot." "She's a valuable asset to any farm." "Our cats have increased." "There's few more than what we really need, but what do you do?" "You just let them go on." "They do keep the rats and mice down to a limit." "I don't say they have every one, but they do catch up with them at the finish." "But what happens when this usually solitary animal lives in close quarters with so many others?" "Oxford University Professor" "David Macdonald has studied farm cats since 1978." "Why is it that people have tended to typecast cats as anti-social, as solitary creatures?" "I think there's two reasons." "Once of them could be that the sorts of things that cats do socially are not the sorts of things that classically people have had in mind when they though about wild animal societies." "And I think that's because cat society is based on a rather subtle, covert language." "And the sorts of signals that pass between cats, and the one I personally think is important is this business of rubbing where one individual rubs its lips and its cheek against another individual happen very quickly, they happen very rarely, and if you're not tuned in to looking for it," "you just don't see it." "So I think people have spent their lives living amongst cats and formed an impression which hasn't taken into account the subtlety of the relationships that occur between the cats themselves." "It turns out that they are living in a society." "And, therefore, it's a bit irritating in a sense that one hears so many people saying," "Oh, the only sociable felids, the only sociable members of the cat family as a large group are lions." "That having been said, there are a lot of similarities between these barnyard lions that we have around here and the lions that we are ever more familiar with from programs and researches about the African lions" "Lions are the only wild cats that normally live in a group, called a pride." "At its core are the adult females, usually related." "Researchers have discovered that within a pride the females look after and nurse each other's cubs." "Here, three different females allow the same cub to nurse." "Though a lioness gives preference to her own cubs when they want to nurse, at times she will allow younger sisters or brothers, nieces, nephews, or grandchildren to join in too." "David Macdonald was intrigued that among farm cats the same communal behavior occurs." "It comes and spends a bit of time..." "A student, Warner Passanisi, often follow the cats around the clock, just as naturalists do in the wild." "...their litters together." "So we have, generally, the females taking a turn to suckle these kittens, again indiscriminately." "Any kitten that is there is suckled." "Although unrelated females may help each other in this way, generally the behavior only follows bloodlines." "Mothers, daughters, and sisters cooperate most often, but it is quite possible that other related females will also nurse and care for the kittens, much like an extended family." "Six weeks old, this kitten has begun only recently to explore on his own." "Today, he has accidentally become separated from his mother." "Out of hearing range, she knows nothings of her kitten's dilemma." "A related female hears him but does nothing." "He starts back uncertainly." "Out in the barnyard and still no sign of his mother." "He comes upon the related female, now nursing her own litter." "Hungry, tired, the kitten is willing to risk hostility to get close to her." "In the end, she accepts the tiny, distressed explorer." "Why should the females behave this way?" "Once more the behavior of lions held the clue... a behavior not of care and comfort, but of savagery and death." "In this graphic film footage, the cameraman bears horrified witness to a systematic and vicious killing." "As three terrified cubs huddle nearby, a male lion prepares to brutally attack and kill one of their sisters." "When there is a successful take-over of a pride, the new dominant male kills the cubs of the ousted male." "Thus, the female will come into heat sooner, the new male can then mate with her, and thereby perpetuate his own genes." "The barnyard, again, was to prove remarkably like the plains of Africa." "Macdonald recalls the events leading to a gruesome discovery." "As I watched at the communal den with these four sets of kittens altogether, nine kittens in total, the scene was really a very intimate one." "The kittens were, as you can imagine, a chocolate box scene in amongst straw bales." "Their nest was built in amongst a stack of bales, and a narrow passageway led into the kittens." "And they were all just piled on top of each other." "And each mother would come and go from that den, each suckling the kittens indiscriminately." "On this occasion I was watching this nest of kittens and in slunk the male." "And within just a few seconds this commotion brought the mothers running, but not soon enough." "Because by the time the mothers came back and chased had been in that communal den to start with, six of them were slain." "So I think we've come up with two answers, both of them perhaps rather surprising to why cats may benefit individually from living communally." "One of them is that they can look after each other's young by sharing the load of nursing, and the other is that females may be able to repel murderous males." "Thus, cooperative care by a number of females increases the likelihood that more kittens even orphans will be watched over and thereby protected." "What other unexpected parallels may exist between these barnyard lions and their wild cousins is yet to be discovered." "In another English village, the image of cats as ruthless killers was confirmed in a different way." "It began with a local teacher." "Peter Churcher has taught biology at the Bedford School for 15 years." "Those two have started before that one." "And of course it's important they all start at the same time, isn't it?" "Right." "So back to the beginning." "A cat owner himself, Churcher applied the discipline of his scientific training to explore the unseen world of the house cat on the prowl." "Throughout England, indeed in much of the world, cats are let outdoors to roam the neighborhood at will." "How much impact on wildlife," "Churcher wondered, do cats actually have?" "Unable to follow the cats, he did the next best thing and enlisted the help of their owners." "Well, the first thing was to go around the village and just find out who had cats." "And so I knocked on everybody's door and said," "Have you got a cat and were you willing to take part in the survey?" "And surprisingly enough, virtually everybody in the village did." "And that meant that I had something around 78 cats to start off with, which was a good number." "Oh, hello, Peter." "Good morning, Marjorie." "Have the cats caught anything this week?" "Yes, I have a body for you ready and waiting." "Thanks very much." "Well, that's nice." "Yeah, that's field vole." "Who caught it?" "Eccles." "Eccles again?" "Yes, the black-and-white one." "Quite a good hunter for us, isn't he?" "Yes." "The others don't seem to be catching very much." "Laziness, I would say." "Here you are, Peter." "I think it's a wood mouse, a field mouse." "I was very surprised at how cooperative the owners were in the survey." "I think a lot of people don't like the idea of picking dead bodies and putting them in polythene bags." "But most of the people in the village gritted their teeth and did it." "And some even went as far as to put them in the deep freeze, which was nice, because, as you can imagine, at the end of a week in the summer, often the dead bodies were getting rather smell." "And it was pleasant to have them put in the deep freeze before I got hold of them." "...take it to work and look at it under the microscope." "That's Wednesday." "When the specimens were labeled and the numbers of dead totaled," "Churcher and cats of Felmersham made headlines." "if the cats in Felmersham caught 14 animals each during the course of a year, we know there are about five million cats, domestic cats, in Britain." "So that means that 76 million small mammals and birds are caught by cats in a year." "And so, domestic cats, in spite of their reliance on man for food and a lot of other things, are still remarkably independent." "And I think what our survey has shown is that they're also very important as predators on the ecological stage." "Churcher does not propose that cats be confined indoors." "Others insist it is essential, not just for the wildlife, but for the safety of the cats themselves." "While debate continues, one thing is certain:" "In every well-fed cat by the fire lies a dormant tiger primed for the thrill of the hunt." "Because cats are seen as self-sufficient hunter, many people feel no qualms about abandoning them." "Nationwide, millions are dumped every year." "Near Oxnard, California, animal welfare activist Leo Grillo has tried for weeks to trap two cats living in this jetty." "Such brutal conditions are a death sentence for cats, and he devotes his life to rescuing them." "When the winter hits, these rocks are really cold and the waves are cold and the mist is cold and the fog is cold, The cats are cold." "And everybody thinks they have a fur coat, they're going to be fine." "And it's always like this, and when it's a bad winter especially, it's really pitiful." "Here, at the farthest tip of the rocks the cats have retreated from the taunts and bottle throwing of uncaring strangers." "But they are also completely cut off from fresh drinking water." "So Leo baits his traps with it." "Hi, Jet." "He has named the cats "Marina" and "Jetty"" "because of where he found them." "Come on, Jet." "Com on, Jet." "Come on." "It is not uncommon for Leo infinitely patient to return to the same spot week after week." "Marina" "To Grillo, these cats appear relatively tame." "Clearly, they were not born wild, but raised in the comfort of a human home." "But these same humans abandoned them." "The cats no longer trust." "For Leo it is always a waiting game to see which is stronger, thirst or fear." "Atta boy." "I'm coming down." "All right, Jet, all right." "Here you go." "When I get a cat, and those traps are set, and I get a cat to go in the trap and that door comes down and slaps, that is the most exciting feeling." "And that little saga, that little story, the trips to this one little rock to feed that one little cat is now over." "It has an ending." "After weeks of failed attempts this day would finally bring success." "Tired but exultant, Leo would trap both Marina and Jetty and bring them back to a world of care and love." "Grillo runs four licensed shelters in California." "But they are only for animals he himself has rescued." "An ever-changing number of cats and dogs live out their lives here." "If it gets too crowded, he says, I just expand." "Leo and family live nearby with,6 cats." "This ranch house is home to more than 156 at last count." "Dry food seven tons a year is left out at all time." "Canned food is fed twice daily, totaling more than 86,666 cans per year." "All of this is paid for by private donations." "There we go." "Come see Jetty and Marina." "After a trip to the vet for shots blood tests, spaying, and neutering," "Marina and Jetty are ready to meet the others." "But only from the safety of their cages." "J.J., Junkyard, come on." "Come see your friends." "Come on." "This cat is in ecstacy just to have food, real food." "Yeah, look at that." "Beautiful thing is they were caught together and they can tame down together, comfort each other" "For many people the cat is all but hypnotic soothing and calming just to behold." "Through the ages, an uncounted number graceful, beautiful, and mysterious have captivated the human mind and eye" "Scientists learned that simply petting a cat lowers human blood pressure." "Now, some go further and suggest cats may actually benefit our longevity." "In a small town on Long Island, one innovative woman is playing a role in the sweeping changes in health care." "When her cats helped her cope with an illness," "Joan Bernstein was inspired to reach out to others." "I became ill." "I developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, at that time not knowing what it was." "The disease was not defined at that time." "And there were days when there was no way" "I felt like getting out of bed, crawling out of bed literally in pain, and feeding the cats, changing litter pans, and doing everything else that has to be done." "But I did it because the cats insisted that I did it." "Sometimes they'd just by my hot-water bottle or my comforter." "Whatever I needed them to be, they became." "So I became very aware of the value of the cats as a therapy." "Lonely, often forgotten, the institutionalized elderly have been cut off from a lifetime of friends and memories." "Ladies and gentlemen, one of the most beautiful Grand Champion, champagne mink Tonkinese..." "At the Brookhaven Health Care Facility Joan's Tonkinese cats are eagerly awaited every month." "Bred for their stable temperament and sociability, they offer therapy at many levels." "The warmth of the cat on her lap is very important." "Just holding the cat in her arms." "First of all, it's good exercise for her;" "she's utilizing the muscles in her arms and her hands." "So we have the physical aspect of it." "Look what I brought you." "You think she's trying to tell you something?" "Come on." "Okay." "She'll stay right there with you, Mr. Hook." "Patients who have difficulty with recall, with recall of the present, okay, in other words remembering the present from now to tomorrow, or now to next week, or now to a month from now, they will remember the cats." "She's a lot like the one I brought here one time who was sitting on your shoulder." "Remember?" "Yeah." "And I took a picture of you with the kitten sitting on your shoulder, and only half the picture came out." "She really is a good guy." "So soft and so pretty, isn't she?" "Some scientists believe cats touch people more than other pets do, literally and figuratively." "Their lithe and graceful movements are non-threatening." "And the cat's shape and size are basically the same as a human baby's for most people, an automatic invitation to nurture and love." "She is beautiful." "Aw." "I'd love to hold you call day and all night." "I really would." "Another world touched by Joan and her cats is a residential school for autistic youngsters." "The cause of autism is not fully understood and currently there is no known cure." "Locked largely in a world of their own the children are extremely difficult to reach." "Some, like John, erupt uncontrollably." "Easily frustrated, he often reacts with raging tantrums." "While no one pretends the cats are a miracle cure, they regularly bring about miraculous breakthroughs." "How can you tell me what color they are if you don't look?" "For John, the cats open a window on a bright, new world." "...game with me." "I know." "I think you're playing a game." "John, if she's red, then I'm from Mars" "Do I look like I'm from Mars?" "No." "No!" "She's brown." "And what color are her eyes again?" "Blue." "That's right." "How about looking at the eyes?" "How about looking at them?" "Oh, okay." "Did you want to give her a kiss?" "Okay." "Etta" "Etta, what have I got?" "Etta becomes very agitated as you can see from her rocking back and forth, a constant motion." "And the more she rocks, of course, the more agitated she is." "I can take the cat over to her, and at first she may thrust it away." "But if I'm persistent, sometimes I have to withdraw a little bit and come back to her." "But if I'm persistent, the cat can stop her." "Later, Joan will try again." "What have I got?" "Cat." "Is this a nice cat?" "Do you like this cat?" "I see them relating to the cat so much more openly, so much more freely, than they do to other people." "They can trust the animal." "With every individual I've worked with they have eventually reached out, and I think it's because there is again that sense of communication the says, 'Trust me'." "I won't hurt you." "Is she saying give her a kiss?" "Do you want to?" "Okay." "Do you want me to turn her around this way and give her a kiss back here?" "A little closer." "Good." "Okay!" "Joan senses she can approach Etta again." "By holding the cat and focusing her attention on the cat, she will stay still, and she will talk to the cat." "She's with us for several minutes at a time." "How about saying, 'Hi, kitty. '" "Hi, kitty." "Good!" "Hi, kitty." "Good!" "Okay!" "We're talking about therapy." "We're talking about hands-on, and we're talking about one-on-one and up-close." "We're also talking about cats that are capable of creating interaction or curling up in somebody's arms and saying." "I'm all yours." "Right this minute I belong to you." "You're special to me and I love you." "So hold me and feel good." "It was said that a long time ago, probably in our own Golden Age as gatherer-hunters, that we could talk to the animals and they would talk to us." "And I think part of understanding "felinese" is that we can learn the cat's repertoire and have a deeper communication and communion with our cats." "Love for cats is part of a universal love for all creatures, which impels us toward a reverence for all life." "Subtle, amusing, enigmatic... regal and serene... cats remain ultimately independent of their human companions." "They move among us as half-wild creatures, the only domestic animal man has never fully conquered." "Plain or fancy, barn mouser or lord of the hearth, they have fired our imagination." "But, we wonder, did we adopt the cat or did tabby simply deign to share his life with us?" "In the end, it is a tantalizing mystery, one that we, being mere humans, can never hope to solve." "The human mind has always had a fascination with worlds beyond our own" "Following the stars across the seas, early explorers imagined that they might meet weird creatures in undiscovered lands." "They never guessed that under their keels, drifting in the same currents that carried their ships, were life forms far stranger than anything they could imagine." "It's a world where the forces of pressure and darkness have given rise to creatures as different as on another planet." "Their whole existence is shaped by the great ocean currents, which sweep them endlessly around the biggest living space in the solar system." "At the edge of this alien world, here in Florida, one ocean drifter comes from the beach itself." "It can take these hatchlings three days to claw their way up from nests buried two feet deep." "They may look like land animals now, but sea turtles have evolved for 80 million years to be riders of the ocean currents." "These loggerhead turtles, no larger than a child's hand, are about to embark on a perilous 10-year journey around the ocean." "As they head down the beach, they're already reading the earth's magnetic field with their internal compass." "Only one hatchling in a thousand will survive to adulthood and ride the currents back to this beach to breed." "It's among the most extraordinary odysseys in nature." "This is the story of one loggerhead's journey into the unknown world of the ocean drifters." "Like a windup toy, the hatchling swims relentlessly out into the ocean." "The waves tell her which way to go away from shore and from predators stalking the shallow water." "Danger causes her to tuck in her limbs disguising herself as floating debris." "The shark doesn't see her and swims on" "As she heads toward the safety of deep water, the hatchling joins a rich tide of other marine creatures." "Every rock and weed is home to a different species." "Coastal waters are the fertile breeding ground for the oceans." "Florida may produce five million loggerhead hatchlings each year." "In some coastal species, 500 million offspring may come from a single female." "The eggs of this sea urchin and the smoky clouds of sperm from a nearby male swirl together in a fertility dance on the ocean floor." "Huge quantities of eggs and larvae produced along the coastline will be drawn into the ocean currents." "Most will become food for other marine creatures." "Setting their offspring adrift might not sound like good parental care." "But it's a valuable survival mechanism for many coastal species." "It lets them populate new areas and encourages the exchange of genetic material." "All through the night, instinct drives the loggerhead to push on." "The outpouring of new life on the continental shelf below her is just as persistent." "With the bellows like action of her pleopods, the spiny lobster sends 700,000 hatchlings seaward." "It's a reproductive blizzard." "The lobster's larvae have evolved a flattened shape;" "it suits them for the drifting life as ideally as a snowflake." "After 36 hours of swimming, the hatchling is growing tired." "In the clear water 30 miles off the Florida Coast, she reaches the edge of the Gulf Stream, and finds shelter in the drift lines of sargassum weed." "This plant spends its whole life floating on the open sea, held up by small air bladders." "The sargassum provides a haven in a vast, featureless world." "All kinds of creatures find harbor here." "For the first time in her life, the loggerhead can rest." "But the stillness is an illusion." "The winds have piled up the sargassum weed in drift lines along the edge of one of the most powerful currents in the world." "Just beyond, the Gulf Stream hurtles by." "Viewed from space, the Earth is alive with clouds caught up in the rhythm of the tradewinds." "These winds and the rotation of the planet generate the great ocean currents." "The loggerhead will be traveling for years in a circle of currents called the North Atlantic gyre." "Her journey starts off Florida in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, which will carry her north past Cape Cod." "Satellite imagery is teaching us that the Gulf Stream is a wild living carousel, spinning off side currents, and stirring up a broth of marine life" "The edges of currents are the great way stations of the open sea." "Plant and animal drifters are drawn into these fronts, one species making life possible for another." "For a hungry animal, it's an oasis in an oceanic desert." "The sargassum becomes a perch for goose barnacles." "They glean food particles from the plankton, the rich soup of plants and animals, many of them microscopic." "Even sluggish homebodies can be marvelously adapted for travel in the larval stage." "The glorious creature drifting on wing-like lobes is a snail." "Some snail larvae use tentacle like arms for feeding and to keep from sinking." "Some may by able to remain in this stage from months until they drift to a suitable habitat" "Everything is kept lightweight for easier travel." "Look closely and you can see the spiral of a transparent shell." "These beautiful drifters move so gracefully, you forget that the Gulf Stream is hurrying them along at 100 miles a day" "Microscopic larvae spawned in Florida could eventually settle on the shores of Africa." "And the next generation may ride the currents back." "The ocean drifters have little to eat except each other which they do eagerly." "So if the sargassum weed provides shelter, it also harbors death in an astounding diversity of forms, often wonderfully camouflaged." "The sea horse has evolved a mild and plant-like demeanor." "But it's still a predator and keenly watchful." "It drops down to ambush its planktonic prey." "Then loops itself back into the sargassum to avoid being ambushed itself." "The entire food chain is caught up in this dangerous game of deception and self-defense." "Small fern-like animals known as hydroids colonize the sargassum and feed on the most minute plankton." "A sea slug grazes in turn on hydroids." "The slug's camouflage doesn't fool a potential predator." "But the sea slug has armed itself with chemical defenses from its prey." "The file fish abandons the attack." "But another creature's camouflage will soon bring the fish to a gory end" "The drifting weed may look innocuous." "But look again." "A fish hoping to harvest hydroids from this leafy growth would find itself staring into a malignant eye." "Evolution has made the four-inch long sargassum fish the big bad wolf of this floating world." "Its extraordinary camouflage doesn't just mimic the coloration of the plant" "The white spots also mimic the tube worms and hydroids that grow on sargassum." "Its pectoral fins have evolved into prehensile fingers, the better to creep through the foliage." "It will eat creatures almost its own size, and its victims thrash around in its gut momentarily before they die" "The loggerhead swims directly under this hidden peril." "But the sargassum fish lets her pass by." "Hungry dolphin fish won't be so particular." "These big, fast-moving fish can devour all life on the weed lines." "The turtle scramble for a hiding place" "Now the loggerhead pushes onto deeper water." "Beyond the sargassum in the open sea, gelatinous drifters are the most abundant life form." "They may be the loggerhead's main source of food for much of her journey" "A jellyfish like this may be more than 95 percent water." "But the thin membrane of living tissue is still nutritious." "We know almost nothing about how the turtle or any other animal survives here." "We act as if this is our planet and we call it Earth." "But the oceans are so large and so deep that they constitute more than 99 percent of the inhabitable world." "Even for oceanographers, the open sea is an alien environment, tantalizing and yet largely unexplored" "Each creature in the currents has its own story to tell, its own extraordinary adaptations to life on the open sea." "Humans venturing into these waters with scuba gear study only the upper layers of the ocean." "They stay tethered to a rope, like astronauts walking in space." "It's a 500 mile swim to shore." "Richard Harbison and his colleague Larry Madin are among the few researchers studying how these ocean drifters behave in their own environment." "The air tanks limit them to 25 minutes per dive." "So they get just a glimpse of how these high sea drifters really live." "Harbison and Madin specialize in creatures of incredible delicacy known as jelly plankton." "This underwater world changes by the hour." "Many species stay away from the brightly lit surface by day, so these researchers dive round the clock." "Under the cover of darkness, a whole new world of creatures rises from the depths." "It is the largest animal migration on the planet, and it happens every night in the oceans." "This sea snail joins a glorious host of species as they ascend to feed at the surface." "Life as a jelly is an ingenious adaptation." "There are no hard surfaces to run into on the open sea, so these drifters don't need a sturdy body." "The gelatinous form gives them the same buoyancy as the water around them" "They've evolved for life at sea by becoming organized seawater themselves" "Near the surface, the smaller drifters feed on minute plant life that's been growing all day in the sun." "Bigger animals come up to feed on them" "The great oceanic food chain begins here and everything else depends on it" "This weird apparition is a killing machine for small crustaceans." "The writhing arms of this comb jelly startle its victims, which flee straight into the wing like feeding lobes at either end and become entangled." "It's easy to become mesmerized by the delicate structures of some ghostly creature turning gently in the currents." "You can see the beating of the heart through the transparent shell." "Its mouth parts are like an easter lily." "Ocean conditions have reshaped it beyond all our notions of what a snail should be." "Look in another direction, and there's a salp chain grazing on small plant particles." "This jelly can reproduce with extraordinary speed to take immediate advantage of a new food source." "The salp sprouts new individuals like a chain of paper dolls." "The gelatinous form makes for efficient feeding." "It allows this siphonophore to spin out lengthy tentacles like fishing lines." "It twitches its crustacean-like lures to entice its prey." "In the boundless world of mid-ocean, with the sea bottom miles below and no other surfaces nearby, a jelly is the only niche for other species." "One animal's body can become the whole world for another." "A crustacean deposits her offspring on a comb jelly." "As they grow, they devour their host." "Crustacenas eat jellies, and jellies eat crustaceans." "It's a banquet where it's difficult to distinguish the guests from the dinner." "The jellies also prey on one another." "The jelly plankton even have their own great white shark." "The three-inch-long beroe is a jelly with jawa." "Its mouth is lined with sharp, tooth-like hooks." "The beroe latches onto its prey and then expands to engulf it." "This ability to stretch is another advantage of the gelatinous form." "Though scuba researchers are limited to working in the upper layers of the ocean, with this submersible, an oceanographer can study drifting life forms down to 3,000 feet" "There the world of the ocean drifters becomes even more fantastic." "Edith Widder studies creatures living in the deep sea currents." "Her pilot maneuvers skillfully as he collects samples with a battery of scientific equipment" "On the way down, they may be the first humans to see creatures that have drifted here for millions of years endlessly strange and wonderful." "A siphonophore spirals out into the watery darkness, like a galaxy." "It's maximizing the feeding area for its fringe of stinging tentacles." "Scientists have only recently discovered this football-size comb jelly." "They call it Big Red." "This fish isn't sick." "In these dark unbounded depths, with no top and no bottom, everything simply behaves differently." "Like this squid suspended in the stillness." "Or this squid which has developed a transparent gelatinous body." "All the rules are different down here." "Researchers freely admit that what they know about almost any of these animals is less than a paragraph." "Scientists have given this newly discovered deep-sea octopus the nickname Oumbo." "Wider specializes in bioluminescence, the ability of living creatures to communicate by producing light." "To study this phenomenon, she measures what happens when bioluminescent animals drift into this screen." "She must shut down her own floodlights and use special cameras to see how they respond." "The pitch blackness of deep water suddenly explodes in a fiery light show" "A sea cucumber looks strange enough just before it makes contact with the screen." "Then it turns on its own lights, and rolls off unharmed." "Almost every animal uses bioluminescence in the pitch dark of the deep." "Given the abundance of life in the oceans," "This may be the most common form of communication on earth." "The clouds of bioluminescence can be so bright that they light up the instruments inside the submersible" "If attacked some animals try to confuse their predator with sheer incandescence, like a flashbulb in the face." "Others illuminate the predator in the hope that some larger predator will come along like a cop and take it away." "Some use light like a lure to draw their prey close, or to attract a mate." "In this world of darkness, the language of light is so important that a moment's flickering may determine whether an animal lives or dies." "But what we know about bioluminescence is limited by the difficulties of ocean research." "Even a submersible stays underwater for only about three hours." "The promise of oceanography is tantalizing." "Bioluminescent chemicals are already being used in medicine." "But reaping the potential benefits is dangerous work." "In many ways, it's like the grand adventure of space travel." "But we've mapped the barren surface of Venus in far more detail than our own deep ocean floor." "Is it worth exploring the depths of this planet?" "In one area the size of a small living room, deep sea researchers recently discovered 460 new species." "Who knows what secrets we have yet to discover in the oceans?" "Even back on the surface, the limits of our knowledge can be painfully apparent." "In the complex ecosystem at the very skin of the ocean, a whole other world of creatures lives both in and out of the water." "As it moves, the stinging tentacles of the Portuguese man o' war stream out to gather food." "By raising its gas-filled sail, the man o' war can travel at varying angles to the wind." "It's an elegant system for dispersing animals not just where the current takes them, but across the face of the ocean." "Nothing about the man o' war is simple" "It's neither an individual animal, nor a colony, but something in between" "Joined together under the gas bladder is a kind of cooperative assembly of stomachs, tentacles, and reproductive organs." "Other species add to the complexity." "One fish, called nomeus, hides out among the deadly veil of tentacles." "The man o' war toxin is more potent than the cobra's." "But perhaps because of a protective mucus layer or greater immune resistance, nomeus can dine unharmed on the man o' war itself." "Other fish aren't so lucky." "The man o' war can stretch its tentacles out more than 50 feet, and each tentacle is studded with batteries of stinging cells." "Nomeus may help out the man o' war by herding these fish toward their death." "Triggered by the fish, the stinging cells fire slender threads lines with barbs." "The victim is lassoed, hog-tied, and injected with paralyzing poison." "Then the digestive organs move in." "Like some monstrous lifeform, they wriggle and twist as they fasten their flexible mouths onto the victim." "Gradually, they engulf the fish and dissolve its flesh." "After half a year, the young loggerheads odyssey has taken her to mid-ocean." "But she still has a lot to learn." "All the activity around the man o' war catches her eye." "She just wants to grab a few fishy tidbits and doesn't seem to notice the nasty business overhead." "For a moment, the turtle looks like a puppet on a deadly set of strings." "But it's the man o' war that's in danger." "The turtle turns her hungry eye on this intriguing new possibility." "People talk about the first brave human who ate an oyster." "But what a tangled and spicy meal the man o' war must make." "The turtle's skin may be too thick for the stingers to penetrate." "But no one knows what protects the turtle's eyes and mouth." "The loggerhead soon pushes on in search of a meal that's not quite so challenging." "One of the strangest inhabitants of the harsh world between air and water is the drifting nudibranch named glaucus." "This upside-down sea slug swallows air bubbles to hold itself at the surface." "With its pointy appendages, it latches onto anything it's lucky enough to bump into." "But what it's really after are the deadly tentacles of the man o' war" "It coats its mouthparts with a mucus layer to protect itself." "The smaller less powerful stinging cells get digested." "But the most virulent stingers remain intact." "Amazingly, they pass directly to the nudibranch's extremities and it uses them for its own defense." "But these surface drifters must face adversaries even more formidable than each other." "A storm is brooding up across the water." "It's a reminder of how unstable life must be on the very face of the ocean." "One moment these creatures are being scorched by sun and wind, and the next they're tumbling in storm-tossed waves." "As the storm passes, they get pelted by icy rain and have to endure the dilution of their salty home." "Yet the animals living in the ever-changing surface can seem so delicate." "This drifting snail builds a fragile home of air bubbles sealed in an envelope of mucus then hangs on for dear life." "If it lets go, it'll sink into the abyss." "The raft is also holding up the snail's offspring, in these egg capsules." "It's a cradle at the top of a hostile world." "When it's done laying eggs, the snail builds a new raft for itself and cuts its 50,000 offspring adrift." "Natural debris also drifts in the surface currents." "It's always been a means of dispersal for some plants." "A coconut from the Caribbean may ride the Atlantic currents thousands of miles to take root on some distant shore." "Fish are drawn to this kind of flotsam for shelter." "A drifting crate can turn into a small ecosystem," "Where fish lay eggs or find their food." "But the little things we throw away add up, and the supply of garbage begins to seem endless." "One study estimated that 13 tons of trash per minute was being heaved overboard by ocean-going vessels alone" "A recent treaty now regulates the practice, but it's rarely enforced." "Whatever goes into the ocean gets drawn into the currents, and it builds up in the very places where marine life is richest." "Animals encrusted on debris may rouse the loggerhead's hunger and curiosity." "For her, drifting objects have always been a natural food source." "Until recently, a loggerhead could safely eat almost anything she came across." "Nothing in her evolution has prepared her for this wealth of deadly new choices." "To her, it makes as much sense to pick at the festive remnants of a balloon as at a man o' war." "Fragments like these can choke turtles to death." "Plastic blocks their digestive tracts and causes starvation." "This time, she's unable to tear off a bite." "But she'll face many more opportunities as she swims on." "Almost every dead turtle found has plastic in its gut." "Millions of seabirds also die each year because of garbage like this gannet tangled up in debris absent-mindedly discarded by sportfishermen." "Commercial fishermen lose thousands of miles of net each year, which spread out all across the oceans like a deadly web." "There may be no way for the loggerhead to learn about these new perilss until it's too late." "The turtle has survived her first year" "But in the long seasons before she circles home to Florida to lay her eggs a more sinister peril may threaten her" "Everything out here is absorbing a swelling tide of chemical wastes" "even the plankton." "Though they may seem insignificant, the lifeforms here are important to cloud formation." "They even help regulate the global climate." "These microscopic plants and animals have always struggled against enormous odds to reach maturity" "Now they must also absorb heavy metals sewage, pesticides and petrochemicals." "Plankton is the base of the food chain and every marine animal depends on it." "If our carelessness disrupts this vast drifting tide of life, will it imperil the entire ocean?" "Will it affect the food we eat and the very air we breathe?" "No one has yet spent enough time traveling in the loggerhead's world to find out." "It may be that we humans will always find it easier to turn our imaginations away from the oceans and out to other worlds" "But as we peer up at the stars, we should keep one truth in mind" "All the alien life forms we know and perhaps all we ever will know" "are here adrift on planet Earth." "December 8, 1963 a day like any other." "At Alldinga Beach, the annual South Australian spearfishing championships are set to begin." "23 year old Rodney Fox, a life insurance salesman from Adelaide, and former champion, takes to the water." "He sets his sights on a large reef fish." "Little does he know that he himself is being stalked..." "By a great white shark." "Through a series of near miracles," "Rodney Fox arrives at Royal Adelaide Hospital in under an hour." "The vascular surgeon there has just returned from an international conference with the very latest in surgical techniques." "They go to work on the mutilated body delivered to the operating theater." "The shark has punctured his left lung, left clavicle, and diaphragm." "The jaws have bitten through all his ribs, gouged skin and muscle from his left side, and exposed several major organs." "According to one surgeon, had Rodney arrived five minutes later, he would have bled to death." "Sewn back together with over 450 stitches, he lies bedridden for two months with the pain, and the awful memory." "Do you hope to continue skindiving one day?" "I'll get in the water somewhere sometime, but I don't know whether I'll go in this gulf here where there's been two or three attacks in the last few years." "That was Rodney Fox then..." "And this is Rodney Fox now." "Seldom has a single event so radically transformed a person." "In a way, the great white shark that attacked him 30 years ago took his young life but gave him another." "In three decades, Rodney Fox has grown from a fearful shark victim into a shark champion and protector." "I think that sharks and the shark world is really beautiful and interesting." "The shark gets a raw deal, and people just hate it because they don't understand and they fear it." "I love to see them flying and gliding through the water, and I think that most people would really enjoy it too, if the realized they weren't going to be eaten alive." "This from a man who was himself nearly eaten alive." "Rodney's life since the attack has been a continuous challenge to overcome his fear by facing it." "Today, documentary filmmakers and marine scientists from all over the world travel to Australia to go looking for sharks with Rodney." "His knowledge of living sharks is unparalleled." "Marine biologist Eugenie Clark" "People who hear about Rodney's shark attack go, wow, he's an ordinary man like one of us and yet he'shad such a terrible experience, and on top of that, he's telling us that sharks aren't dangerous," "they're good, we should preserve them." "So this is what's so wonderful about Rodney, the someone who suffered through such a terrible incident can now defend the animal that attacked him." "It wasn't always that way." "Reliving the shark attack story has been a continuous epic in my life." "So many people want to hear how I survived, how I stuck my fingers in the shark's eyes, how I put my arm around it so it wouldn't bite, and how I went up to the surface and it followed me." "And after about eight or nine years of telling the story," "I read the original Readers' Digest First Person Award the" "I had written immediately afterwards, and I found that I had changed the story a little." "I was telling people what they wanted to hear, and not necessarily the truth." "Time often affects memory." "Here the story is only two days old, and not nearly so heroic." "All I remember is this big thing pushing me through the water," "and it seemed to let go a bit when I pushed my hand up at it, and it still wouldn't let go." "The pressure of the water might have been holding me in his mouth." "And I managed to put both arms right around him and I was looking for his eyes with my fingers and after awhile, he managed just to let go and" "I managed to get to the surface." "Very luckily there was a boat just coming over to see what was going on because there was so much blood and disturbance in the water." "And they quickly rolled me into the boat and I had to keep both arms just like this so they wouldn't rip my arms off." "As they came to shore on this incredibly rough area there, they drove the boat up onto the shore." "And they loaded me onto a bit of a stretcher, and a car, the only car in the whole area that had been in this beach for about four or five years was available, and they drove it out over the reef with 10 or 20 guys lifting it" "over the big lumps and the rocks through here." "Loaded me in the back of it, took off toward Adelaide." "It was an absolute miracle, especially when they unloaded me out of the boat." "As they did, my wetsuit slid open and my stomach, actually, loops of intestines, came out which seems funny now." "I've got a good friend who actually tells me every now and again that he stuffed them back in with his fingers." "They bunched me up." "Rodney's wife Kay." "I didn't know how bad it was for many days afterwards, but by then he was up and breathing and talking and so, you know, it's only later when they tell you all the things that were wrong" "that you realize just how close it was" "But everybody in the hospital thought he was dying but I knew he wasn't." "His attack drew worldwide attention." "Rodney became a sensation almost overnight." "The public notoriety would set his life on a brand new course." "Three months after the attack, escorted by Kay," "Rodney began his return to the sea." "But it wasn't easy to forget his attack." "The fear of the sharks when I went back in the water was huge." "My first time my head went underwater," "I imagined in my mind sharks running in from all directions and I said," ""stop it, you've got to control that."" "Things would never exactly return to normal for Rodney." "His love of the sea was now overshadowed by a terrible fascination with his old nemesis the shark." "In 1965, he organized the first expedition to track the great white." "The adventure became a docudrama." "But danger in the unknown makes man himself the quarry of the most savage hunter of the deep" "the great white shark the white" "great white death." "Come on you bastard, attack." "This is some of the first footage ever shot of a great white under water." "Coming in now!" "That doesn't taste so good, that wire mesh." "The theme is revenge a crusade to rid the seas of evil sharks." "Death and the battle's almost over, a second maneater who's jaw will never again menace an unsuspecting swimmer." "In those days, people feared sharks because they knew very little about them." "They thought that every shark was a bad shark and there was a big saying at that stage that the best shark was a dead shark." "The first film was followed by a second." ""Attacked by a Killer Shark" is about Rodney his attack and recovery." "Again, it shows Rodney wielding a speargun, bent on revenge." "Time out to reload." "The cartridge inside the head explodes on contact." "The tremendous concussion is transmitted into the body, killing instantly." "But it does twist the truth just a little." "I wasn't really after revenge." "What I was frightened of was going back in the water and being bitten again." "And so I was quite keen to try out the new explosive powder head that had been invented." "And I went underwater and I shot some of these sharks on file to show that man could protect himself underwater." "Rod's on a killing frenzy, intoxicated with his successes overriding his fears." "This is exactly the scene he had been in need of." "In fact, Rodney's attitude was beginning to change a fact obscured by the dramatic film script." "I didn't realize or understand much at that time but I thought, that's not the right attitude." "We've got to look at it further than that." "We've got to learn more about them and understand them and learn to live with them." "As Rodney's appreciation for the great white began to grow, so too did his expertise as a shark tracker." "In 1969, he was called into work on a shark movie unlike any that had gone before." "Has that cage been checked out?" "Film Producer Peter Gimbel turned to Rodney to deliver the sharks for his cameras." "Well, generally, after they've had a taste, they start really to tear into things and really start to be active." "And then you'll let us get into the water." "I'll push you." "The result the critically acclaimed documentary," ""Blue Water, White Death."" "In the crew was diver cameraman Stan Waterman." "The two men would become lifelong friends." "There's gotta' be 12!" "Oh, yeah." "Rodney had already done two films about the great white and Rodney probably knew more about how to chum in the great white very important that, chumming, the putting out of what was called burley in Australia to attract them." "So that Rodney was the natural man to set up the scene for us." "Rodney didn't have a cage back then." "Gimbel had the cages." "Rodney knew where to find the burley, the chum, and set up the boats." "And way back then, in the beginning," "Rodney was your man in Australia if you wanted to film the great white." "Sorry about you cage, fellah, wait 'ill you see it." "How bad is it?" "What a mess." "He bent the cage, Stan?" "Oh, wait 'till you see." "The carnage of earlier films was not repeated." ""Blue Water, White Death" marks the beginning of a new kind of relationship between white sharks and human beings one that allows the sharks to survive the encounter." "For Rodney Fox, the occasional filmmaking stint was not enough to support his young family." "So he took up abalone diving, a dangerous but lucrative profession." "It would put food on the table for 18 years." "But always, the sharks weighed heavily on his mind." "One of the hardest things to do over that 18 year period when I was abalone diving was when I had to return to abalone diving the week after I'd been out filming sharks." "We had attracted maybe 10 or 15 great whites around the boat during the week period." "We had them biting on the cages and taking baits and showing these enormous teeth." "When the film crew had left and everything had quieted down," "I had to make my living again, and go back in the water only a few miles from where we'd seen all these sharks." "I had to put on another hat and say to myself," "Sharks don't like abalone." "They generally don't eat humans." "You'll be okay." "But the first couple of days" "I imagined those sharks were looking at me." "And sometimes when my knee would hit a soft sponge," "I wondered whether that was a soft shark's belly and whether it was biting my leg off." "But I knew that it was fear in myself." "The danger to abalone divers was genuine enough." "Some of the best abalone beds were near seal colonies where white sharks liked to hunt." "But instead of killing the sharks," "Rodney and his colleagues designed a protective working cage for the abalone divers." "Then they tested it in shark infested waters." "Watch out for that..." "Hurry up!" "Break a leg!" "It really proves that the cage is safe to abalone divers because you've been involved with five sharks down here swimming around, attacking it, and they've only taken the hose." "And if you've got enough air to survive and you can get up to the surface, you'll be safe." "Makes the adrenaline pump, doesn't it?" "The adrenalin really started to pump in 1974 when Rodney was contracted to coordinate the filming of live sequences for the greatest shark film of all time." "He had had experience with filming great whites in the wild, but "Jaws" was a different kind of project." "They had sent over a small stuntman, a midget diver and a small cage so that the sharks would look bigger because Jaws, of course, Bruce was a 25 footer and our sharks were only 14 foot." "And as we were dressing the little guy one of the sharks came in and grabbed hold of the propeller on my boat and actually shook the boat physically and it was well over 14 feet long, and a very strong shark, and as it swam along the side," "I'm saying to Carl, Quick, get in the water, get in the water!" "The cameraman's ready, here's the shark, and he kept saying, No, no, no!" "The stunt diver wasn't the only one who didn't want to go in the water." ""Jaws" was great entertainment, but the public was terrorized, and the perception of sharks went from bad to worse." "Nobody realized at that time that it was going to be a horror film that was going to frighten so many people, including a lot of my friends, out of the water." "I had people say to me," "I wouldn't even go in the bath now after seeing the film Jaws!" "For Rodney, "Jaws" was the turning point the moment he finally realized that the sharks needed a champion." "And so he set out to debunk the old myths." "He started a business an expedition business taking filmmakers, scientists even tourists out into the South Australian seas for face to face encounters with the real great white sharks." "These days, his business serves two ends it contributes to marine science and it satisfies Rodney's rather large appetite for adventure." "Some experience, I'll tell you!" "This scientific expedition will drop anchor in the Neptune Islands off the rugged coast of South Australia to find, film, and study great white sharks." "Rodney's son Andrew has taken over the necessary, if noxious, chore of mixing the key ingredients of burley a kind of foul stew that sharks seem to find irresistible." "Blood, ground tuna, and a little sea water that's the recipe." "Andrew will create a smelly slick stretching several miles down current from the vessel." "Any sharks in the area will find the invitation very attractive." "Marine scientists from the University of Adelaide want to test the strength of a great white's bite, and to identify the telltale sings of shark attack for forensic purposes a grisly but necessary study." "The sharks must be induced to bite a specifically designed pressure plate." "First, they need to be worked into a biting mood." "Ready now?" "Okay, drop her in, Andy." "Now that the shark has the idea, he gets his tuna on a plate." "Keep it in the air anyway, because he's a bit cranky!" "Running tests on the great white sharks in the wild is always unpredictable." "We should have an impression on plate!" "The plate is designed to measure pounds of pressure per square inch." "That is amazing." "We're looking at the test strip now and that looks as if..." "This one is 500 kilograms, 1,000 pounds." "One thousand pounds." "That one's more than 1,000 pounds." "A thousand pounds per square inch enough to puncture metal plating." "But what exactly is it that draws a great white and prompts it to bite?" "Is it the smell of prey, or the sight of it, or the vibrations it sends through the water?" "That's a crucial question for divers so Rodney helps set up another experiment." "What I hope to do here is to really work out whether the great white sharks are interested in humans, whether they can actually see that there's an unseen shield there, whether they may be interested in fish or sound" "Just to see what they are interested in." "They swim around and around so many times the cages without biting and haven't had any true results." "In order to test sight, Rodney will use a cage of quarter inch" "Lexan plastic to give the sharks a clear view of his shape." "An underwater speaker will test for sound, broadcasting low frequency vibrations to simulate the vibrations made by moving prey." "A thawed tune will provide scent." "Will the sharks show any clear preference?" "Which one will attract them the most?" "The adrenalin that rushes in you as you go down there and as the shark comes in when you're in the Lexan tube gives you a real rush that excitement all over again." "It's like the first time in my shark cages." "It's exciting and my heart you can feel it a little higher in you beating a little faster as you realize that you are part of an experiment, that the sharks don't really know whether or not they can get at you or not." "It was quite unnerving really, because I felt like I was naked in the middle of the street in the shop window with everything exposed..." "Again and again, the circling sharks pass Rodney by, and return to the source of the sound vibrations." "The proof is clear at close range, underwater vibrations, not sight or smell, are what attracts the shark." "Rows of sensory cells along the flank are especially attuned to these stimuli" "Well, there's absolutely no doubt in my mind they're far more interested in the low vibrations than they ever were in me or the tuna..." "The more Rodney has studied them, the more he has come to learn about sharks, the great variety of sharks all 370 species of them." "I get lots of pleasure from looking at the different species of sharks, from the carpet shark that lays on the bottom with its frilly mouth" "to the nurse sharks that seem to rummage around and sleep a lot" "to the beautiful whaler sharks and the bull sharks and the silkie sharks." "There's so many of them the mako sharks and the great white sharks." "All of them have a different feel, a different way to swim, a different way of life." "But they're all beautiful the way they swim and glide and fly through the water." "And the biggest and most mysterious of all: the whale shark." "It's not just the largest of the sharks it is, in fact, the largest fish in the ocean." "But despite its menacing size and appearance, this is among the most gentle and benign of all sharks." "It eats plankton, not people." "Few in number, slow to reproduce, the whale shark is one of the great and vulnerable wonders of the oceans." "Whale sharks to diver have been one of the greatest pinnacles of sharks in all the oceans of the world." "They were the largest shark, they were a docile shark, they were a shark that you could hitch a ride on, a friendly shark, all the things that the great white shark wasn't." "Growing to over 50 feet and 20 tons, the whale shark is so big that it supports other fish, like these remora." "They hitchhike harmlessly on the whale shark and eat the food it leaves behind." "Ironically, the most visible fish in the ocean is also one of the least understood." "No one can say where or when these sharks reproduce, or even how old they grow to be, but some scientists believe they live as long as we do," "Roaming the tropical ocean in search of food and occasionally, each other." "Now imagine a shark this big with teeth to match a massive, meat eating predator." "At one time, such a shark did exist:" "caharadon megaladon 50 feet of carnivore lived during the miocene ear some 20 million years ago." "It was the largest ocean going predator that ever existed." "Rodney traveled to South Carolina to find out more about the megaldon." "He and naturalist Vito Bertucci will dive in the Cougar River off Charleston." "It's a dangerous dive." "But this was a hunting and dying ground of cacharadon megaladon and his fossilized teeth lie embedded in the river bottom." "The most important thing to worry about here is just to work you way into the current and down the anchor line and then once we get down, you have to be aware that there are sharks and turtles in this area and an occasional alligator," "and if you do come up on one, not to be startled by it and if you ignore them, they usually ignore you." "Alligators, the only danger with them is on the surface." "If you see one come at you at the surface, all you have to do is dump your air and go down." "And they won't come after you." "The sharks, if they come up to you, just give them a shove and they'll take off." "Well, I got my knee pads on for praying" "I hope this turns out alright." "Here goes." "The water is cold." "Visibility is nil." "The darkness is decidedly spooky." "I had some incredible images of monster sharks swimming around." "In these gloomy water, a monster carnivore would be right at home." "Within minutes, Rodney finds the first traces of these ancient killers." "Luckily, of course, it's the teeth, not the shark." "You okay?" "Yeah, why?" "I dunno' if I can get up here very easy." "Just leave your gear on the floor." "How do I get this helmet off?" "I feel a bit like Hoodini." "Why are they different colors?" "This one was in the sand." "On the sand?" "Yeah, it the sand and these were in the mud." "You know, when I was heading down there with you for the first time," "I thought, "what am I doing here?"" "It was dark and crazy and I'm pulling and I'm spinning sideways on the rope down there and it was only when I saw the bottom come up slowly that I realized there was a steady bottom there and I thought, "I cannot give up now because I gotta' get back in the boat."" "And then I went on and then when I saw that first half a tooth down there I thought," ""Ah, this is worth it."" "And then I started looking, looking, and I forgot about all the problems that you told me about down there and started" "looking, looking, looking for teeth." "And, you know, you can get carried away." "Down in Jacksonville, Florida, Dr. Cliff Jeremiah is taking Vito's fossil teeth and reconstructing a megaladon shark jaw." "It will be the largest shark jaw in the world big enough to swallow a small car." "And it has an entire set of properly matched teeth." "It has taken Vito 19 years to collect the full set." "Some 200 fossilized teeth will line the recreated jaw, adding almost 300 pounds in teeth alone." "Shark teeth, of course, stand out so much that white pointy ivory things knives against their gray body." "And of course, if you had somebody in a room pointing a revolver at you, you would look at the revolver too, because it's the sharp pointy end, the point that's going to cause all the trouble." "Shark teeth are compelling." "It's difficult not to admire them and react with a shudder." "The only part of the shark's skeleton that's not cartilage, these razor teeth are used to dismember and devour prey." "But despite our worries, only rarely is that prey human." "First of all, the word shark is such an enormous pull on people." "Sharks three or 400 varieties of sharks in the world, all go together as one name shark and that spells out fear." "Research was done and shows that the word shark had a higher reaction on the nervous system of people than any other word in the English language." "And so the general public, when they talk about sharks, they talk about something they cannot understand and something they fear." "In fact, sharks are not all scary." "Only a handful are any kind of threat to people." "What they are is vitally important to the oceans." "As top predators, they help maintain the entire balance of the underwater world." "Rodney's fascination with these great hunters has taken him all around the planet." "His quest: to learn still more about sharks, and it's quest that never ends." "Alright, we're gonna' place the mask on and the way to do that is to put your chin in first and then we'll pull this strap over the top." "Here at Walker's Ca in the Northern Bahamas," "Rodney and Dr. Eugenie Clark have come to swim with reef sharks in the wild." "On this dive, Rodney and Eugenie are wearing special masks that allow them to communicate underwater." "No metal cages, no Lexan tubes, just a swim alongside the sharks to show that if you know what you're doing, you have nothing to fear." "They've picked a dive center where frozen fish remains are put out to lure large numbers of sharks for the divers." "It's just beautiful to be here and watch them." "The nurse sharks are the first to arrive." "They certainly don't seem to be paying any attention to us, do they?" "What sort of food or fish do these nurse sharks normally eat?" "The nurse sharks eat the food on the bottom shellfish, clams and any kind of fish they can get ahold of." "Genie, he's eating your hair." "Watch out!" "They're trying to eat your hair, Genie." "Trying to eat my hair?" "I really like that, Rodney." "He just stopped then and wanted to be scratched..." "While the nurse sharks are fairly docile, the blacktips that follow are much more aggressive." "That one just tried to bite me on the camera..." "How about staying close to me?" "It's getting a bit exciting here." "How many species do you think we're seeing, Genie?" "Well, it looks like three species for sure the gray reef or the reef shark, as it's called in the Caribbean, a lot of these nurse sharks, and then the blacktip." "I don't know if there are two species or one of the blacktip." "Yet, even the blacktip and gray reef sharks seem more interested in the food than the humans." "There are almost 80 sharks feeding simultaneously." "And for the most part, they simply ignore the divers." "Funny how when we're down here with them, the way we are now, we've both stopped feeling that there's any danger at all in the situation we're just so fascinated with watching them." "In fact today, people threaten sharks more than sharks threaten people." "Sharks are being killed sometimes purely out of hate they don't even use them." "In some of the shark tournaments, they just go out and kill sharks." "But I think we're getting away from that." "There's too much now on television and magazine articles and books and people like Rodney Fox who are... telling people what good sharks can be and who are living examples of how, if you understand a shark, you can go on swimming with them," "and they are not to be feared and hated." "They're like puppy dogs, aren't they?" "Some sharks you can swim with, some you can't." "It takes some education, experience, and common sense to figure out which ones are safer than others." "Silkie sharks, for instance, are on the safe list." "And with silkies, there's a twist, as Bahamian Stuart Cove will show Rodney." "And when we go down there, you're going to twist its tail?" "Yes." "It's important when we're swimming around with sharks to keep our hands down, because they do have teeth, but when they swim by us, if we grab their tails and twist them gently, it will paralyze the shark and when you do that," "you can actually roll them over and stroke their bellies." "We use this maneuver to actually remove fish hooks and so we sort of do the sharks a little bit of a favor and we remove the fish hooks and it doesn't seem to bother them." "Paralyze the sharks and then release the sharks, they'll come right back to you and you can do it again." "Well, I'm game." "Let's try it." "Silkie sharks are so called because instead of the usual rough shark skin, theirs is smooth as silk." "Reaching up to nine feet in length, they inhabit the waters off Nassau, to the south of Walker's Cay." "Grabbing silkies by the tail might sound tricky, but divers in the area have been doing it for awhile, ever since they first set out to remove the hooks of careless fishermen." "That's when they discovered the silkies' special weakness." "It's called tonic immobility, and it's a quirk of the sharks' nervous system, a kind of temporary paralysis, brought on by twisting the sharks' tails and flipping them over." "I don't believe that." "Those sharks are so friendly." "They're right behind you." "They're all around..." "It's incredible." "I've never experienced anything like that before." "So silkies are friendly." "Nurses are okay." "What about any others?" "You got any others?" "We've got no dangerous sharks in the Bahamas." "Unfortunately, two weeks ago, we had a longline boat come into our area and target our shark dive, up in the reef area on the inland sites and caught 35 of our shark population and they had different names." "They were like our kids." "It was like having your pet dog killed." "And we had a great affinity, a great affection for all these wonderful sharks." "Well, after that great white shark got me," "I really knew nothing about sharks." "This is one of 350 varieties of sharks in the world." "And you just have to find out which ones are potentially maneaters, or manbiters, as they say." "I'm less frightened now than I was before my shark attack, because I've learned to find out which ones are dangerous and which ones aren't, which ones you can handle, which ones you can swim with." "I think they're beautiful." "Hi Joe" "Felicity, Margaret boys and girls, many different shapes and sizes." "Come on." "It's my belief that education will stop this massacre of all the sharks and the massacre of our oceans." "There's a great upwelling amongst people now to say," "Hey, let the sharks live, let's learn more about them, let's find out how we can enter the water without having to kill them all off." "And it's the education of our younger people now and I see a large uprising of it young six and seven years old saying," "Don't throw any plastic in the water, don't do this, why are you killing that shark, why is that photograph of a dead shark?" "It's really great to see that we are starting to let our seas live." "For Rodney Fox, the past 30 years have been a journey, a journey with the shark." "It was a voyage that started in one terrible instant, a voyage into the face of fear." "Over 30 years, Rodney has traveled from terror and death to understanding and life, from the early days when killing sharks seemed right, to the present when harming them, even accidentally, seems very wrong." "In a way, he was chosen on that awful day 30 years ago to speak for the sharks, chosen for a special lifelong bond." "For while the great white would put one mark on his body, the next 30 years would leave another on his soul." "Thirty years ago, I had no idea" "I'd be dragged into a whole lifetime of the study of sharks." "And when I look back now, I realize and feel quite proud that I've worked with so many interesting people." "And what I've tried to do over that period of time is to get the respected filmmakers... and the scientists that know what they are talking about to learn more about the great white and get them to portray that the shark isn't a bad shark," "that we have to learn to live with it, and not just kill it." "And I look back over the 30 years to find that slowly it's been happening and working and all of the people agree with my philosophy:" ""Let the sharks live!"" "In Ireland, horses are an indelible part of the landscape... of history and memory, of a past and present where the ancient magic of the horse still weaves its spell." "Their presence is pervasive, as if horses help to define what the Irish people are." "Horses are the Irishman's sport..." "Ireland is the birthplace of steeplechasing." "Horses are Ireland's tradition." "Showjumping originated on this green land." "Horses are Ireland's business." "This is the Irish National Stud." "Horses are Ireland's pleasure." "Here people still ride across fields and farms to the hounds... and thousands of families keep horses for recreation." "This romance of the Irish and their horses was born of the land, nurtured by necessity, and fostered by ancient bonds." "It is one of the oldest love stories on earth:" "The Ballad of the Irish Horse." "Ireland" "Ireland of myth and mystery, of wild shores and soft rains, lush pastures and rich soil, where the past still lives." "Even today, Ireland remains, as it has been for thousand of years, largely agricultural." "Here, the story of man and horse stretches over the centuries..." "A saga woven of threads of tradition and history, custom and religion, that binds them inseparably in the fiber of Irish life." "While the rest of Europe was transformed by the Industrial Revolution," "Ireland remained essentially untouched and unchanged." "Until only 40 year ago, most families in Ireland needed a horse to plow the fields through the week." "On market days, the farmer hitched the horse to a wagon to haul his produce." "On Sundays, horse and wagon took the family to church." "In remote areas of the west, the old Irish ways and language survive." "And the people of Ireland keep horses in their lives and on their landscapes." "Here, people still go ton fairs at villages and country crossroads to buy and sell horses as they have for centuries." "In Napoleonic times, quartermasters from European armies came here to buy the famed Irish horses for their elite cavalry regiments." "Today at the Great October Fair in Ballinasloe, the flavor of a lost age lingers." "If she's there for 50 pounds, she's there." "The trading is still punctuated by the slapping of hands a middleman still brings buyer and seller together." "And a bit of earth on the horse's hindquarters still shows that a bargain has been struck." "Like his father and grandfather, John Daly is a horse breeder." "He came to this fair with his father." "Now he brings his son, Alan, knowing the boy will follow in his footsteps." "And today he has come to buy Alan a pony." "We'll go and see something else anyway." "Stand back a minute there, lads." "What do you carry on the book down there?" "Fourteen two." "The man says seven." "I'll give you eight." "Give him 1,000 pounds." "Give him to him for 1,000 pounds and that's the price." "And after that, say no more." "I'll give you 800." "Well, I look at it this way." "Your lad will be getting a good pony, and he's a good rider." "And I like to see him getting the pony" "If you tell me you'll take it for them" "I'll divide it the last 200 pounds." "That's 900, right?" "Give him 1,000 pounds." "Go on, give him 1,000." "I tell you what I'll do." "I'll go away and leave you for an hour to think about it." "And you might get a better lad." "I'm here to sell him." "That'll be 1,000 pounds, the both of yours." "You're fiddling around there like a fiddler." "That will be 1,000 quid and get the money." "Give him a check then for 1,000 pounds." "Will you break the board?" "Go on." "Give him to him now." "Sold." "Hold out, hold out." "One, two, three, four..." "God bless you." "After a few pounds are given to the seller for luck," "Alan leaves the fair with a Connemara pony... symbol of his future and his heritage." "Some 9,000 years ago, man made his way here, crossing a land bridge that once linked Scotland and Ireland." "Horses arrived about 2,000 B.C., brought by Neolithic people who introduced their farming culture to this fertile land." "The island's placid existence exploded around 500 B.C., as a wave of Celtic warriors invaded their battle chariots drawn by hot blooded horses." "When the bloody days of plunder and murder subsided, the invaders became settlers, and their Celtic legacy imprinted its indelible stamp on the soul and style of Ireland." "The blood of their fiery mounts mixed with that of the indigenous ponies, producing a better, faster horse." "Over the centuries, successive tides of conquering peoples and ideas were to sweep across ireland in her poignant and tumultuous history." "There were Vikings, Normans, and Englishmen." "There were St. Patrick and Christianity." "All would create permanent changes on the face of the land and in the hearts of the Irish people." "But certain things would never change." "For thousands of years and hundreds of generations, man and horse continued to share the soil of Ireland." "Today, in the west, Connemara ponies still run free over the wild countryside." "Here at Lough Mask in County Mayo," "John Daly has kept two stallions isolated on an island through the winter." "The island is a short trip by boat from the lakeshore and Daly's stud farm" "Connemara ponies are, in fact, small horses, muscular and strong boned" "Perfectly adapted to the rugged western landscape, they retain the iron constitutions of wild horses the ability to forage, the strength to survive on their own in an untamed wilderness." "But now, in spring, it is time to reunite the gray stallion with the mares." "Come on, boy." "Easy, boys..." "Easy, good fella." "With a gentleness and expertise attained from a lifetime shared with horses," "John quickly gains the stallion's confidence." "There is evidence that spirited spanish horses, some imported, some shipwrecked off the coast, mixed with the native ponies to create this hardy breed." "Once used as both pack and plow animals in a rough and roadless countryside, today the intelligent, docile Connemara ponies are bred for riding." "Daly will release the stallion with the herd, allowing him to mate with any of the mares that are in season." "Mares come into season only nine days after foaling... but are quick to let a stallion know if his advances are unwelcome." "Her posture and stillness indicate this mare's receptiveness." "So the blood of native Irish horses, strengthened by the demands of wild coast, tempered by centuries of work with the Irish people, is passed into the future." "And if all goes well, in 11 months there will be a new foal in the daly herd." "At Tulira Castle in County Galway," "Lady Anne Hemphill began breeding" "Connemara ponies some 25 years ago." "An avid rider from the age of three," "Lady Hemphill wanted her children to share her lifelong enthusiasm." "Her husband encouraged her to organize classes in horsemanship for the local children." "Two decades later, she is still teaching the County Galway Hunt Branch of Pony Club." ""Now if the pony's at grass, what should he have in the fields?"" "Water." "Yes, fine." "What's another reason, David?" "Shade." "Shade is most important, isn't it?" "Are you looking at his teeth?" "Yes." "If he has a full set of teeth, he's over seven years." "Well done." "Good Girl." "There are pony Club branches all over Ireland porviding an opportunity for both country and city children to learn not only riding, but sportsmanship and proper care of the animals." "I think it's a very good foundation for them because it's getting away from this usual thing of being in the cinemas, the discos, and what have you." "Can you manage, Mark?" "No, no... it's a long way up." "I don't know if you'll be able to hold him, will you?" "Keep away, keep away from that." "Go out here in the middle of the field so that other people can get through and get mounted." "Now, come on." "I'll give you a leg." "Ups-a-daisy." "Hold on." "Good boy." "I find it very rewarding, and it's more rewarding in that when some of the children that were members of this branch when I first started." "They're doctors, or they're solicitors, or they're business people now." "And they're coming back, and they've got children." "I call all their children my grandchildren." "I haven't got any of my own grandchildren, but I got a lot of grandchildren." "Use your legs." "Take him on." "Now, take it easy." "Just come back, Gay, and take it easy." "Use your legs." "Good boy." "Now don't go so far back." "Now just trot into it." "Good boy." "Well done." "Good man." "Woops!" "All right?" "You're fine." "Next." "Shorten up your reins." "You haven't got much contact, have you?" "Come into it trotting." "For a small branch we've produced the winning Pony Club championship teams." "We've gone to England three time." "It is quite something." "I don't want any racing, and I don't want anybody going into hospital." "So for goodness sake just take your ponies down." "You will trot down across the field to the river." "I'll show you which way to go." "I love seeing these children with their happy little faces." "But it just gives me the greatest pleasure." "So a keen horsewoman passes on the joy of riding, and the children of yet another generation forge new links with their ancient Irish heritage of horsemanship." "Racing horses was the Celts' favorite sport." "This plain still bears the name Curragh, derived from their ancient word meaning" ""a place where horse racing is held."" "Keep her going now on to the next one." "Living at the edge of the Curragh, the Hutchinson family retains the Celtic passion for horse racing." "In the paddock behind their home," "Caroline, age 15, is coached by her father, Pat." "He was an amateurjockey." "She dreams of becoming a professional." "Whoa, lass." "Whoa, lass." "That's all right." "Pony races are held throughout ireland" "Though the jockeys are young boys and girls, the betting is serious business, with part of the proceeds going to charity." "Six to four on..." "My father always had about a hundred horses." "And he was one of the biggest dealers in the country." "Had a couple of thousand acres of land and I used to ride all our own horses." "And now, thank God, the kids are following on." "Caroline is one of four Hutchinson daughters participating in this competitive world" "Mrs. Hutchinson is active too, for the pony races are a family affair much like Little League Baseball." "Some of Ireland's leading jockeys began their careers in the pony races." "Sure, Caroline is very good." "She's courageous, she has ability, she likes the game, and she loves horses." "And I don't think she'll ever, no matter what I say or anybody else says, she won't do anything else." "She rides to win, and I think that's the secret." "I'd live to be a professional jockey when I get older." "The biggest challenge for me anyway is that I'm girl." "I don't think race riding is wonderful for little girls." "But they do like it." "They love it." "They live for it." "They don't want to go to the disco." "They want their pony." "They want to be a sport." "You're always thinking of where you are and thinking ahead of the next bend whether it's sharp or how to ride the next bend." "And especially if you're on a pony that's slow earlier on and comes on fast at the end." "Because of her consistent winning," "Caroline is sought to race other people's ponies as well as her father's." "When you're in front and when you have won, the owners come running up to you and say, "Well done" and all that." "It's just great to see their happy face from winning on their pony." "And then your friends come up and say, "Well done"." "It's just a great feeling." "I'm delighted that I won the last race." "That was a female race." "And I'm just thrilled that I won it and that I had a good pony." "Winning against both girls and boys," "Caroline raced closer to her dream when she became champion pony racing jockey for an unprecedented fourth consecutive year." "In 1752, with the steeples as starting and finishing points, a Mr. O'Callaghan raced a Mr. Blake from the church at Buttevant, jumping walls and fences, across farms and fields, to the church at Doneraile... thus running the first recorded steeplechase." "Today, some of Ireland's most popular steeple chases take place at the Galway Races." "Thousands gather daily to bet on the horses in this week of festivities held at the same time of year that the ancient Celts assembled to honor their god of horseracing." "The National Stud was established to foster the Irish thoroughbred industry by providing breeders with good stallions at reasonable fees." "The record of thoroughbred breeding dates from the publication in 1793 of the first English Stud Book which listed three Arab stallions and the Royal Mares." "Every thoroughbred on earth is descended from them." "A sire is selected by the breeder on the basis of bloodlines, tracked back through the stud book, his conformation or appearance, and the number of races he has won." "Six-year-old Raja Bab horse." "He's a tremendous individual." "A great mover, tremendous quality." "His first crop are now foals." "He won four group races, including the Corkanorry Stakes at Royal Ascot in course record time." "Dr. Maire O'Connor is deputy manager and resident veterinarian at the stud." "We're just starting to build her back up again... for a couple of days." "Yeah, yeah." "She's walking very well now." "Ireland is well known as the European nursery." "We have the climate and the soil for rearing horses." "There's a tremendous closeness and a tremendous understanding of the horse in the Irish people." "Among her responsibilities is determining when the mares are ready for covering." "Every step of the procedure must be carefully monitored in the breeding of these delicate and valuable animals." "Eighteen days after the covering, a sonogram is made by a visiting veterinarian and Dr. O'Connor." "With this sophisticated device they can see inside the mare's uterus and determine if there is a live fetus" "You can see it there..." "at about 10 o'clock." "Heart beating." "The heart's beating." "Within the white spot, the pulsing heart of the tiny fetus is clearly visible." "The mare's gestation period is 11 months;" "the birth usually takes less than an hour." "A member of the staff acts as midwife." "For Maire O'Connor and the staff, the hundreds of births they have witnessed in the past do not diminish the wonder of this moment." "Within the hour the age-old instinct to stand and run with the herd is already stirring in the foal, and the fragile new life is given human help." "These spindly legs, now trembling and weak, have centuries of speed bred in them." "When they are three days old, healthy foals are ready to go outside." "Each is examined daily." "Those with special problems get special attention." "Up you come." "There's a baby, there's a baby." "That's good." "Okay." "Come on." "There's tremendous limestone in Ireland and you get a tremendous amount of minerals coming through the grass to the horses." "So you get very good bone development." "And, of course, race horses need their legs." "So you want good bone in a race horse." "Born to race, these foals carry within them the urge to run." "Among these new lives there are future champions, bred at the Irish National Stud to thunder home to victory on the race tracks of the world." "Here at Goffs, the finest thoroughbreds are offered at auction." "A yearling, still totally untried as a racehorse, may bring close to a million dollars." "At 260... any more now, about $300,000 at 260, at 260 one more time." "At 260 that's what I sell her for this time..." "Millions are spent as buyers stake their money on the animal's pedigree and conformation." "Vincent O'Brien is the greatest racehorse trainer in the world a magician who transforms horseflesh into gold." "An international group of investors depends on his uncanny eye to select potential champions." "His reputation began to soar in the '50s with three consecutive wins at the world's most difficult steeple chase:" "England's Grand National." "There is stubborn refusal here by Glen Fire." "And now for a most unhappy landing." "Those were the leaders at the 27th jump, but alas, this fence accounted for the gallant Sun Dew and Martuvu." "No, there was not to be a royal victory this year." "At the last fence, Tudor Line jumped wide but Quare Times made no mistake and galloped away in great style." "Neither Tudor Line nor Kerry's Cottage who will finish third, could possibly catch him now." "It was Quare Times' Grand National all right." "And it was the third successive National win for trainer Vincent O'Brien." "These Irish!" "Triumphant in the classic races of steeplechasing," "O'Brien next turned his wizardry to flat racing." "Son of a farmer, fifth of eight children, he started his remarkable career with a rented stable and three horses." "I must have had a natural liking for horses right from the start, and that developed then over the years." "Eventually I started training." "I don't think I would be happy doing anything else." "Today his empire spreads over nearly 1,000 acres." "Ballydoyle is the world's finest private training facility, with magnificent barns, covered rides, gallops each 14 furlongs in length, a 19th century Georgian home, a helicopter pad, and stables of thoroughbreds worth millions of dollars" "all under tight security." "O'Brien retains a percentage of every horse he trains." "Among this season's crop of aristocrats are seven sons of Nijinsky three of Alleged, and nine of Northern Dancer." "O'Brien's extraordinary powers seem to spring from an almost magical ability to sense what each animal ends to develop and succeed." "It is very important to make a study of each individual animal because they're like people they all differ." "Some horses have got a very easy, calm disposition, and they have no mental problems." "But others have, and they give them special attention." "They're specially trained, so as to try and keep them settled and at ease in themselves." "O'Brien's success as a trainer is legendary:" "His race winnings alone have been as high as a million dollars in a single year." "But it is after a hose's last race is won that its big moneymaking career may begin." "Today O'Brien focuses on training colts." "After a few major wins of top class races, the best are retired to stand at stud." "Sold to groups of investors for more than 25 million dollars each, these stallions earn huge fees in their years as sires." "So, the mystique of a man and his thoroughbreds becomes big business an important component of modern Ireland's economy." "In the 18th century," "Irish farmers began to breed tough, powerful, work animals able to pull both plow and cart." "Today, the blood of the robust Irish Draft horse mingles with that of the fiery thoroughbred to produce horses with the stamina needed forjumping and hunting." "The hunt, as a gentlemanly pursuit, attained its present form and popularity in 18th century England and was brought here when Ireland was under English rule." "Michael Dempsey is master of hounds of the world famous Galway Blazers Hunt Club." "Tempo, get in." "Tempo, come in." "Get in." "My grandfather was interested in, my father was interested in horses, and my uncle." "They used to both hunt." "At that time, you see, we used to do all the work with horses on the farm." "There were no tractors." "Once the exclusive province of the aristocracy, today the hunt's traditional style is enjoyed by thousands of ardent Irish riding enthusiasts." "Dempsey, a local boy, grew up dreaming of becoming master of hounds." "But I think I was about either 13 or 14 years when I said," ""One day I will hunt those Blazer hounds"." "That was my ambition." "Yes, all my life was to hunt those hounds." "A farmer of modest means, Dempsey is paid by the members' subscriptions to hunt the pack." "Oh, I love those hounds, and I know all of them individually." "And they're all of a character and they all are different." "I see them every day to get very close with them." "You have to be very close to your hounds before they'll work with you." "Farmers have long considered foxes to be vermin." "Hounds were bred to scent the wild foxes that his in fields and farms." "Hunters "riding to hounds" followed on horseback, and so, this sport evolved." "When you get out there and your packof hounds are going together and you hear their voice, that is the greatest feeling I know." "And a good horse beneath you." "To be able to gallop right across the country behind them, and they're really running on and speaking." "I think it's the best thrill that anybody could ever get." "I don't know what it does to you the voice of those hounds it just gets your blood really up." "The first fox of the day is scented and pursued." "Often they lose the fox." "Sometimes, they lost their seat and occasionally they lose their way." "Are you hurt?" "Off you go." "Well, where do I go?" "Go on, go on across there." "Go on and get on to it." "When the last fox outruns the hounds and the hour grows late," "Dempsey calls a halt to the day's hunting." "Home now." "We go for the beer now at Raftery's." "The hunters head for a traditional last stop:" "a pub called "The Blazers." "The Galway Blazers have a reputation for recklessness." "It is said that a group of hunters from Galway once reveled so boisterously in a certain hotel that is burst into flames thus giving the group its name." "Tonight, this pub is ablaze with traditional Irish pleasures:" "the pints, the laughs, and the songs." "Every year the town of mill street hosts international show jumping competitions." "Show jumping began in Ireland a century ago." "Contests to see how high and wide the horses could jump over fences and walls, they offered prizes to those judged most suitable for hunting." "This competition is called "Carroll's Boomerang Finder"." "It was named in honor of Boomerang, the horse that this man," "Eddie Macken, rode to fame and fortune in the world of international show jumping the horse that made him a national hero." "Macken's great successes with Boomerang began in the mid 70s." "Soon horse and rider were labeled" ""the most exciting partnership show jumping has ever seen"." "The Hickstead Derby, English, 1977." "Winner in 1976, now can he beat this time?" "He'll have to do fantastic turns to do it, and there are few riders more likely to do it than Eddie Macken." "Come on, Boomerang..." "Yes 27.3!" "Boomerang was everything I am." "I just was very fortunate to meet him at the right stage in life." "He was probably fortunate to meet me." "We came together and developed a great partnership;" "and he put me right at the top of the world of show jumping in a very short period of time." "All eyes are on the brilliant Irishman Eddie Macken." "He just pauses." "He's in plenty of time." "He's absolutely right for it." "Go on, Eddie!" "What a magnificent performance by Eddie Macken." "Incredible to think that he's now won his fourth British jumping derby in a row." "This trophy was commissioned after Boomerang had won his fourth consecutive Hickstead Derby." "The Hickstead Derby is probably one of the most difficult competitions in world showjumping to win." "For a horse to win it once is an achievement, be he actually won it four times." "In 1980 Boomerang broke a bone in his foot and Macken retired him." "But Hickstead brought them back for an emotional farewell tribute." "It was a sad moment for Eddie as they left the show grounds for the last time." "Three years later, Boomerang's condition became so painful he had to be put down." "He is buried on Macken's farm." "I never knew a horse that could mean as much as Boomerang." "And the possibilities of ever finding one with as much talent are very, very slim indeed." "The loss of Boomerang still haunts Macken's life." "With his wife, Susanne, he searches for a horse with the unique talent and temperament to replace Boomerang." "Okay?" "All right." "All right." "Buying, feeding, training, and caring for a stable of horses is an expensive and time-consuming responsibility." "But the Macken animals get the best..." "Including, for some, a bit of Guinness Stout three times a week on the theory that what Irish doctors prescribe for old people and pregnant women must be good for horses." "Youngest of five children," "Macken is the son of a small-town butcher." "Is he ready to go?" "Yeah." "He's fine." "Yeah." "You want to leave him for me in the morning." "I'll ride him." "A superb, natural rider, he has grown to be a trainer with a special feel and touch for a horse." "This animal seems to have a muscular problem." "Macken examines him to see if a veterinarian is required." "He's starting to get a bit of a thing about this now that I'm fiddling around." "Yeah." "He's just anticipating it." "Very tight there." "Will, Robin's coming this afternoon again anyway, isn't he?" "He is, eh?" "Can you not work that other hand on top of his hip and save yourself?" "There's definitely something catching him there." "Yeah." "It's just a really worrying thing for the horse anyway to have somebody contracting his muscles without..." "Eddie himself has acknowledged that a horse like Boomerang comes along only once in a lifetime." "But together, he and Susanne continue their quest, hoping to find to create his next great show jumping partner, and soften the loss of Boomerang, a gallant champion and noble friend." "You remember that chestnut foal we bought at John V. Donna?" "Oh, do you remember, yeah?" "..." "All over Ireland, boys who would like to grow up to be the next Eddie Macken are practicing and competing with the intense hope and fervor of youth." "For them, young riders like Philip and Trevor Dagg, success demands more than practice it requires financial and emotional support from the entire family." "As they often do, their parents devote the weekend to the boy's competition." "The weather's going to break now, too." "How many more do you...?" "Ten more, ten more, and he goes again." "Philip was once junior champion in pony show jumping." "Now he trains his 13 year old brother, Trevor, who began competing just last year." "You come down into it." "You're just going down the hill." "And the horse just tends to go a little bit deeper because you're coming down the hill." "So you just want to sit him up so he can..." "Compensate for the downhill." "You're going too slow and you're half asleep." "Now come on, waken up." "Come on." "Philip has already committed himself to a career with horses, and coaches other young competitors as well as Trevor." "Just give him a little kick." "Come on." "That's good." "We'll just go up above and give him a puff, and then we'll go in." "Now let's have two awake people to jump clear rounds." "All right." "You're going to win, okay?" "You're going to win." "You're going to win, okay?" "You're going to win." "And we will trot, trot." "Oh, crikey!" "We're going to win today, aren't we?" "Yes, we are." "We're going to win." "Good boy." "Let's go see Philip." "Okay?" "Good lad." "Every competition is an opportunity to grow in skill and experience." "But in Ireland, all competitions are prelude to the most exciting challenge of the year:" "the Dublin Horse show." "Ireland's greatest horse show, it has been attracting champions for more than a century." "All of the riders have qualified to participate by winning at a number of competitions throughout the year." "Held at the Royal Dublin Society show grounds, the Dublin Horse Show has long been considered the nation's premiere social event." "Enthusiasts from farms, villages and cities across the country join international visitors as 1,000 horses and riders and teams from five nations stage five days of fierce competitions and showmanship." "Michael Dempsey is here to demonstrate the obedience of the Galway Blazer hounds..." "And Trevor Dagg has an opportunity to compete in the same arena used by the international teams." "And you'll be all right." "Okay?" "Don't worry about it." "It'll go all right when you get out there." "Okay?" "Okay, give him a pop." "And this is George Dagg's Beau Brummel." "To win the championship," "Trevor must clear all the obstacles and jump the course in the shortest time." "Oh, no." "Good man." "Well done." "Oh, no." "It's gone." "A caring brother had hoped for first place." "But for Trevor, this yellow ribbon may be a harbinger of future successes" "It was here that the world's first show jumping competitions were held." "This year Eddie Macken is one of four riders to set a new Irish jumping record." "In this great yearly celebration of horses and horsemanship, the ancient spirit of the Irish people is aroused a new, to stir and soar." "Within each individual, the warmth of the age old connection with the animal that has helped shape his nation's history is rekindled." "I think we have produced a lot of really world class horses on the international scene." "And we've become famous obviously from that." "But I think the greatest asset the Irish horse has is that as a pleasure horse and for the amateur, he seems to be more clever, more easy to deal with, to handle, to ride." "And he seems to give a longer period of enjoyment than the Continental horses do." "Myself and my family, if we have no breakfast, today, tomorrow, some other day in the future, we'll still look after the horse." "We would give the horse our breakfast." "We were with horses for generations, and Irish people, whatever, they're Irish." "They'll talk about horses, they'll have horses, they'll keep horses." "They'll never get rid of them." "A tremendous appreciation of the horse runs through the Irish people." "Ireland is an island." "We are an island people, and as a result, the traits that were in our forefathers are still present today after many generations." "In the quite of the countryside a new Connemara pony enters the world." "Only minutes old, still weak and wobbly, he is born with the ability to stand alone, to survive in the lean land of the west." "Within himself he carries the strength of thousands of years on Irish soil." "The saga of the Irish horse continues in the 20th century because to the people of Ireland, horses represent a link with old ways, old values." "A traditional past they want to preserve." "So the children of Ireland grow up with these animals, each generation adding new chapters of challenge and hope, triumph and love, to the timeless story that is the ballad of the Irish horse." "Thank for your watching." "Sir Francis Bacon wrote, God Almighty first planted a garden, and indeed it is the purest of human pleasures." ""Cultivators of the earth," according to Thomas Jefferson, are the most valuable citizens." "They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous." "Or, as my aunt Mildred said," "Never throw meat in the compost pile." "Hi, I'm Leslie Nielsen." "Welcome to my garden." "I'm sure it's a lot like yours cool, serene, completely under control." "Time to wake up and smell the roses." "The backyard is a killing field." "It's a realm of stalkers... serial killers... aerial combat... venom... death." "So, if you're looking for peace and quiet... stay away from the... savage garden." "A garden is a little slice of nature where you get to call the shots." "You see:" "A raked lawn." "A well-skimmed lily pond." "Perfect rows of vegetables." "Voltaire once wrote, or was it Martha Stewart?" "We must cultivate our garden." "Well, they're both wrong." "Pruning, planting, whacking your weeds?" "It's all beside the point!" "Because the place cannot be controlled" "So give it up!" "Ask not what you can do for your garden." "Ask what your garden can do for you." "Because with the right approach, your backyard can expand your mind." "But you need the right tool for the job." "A famous gardener once said," "I like to watch." "Because when you're "gardening," you're too busy to see anything." "And you're missing all the strange and wonderful wildness of a place that's close to home." "And I don't mean the mall." "Now this may come as a surprise, but I wasn't always this wise." "But I came face-to-face with the naked garden and I was forced to open my eyes." "What I discovered wasn't always pretty but it was always fascinating." "Let me tell how it happened." "It began about a year ago." "I felt like a pretty observant fellow then." "I ran a tight ship." "Yeah, I thought I was in charge." "Still, the vegetable patch held to its own pace... always about a month behind my appetite!" "Every day, until my tomatoes were ripe I'd be there, watchful and proud." "I felt like a maestro, and the vegetables were my orchestra." "And we made beautiful gazpacho together." "I never suspected that even among my precious tomatoes, a trespasser ran amok." "It was a shrew." "This ravenous pipsqueak needs to eat his weight in food every day." "For his size, he's one of the fiercest predators in the world." "But a year ago, I didn't even know he existed." "My mind was in the mulch." "I was too busy savoring the fruits of my labor." "I don't like to brag, but I thought I knew my onions." "Now all the while, this little fellow he weighs no more than a wet tea bag had the run of the place." "Like it or not, shrews are among the garden's most common mammals." "They love to dig around for worms and beetles, spiders, snails." "They work day and night, hunting one hour, then napping the next." "That's a schedule I could settle into." "Shrews operate at such a furious pace that just missing a meal could kill them." "When they're on the go, they really live life in the fast lane." "Under stress, their hearts beat up to 1,300 times a minute like mine during my last audit." "It's safe to say that no perfume maker has ever been inspired by a shrew." "Glands on their bellies put out a musky smell." "Only a predator with a strong stomach will take one on." "The garter snake is tough enough for the job." "He's one of the backyard's great hunters at home in the water as well as on land." "He tastes the air with his tongue and picks up a whiff of a shrew." "Following the trail, the snake closes in." "His weapon: a steel-trap jaw." "A fight is coming, but my little shrew is no babe in the woods." "Predicting a winner might be hard." "The snake has no venom, but his quarry does." "The short-tailed shrew is the only North American mammal with a poisonous bite, except for my Aunt Mildred." "In this fight, the first bite wins." "The shrew strikes for the neck." "His cobralike venom quickly starts to subdue the snake." "Muscles go slack, breathing slows." "Paralysis would soon set in if the shrew weren't so hungry." "The snake has been vanquished by the one creature in my yard there is no taming of." "What a place my garden was!" "I'd reached for the suburbs and ended up in the Serengeti!" "Something awful seemed to stir in every crevice." "This beetle is emerging after three years underground." "She's an acorn weevil a subversive devil about the size of a grain of rice." "I felt like her goal in life was to wreck my oak trees." "As soon as she dries off her wings for her maiden flight, off she'll go... gunning for my acorns." "But I didn't know any of this back then." "I had other fish to fry, like keeping my daisies from drooping." "Of course, now I know..." "I didn't even have control of my own flower patch." "Just below me, an earwig was laying her eggs." "This forbidding insect seems to have had a charisma bypass." "But don't sell her short." "The female cleans each egg to protect it from deadly fungus." "Otherwise she might lose the entire nest to athlete's egg." "Earwigs like to hang out in warm, dark spaces." "But that bit about hiding in people's ears?" "Just a tired, old myth." "I hope." "A terrible threat approaches..." "at its own pace." "The earwig nest is about to be slimed." "There's nothing a caring mother can do." "A hungry thrush spots the snail." "Her next meal will be escargot." "Remove the snail from its shell... delicately." "Then tenderize by pounding on a rock." "The footage you are about to see contains scenes that may be disturbing to some viewers." "Now if you can't stand theheat, get out of the garden!" "Speaking of the heat, I'd like you to meet a fire ant." "These South American invaders work in huge colonies." "They run an efficient operation." "A quarter-million ants that's one extended family, can get by on two meals a day." "Here's the appetizer." "And now for the main course." "An ant attacks." "The dragonfly shakes a leg." "Reinforcements are quick to arrive." "The dragonfly makes a desperate move." "It's too late." "Again and again, the dragonfly is stung with a caustic venom." "It's death by a thousand fiery jabs." "And I thought paparazzi were bad!" "Piece by piece, the ants dismantle their captive, like a scene out of Gulliver's Travels" "Make that Reservoir Dogs." "For the ants, it's Tails I win... heads, you lose." "Decapitation is the final insult." "Some say the world will end in fire ants." "For the dragonfly, it just did." "I thought the garden was mine, but in fact, creatures had claimed it all!" "My yard was divided into warring camps!" "Each shrew controls its own patch." "And being some of nature's crankiest creatures, shrews do not like to share." "My little shrew's neighbor is sleeping just over the scent marked border that defines their territories." "But while these little fellows have a great sense of smell, they have poor vision and can sometimes bump right into each other." "It's usually a nasty surprise for both." "The winner of this battle may gain the other's territory." "The loser may end up as lunch." "They move faster than Aunt Mildred dealing blackjack." "It's extreme wrestling on a tiny scale" "Time out while they play to the grandstands." "Now back to the action." "No one knows if shrews are immune to their own venom." "But if they're not, they really shouldn't be doing this." "A battle can last over half an hour, but my little shrew settles this one quickly with a well-placed nip." "No turf will change hands today." "And both scurry back to their homes." "I used to do battle in the garden myself." "I felt it was my territory, and I had to defend it." "Sure I had big weapons." "But I was starting to worry about the little things." "Something was bothering me." "I couldn't put my finger on it." "Lucky for me." "Black widows were living in my shed." "The male is outweighed 30-fold by a no-nonsense female." "He approaches, tapping carefully to woo her and to avoid her lethal bite." "If we could understand his vibes of love, it would go like," "Please baby, please baby, please don't kill me!" "So far, so good." "She lets him insert sperm by hand." "I mean, by palp." "Part of the limb may snap off to be left inside." "Ah love, For this glorious moment, he's ready to give an arm and a leg." "Now the female lays her eggs." "She secures over 200 of them in a silky sac." "Not one to put all her eggs in one basket, she'll eventually spin about five." "In only two weeks, a thousand new spiderlings will invade my yard." "Black widows may have colonized my shed... but I was more worried about what was going on outside." "I was prepared to fight the good fight with chemical warfare." "As I was saying," "I had no idea the enemy was living in my armory." "It was bad enough outside." "My stems were being sucked!" "My leaves lacerated!" "My petals perforated!" "It was more than a man could bear!" "Who could blame me if I practiced tough love?" "Smells like... victory." "But I was no winner." "My insecticide, long expired, had all the kick of a Shirley Temple:" "And just as well, because the mantis" "loves to munch on the munchers I was trying to murder." "The way things were going," "I didn't have a prayer of taming the savage garden." "I used to call 'em as I saw 'em." "When I saw 'em, if I knew what they were called." "Trouble is, some of these pesky little critters were neither fish nor fowl." "Like the daddy-longlegs in my shed." "They're familiar and strange at the same time." "But what are they?" "Think it's a spider?" "No." "Insect?" "No." "They're called Opiliones from the Latin meaning "aphid sucker."" "Yeah!" "Aphids are perfect suckers, really, when it comes to my rose stems." "And a lot more than one is born every minute at least in my backyard." "In fact, aphids can reproduce without having sex!" "There's one of nature's lousier ideas." "Daddy-longlegs has arrived for the hunt!" "Make that mommy-longlegs." "She has legs up to here!" "Each is slender as a thread and works partly by hydraulics." "She even hears, tastes, and smells using her legs." "Reminds me of... never mind." "I now know there's a lot to admire in this creature." "She has pretty good manners." "She chews her food before eating it, granted, outside her mouth." "She sucks up the juices through a flexible tube." "She also flosses after every meal." "I prefer unwaxed mint, myself." "Why are daddy-longlegs' legs long?" "To keep their plump bodies high above predators." "If that's not enough, two legs put out a nasty smell to discourage hunters." "But trust me:" "If you can smell them, you're too close." "The smelly legs also have built-in seismographs." "And she's keeping her legs peeled for approaching enemies." "Like the tiger beetle." "A killing machine." "An orthodontist's nightmare." "The beetle attacks and grabs a leg." "It's a tug-of-war." "And then built for quick release the leg pops off." "Special muscles close off the stump." "The tiger beetle, no genius, hangs on to its prize." "The daddy-longlegs hobbies off." "But at least she's still alive and kicking." "In the middle of all the mayhem, beauty still flourished in my garden." "I never could train my vines" "Where flowers grow, bees abound." "In a naughty little quid pro quo, bees handle the flowers' sex life in exchange for a drizzle of nectar." "The life of a worker bee is measured in distance not days." "It's like a frequent-flyer program in reverse:" "fly 500 miles, and then you die." "Now, I've been in a "B" movie or two, so I used to think I had a way with these critters." "But then came the fateful moment when I realized that all of the garden was not under my spell." "One day a bee came up to me and stopped to pay her respects." "But this cheeky bug was testing the boundaries." "It was a small infraction, but it threw me." "If she could question authority, what else was going on in my little Eden?" "Well, plenty." "I'd only seen the tip of the iceberg..." "lettuce." "No creature was safe, not even the little upstart of a bee." "She was being watched by many eyes." "Eight to be exact." "They all belong to a jumping spider." "It never hurts to have eyes in the back of your head... even if they're only good for seeing movement." "To see what is moving, the spider must turn to face her prey." "She's caught sight of the bee." "Two large front eyes track the prey." "She can't move her eyes as we do." "But she can swing her retinas back and forth inside her head." "It's like holding your eyes still and then trying to look around by moving your brain." "Don't try this at home!" "There: you can see the eyes lighten and darken as the spider looks around." "Being among the smartest of spiders, she doesn't head straight for her prey." "Instead, she approaches deviously." "She's an accomplished stalker." "Like a slasher film victim, the bee is unaware of danger." "Good luck for the spider:" "the bee flies even closer." "The spider creeps up." "The spider is now within range." "Meanwhile, the bee laps up nectar with her remarkable tongue." "It's long and hairy, like mine the morning after a guacamole festival." "The spider must judge the bee's exact distance." "Just one false move and the spider will suffer a sting," "lose her meal... and perhaps her life." "The spider definitely got the jump on the bee." "Poor bee: she had a good 80 miles left on her." "Earthworms as big as fire hoses." "Bald eagles snatching up babies from strollers." "Woolly mammoths taking down a Seven Eleven." "Well, you will not be seeing anything like that in this film." "But you will be seeing the hard cold truth about the garden." "To me, my garden was filled with sneaky, willful creatures that seemed to enjoy getting my dandruff up." "And worst of all, they didn't respect me." "So I didn't respect them until" "I learned to pay attention..." "close attention." "Now that's harder to do than you think" "Now some people can have their eyes wide open and see nothing." "Other people can have their eyes closed and watch reruns of Bonanza, but that's not a problem I want to discuss right now." "Or you can have this eye closed and this eye open." "Or you can have this eye closed and this eye open." "And either way it gets you... nowhere." "As I was saying, respect your garden." "Watch it closely." "I wish I had learned these lessons sooner myself." "At the time, some lessons were too elevated for me to learn." "Even above my garden, trouble was brewing." "The acorn weevil was back." "Sure enough, she found my oak tree." "She's looking for a good meal." "And when it comes to acorns, she knows the drill." "What a "schnoz"!" "It's longer than her body and tipped with tiny jaws." "Reminds me of my first agent." "After a three-year fast, she's eating my acorns." "Kind of like my second agent." "There goes the next generation of oak trees, I mean." "Her little jaws are smaller than a printed period." "Helvetica twelve point." "Through her strawlike proboscis, she sucks up liquid fat from the acorn." "It's a perfect diet for a weevil, but don't eventhink about it if you're on Jenny Craig." "Next she'll lay her egg inside, but only if this is the one kind of oak tree that suits her." "Finicky, this little pest." "Ah, evening was coming." "A heron approached my pond." "Don't even think about fishing here!" "Sometimes even the darker side had a gentleness about it unless you're a slug." "Dusk was the time for creatures large and small to rest and enjoy the harmony of our domain." "Especially the lucky few that had escaped my iron-fist policy." "What a piece of work is man-tis!" "One of the so-called "good" insects, he excels at inactivity:" "he spends two-thirds of his time motionless much like my third agent." "Still, he's an alert animal, with two big goggle eyes and three extra gemlike eyes." "He spends over an hour a day grooming every part of his spiny body." "Why?" "Because he can." "This evening, my garden was about to disappoint me as it never had before." "I heard a strange new sound." "It was a hungry bat, and she was about to shatter my peace of mind." "The mantis takes flight at just the wrong time." "The bat hunts with a kind of sonar." "From her nose, she beams a high-pitched sound." "Listening to the echoes tells her the position, speed, and direction of the mantis." "Some sanctuary!" "It was Top Gun in my own backyard." "Where's Tom Cruise when you really need him?" "The mantis has a single ear right in the middle of his belly, much like Aunt Mildred." "It's tuned exactly to the bat channel." "The mantis hears the bat throws his legs forward... power dive!" "Narrow escape." "But not for long." "The bat is gaining." "She sounds louder than ever." "Desperately, the mantis flies straight into the ground." "I cheered for the underdog." "The mantis escaped again!" "All right!" "But there's no deus in this machina, buddy." "Death and destruction everywhere." "I'd set out to build a paradise, and here, I had a ringside seat at Armageddon." "I thought this was my darkest hour." "But that was yet to come." "At night." "After the sun went down, some of my backyard's most unsavory creatures appeared." "To find them, all you have to do is follow your nose to the herb patch." "There are eight million shrews in the naked garden." "This had been one of them." "It was my little shrew." "No need to suspect foul play." "Shrews run like mad for a couple of years and just keel over." "But the dearly departed seemed to be coming back to life!" "Nope, still dead." "The burying beetles have come." "For them, the late shrew is a windfall" "It will be food and more." "But hungry competitors are all about, like other beetles, maggots, and raccoons." "It isn't first come, first serve in the savage garden." "So to secure their prize, the beetles conduct a kind of funeral." "Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh." "Lying on their backs, they walk the shrew forward." "I hope this doesn't catch on in my aerobic class." "Literally excited by the smell of death, the pall-bearers take time out to mate" "Couldn't they find a roach motel?" "The beetles drag the shrew several feet to an abandoned burrow." "And just in time." "Because the maggots are frisky tonight" "They're turning a dead mouse into an area rug." "The burying beetles are settling into their underground home." "And it's not from the pages of House and Garden." "It's more like Morticians' Monthly." "The beetles' now have a major home improvement project." "Call it "This old shrew."" "The carcass will be converted into a nursery, an edible nursery." "As at better funeral homes, the body is shaved." "Next, to seal in freshness, the beetles embalm the shrew with secretions." "My shrew, may he rest in peace, is finally prepared." "The female will soon lay her egg near his remains." "Just above, raccoons patrol the garden" "After a few pull-ups and a cool drink of water, they search for food." "The grass is definitely greener on the other side." "An earthworm tries to escape from the raccoon by burrowing." "Poor choice." "But, as Charles Darwin wrote of the worm's mental abilities," "There is little to be said." "A mole, cousin of the shrew, eats the earthworm by squeezing it out like a tube of toothpaste." "I think I'll stick to baking soda." "Of all the things Aunt Mildred brought with her from Europe, why did she have to bring a mole?" "I'll never forgive her." "The mole barrels thru her tunnels with catcher's-mitt paws." "But when she comes up to an obstacle, she won't be stopped." "Now she's poking my parsnips." "I hate when that happens." "I'd had enough trouble in the herb garden." "My whole idea of the backyard was decomposing, much like my poor little shrew." "I wanted to forget about the gruesome burial, but just one week later," "I paid an accidental visit to the grave." "What a change had taken place!" "Babies!" "The morgue had become a daycare center!" "Burying beetles have hatched and scrambled on top of the shrew." "And here the young beetles live like so many chicks in a nest." "They even beg for food!" "Mom's on her way." "First she'll eat what's left of the shrew." "Looks like Aunt Mildred's shepherd's pie." "Next she calls to get her babies' attention." "And now she regurgitates to feed her young." "She offers one a succulent shrew slurpy!" "And I thought I had a rough childhood." "Burying beetles make some of the best parents of any insect." "That's not saying much:" "the mother will happily eat some of her young if the dead shrew is too small to support the brood." "Home sweet home." "As the shrew dwindles, the grubs grow fat." "In a way, burying beetles practice reincarnation... con carne." "High up in my oak tree, an acorn has gone bad." "The tree senses the damage and can cut its losses." "By now, I was expecting something weird and wonderful." "Okay, just plain weird." "Inside, the old acorn weevil's baby has grown up and eaten itself out of house and home" "Good riddance!" "The grub can feel the impact with the ground." "That's the signal to move on." "But it's no easy matter to get out of an acorn." "The young weevil more or less has to perform its own C-section." "It's already cutting an escape hatch." "But it can take three days to get out!" "How do you get out of a hole the size of your head?" "It sure helps to be a living accordion" "Portrait of the Michelin man as a young grub." "The young weevil must now hide itself." "But a hungry shrew is nearby." "The grub will start to dig underground where it will metamorphose and wait perhaps years before emerging to continue its seemingly pointless cycle of life." "On the other hand, look how we're spending our time." "The shrew is intent on finding grub." "I mean, a grub." "Hiding and sneaking, amputation and slaughter." "I was beginning to think my garden was trying to tell me something." "And at this point, like the mantis, I was all ear." "Heh, heh." "I was off-balance, confused." "And I was about to come face-to-face with a force so... vital... so unstoppable..." "I could never look at my garden the same way again." "Shrews!" "A female seems to be accepting a male's overtures." "Is she so hot a shrew as she's reported?" "Humph." "I had no idea I was listening to a love song." "But the young couple was actually off to a good start for what can be a taxing business." "Mating is as hectic as the rest of the shrew's life... often 20 times a day." "Your mileage may vary." "What a sight!" "They looked so... vulnerable." "I was amazed that two shrews -two recluses could put aside their grouchiness." "Suddenly, I realized I had been obsessed with the darker forces of nature with savagery and death." "True enough, for the male shrew, even love can be a drag." "But now I saw my garden's other side." "It was really about love and life and renewal." "Mostly, it was about copulation." "My garden wasn't the scene of an apocalypse after all;" "it was more like... genesis." "The wonder." "The wonder." "The wonder." "What I discovered is that there was a problem in my garden." "And I was the problem." "I was spending so much time trying to control the garden that" "I wasn't seeing things that were right in front of my eyes." "Look down here." "A female shrew's been nesting." "Let's see how she's doing." "Ah, baby shrews." "Some of the smallest and most helpless of newborn mammals." "It would take nearly 5,000 of them to weigh a pound!" "But they'll sure grow fast." "They'll leave the nest in three weeks." "A couple of weeks later, they'll be looking for mates themselves." "It's a beautiful thing." "Don't worry." "I'm not going New Age on you." "But I couldn't help feeling that one of them was smiling at me." "You know, I have a way with the garden's creatures." "So here is my advice about the garden." "Give up the slightest idea that you can control it." "Leave yourself open to delight." "Keep your eyes open." "And enjoy the wonderful flavors that you'll have..." "Ohh!" "Well, and of course, you must share your garden!" "That was a very good tomato." "Stay away from those trees!" "A volcano on the equator in the Pacific Ocean;" "and on its very rim, among the lava boulders life;" "a giant tortoise." "Inside another, in its very throat, an iguana climbs down the walls to lay its eggs on the floor of the crater." "Yet this is one of the most active volcanoes on earth." "Closer to the coast, molten lava spouts from yet another vent." "And here, alongside a lava flow, lives another iguana." "Like creatures from some creation myth these reptiles manage, astonishingly, to live among the fires that build the earth." "The Galapagos Islands are home to the only sea-going lizard in the world the marine iguana." "In spite of the crashing surf, the iguanas manage to graze on lush growths of marine algae that flourish around the coasts." "After an hour or so in the sea, these lizards have to come to land to warm up again in the sun." "Getting ashore is not always easy." "This is the coast of Fernandina, the most westerly and the newest of the Galapagos Islands and home to the biggest concentration of marine iguanas." "It's January, the beginning of the hot season, the time for them to begin to breed." "Big males roam aggressively through the herd of females, establishing their breeding territories and that means battling with rivals." "Shaking the head is a challenge and one that has to be met." "While the larger males were fighting, a subordinate has moved in to mate with a female." "The big male regularly surveys his territory and he's spotted the trespasser." "This cannot be allowed." "He drags the female away and carries her off to the center of his domain." "Once the female receives his sperm, she will become unreceptive and will not mate again this year." "The intruder will have to try again elsewhere." "The iguanas congregate in herds around the coastal areas where there is easy access to the sea and the riches it contains." "There are fifteen main islands in the Galapagos archipelago." "In contrast to the sea around them, they are largely barren and dominated by craters and lava fields." "All, over the last five million years, have been built by volcanoes erupting from cracks in the earth's crust, deep below on the floor of the ocean, a process that still continues today." "Rivers of molten rock pour down the volcano's flanks, lighting the equatorial night with their glow." "Nothing can stand in their path as they flow inexorably downhill into the sea." "When dawn comes, it reveals that the lava has run right through a grove of palo santo trees, the home of a pair of Galapagos hawks and a large colony of land iguanas." "Some of the survivors are making their escape across the cooling fringes of the lava but at the cost of scorching their feet." "Others were not so lucky." "On the coast, the lava created more havoc among the wildlife." "Birds lost their regular roosts but they were able to fly to safety." "Many of the marine iguanas, however, were boiled alive in the sea." "Only a few escaped and now a completely new landscape faces them and the flightless cormorants." "It's February." "On a nearby beach, the female marine iguanas are digging holes." "Four weeks ago, they had mated and now it's time to lay their eggs." "Hawks have appeared in the mangroves beside the beach." "The arrival of the hawks has not gone unnoticed." "Out on the beach, the females are exposed and exhausted from digging." "It's time for them to leave." "As the hawks take off, the female iguanas run for a place where they'll be safe... the sea." "The hawk may have tackled too heavy a victim." "The outcome is by no means a foregone conclusion." "The female will still have a chance if only she can get to the water." "And finally the hawk gives up but the iguana is dead." "The males, being bigger, are usually safe from attack and have been basking in the sun before going into the water" "They have particularly long claws that enable them to cling to the rocks and resist the pull of the swell as they rip off the algae." "Although these are air-breathing animals, they regularly remain underwater for ten minutes at a time." "But they seldom stay out at sea for longer than an hour because they get chilled and lose their energy." "Little wrasse swim alongside them, gathering the small creatures disturbed as the algae is pulled up." "Schools of baitfish have appeared." "They are pursued by sea-lions, descendant from immigrants that came down from California in the distant past." "Sea-lions, like iguanas, are air breathers." "But being mammals, they generate their own body heat and so they're able to spend long hours in the water." "March and warmer waters flow down from the north, raising the temperature of the sea." "Evaporation from the ocean surface increases and clouds build up above the islands." "Soon there will be rain." "All the inhabitants of the Galapagos seem to appreciate the refreshment that it brings." "For the land iguanas, inland from the coast, it brings the rare chance of a drink." "Isabela, the largest of the islands, has had rain for several weeks and pools have formed on the floor of its central volcano, Alcedo." "The giant tortoises take in gallons and store it in their bladders as a reserve for the droughts ahead." "The hawks are beginning their courtship flights." "The tortoises too, after feasting on the newly sprung grass, will soon begin their mating." "The males are all somewhat bigger than their mates, but this one has picked a particularly diminutive partner." "A young hawk seems baffled by these heaving boulders." "It's trick and apparently exhausting business and the groans of the males carry for miles, echoing around the crater." "Alcedo is only one of six large volcanoes on the island of Isabela." "Each has its own population of tortoises that, being separated by barren fields of lava have in isolation, evolved their own individual characters." "Fernandian, west of Isabela, once had tortoises too but none survive there today." "It is, however, a stronghold of the marine iguanas and the eggs they laid on the beach, warmed by the sun, are now hatching." "For the great blue heron, this is a good time." "For the hatchlings, there is hundred metres of open sand to cross before they reach the safety of the water." "Herons are not the only enemy they have to face." "Galapagos snakes don't kill their victims with venom... they squeeze them to death." "But first they have to catch them." "In order to reach the sea, some young iguanas must first cross an old lava flow." "The snakes know this and several of them are there, waiting in ambush." "The snake can unhinge its lower jaw and engulf prey that is stouter than itself." "Death comes to the young iguana from suffocation." "Some iguanas find safety in deep cracks that have formed in the lava." "That crack was just not narrow enough." "The ancestral iguanas are thought to have arrived in the Galapagos as involuntary passengers from South American, on floating vegetation, several million years ago, and while one branch of their descendants stayed beside the sea, another took to the hills." "In patches of vegetation on the lower slopes of Fernandina the land iguanas are now gathering to breed." "Each male has dug a number of burrows and the females come to inspect them." "Her nod, however, is an aggressive 'no' rather than a submissive 'yes'." "But he persists." "Now she seems almost indifferent to him." "She allows a mockingbird to clean her by picking off dead bits of her skin-which it then eats." "She makes a meal from one of the plants growing on the male's land." "He's beginning to lose patience." "This is not the place to mate." "It's better to take her to the center of his territory, where he is least likely to be interrupted." "His contribution to the partnership is almost finished." "When they separate he'll stay here and wait for another female to turn up." "But her labours are only just beginning," "For now she sets off on a quite extraordinary journey." "She starts to ascend the flanks of Fernandina going up to towards the crater." "She'll have to climb up to fifteen hundred metres above sea level and the journey to the top will take her ten days... or more." "Close to the rim of the crater, steam spouts from fumaroles and this keeps the ash warm and moist the perfect place though that town to inherit eggs." "She follows a well-worn path up to the nesting ground." "Hundred have already been this way in the last week or so." "Suitable ground is limited and much of it already occupied." "She spots an area that seems vacant... but it's not." "There seems to be no room for her here" "The sun is beginning to set." "At this altitude, the nights can be very cold and that's bad for a reptile" "She has to find shelter." "A small cave just the place." "Others are already inside, but nonetheless she's allowed in." "The temperature begins to fall dangerously." "But steam, percolating from below, keeps the dormitory snugly warm." "In the cool morning air, steam swirls upwards," "Heated from the magma chambers below." "But the nesting ground is fully occupied." "She and other late comers have to move on." "There's only one place to go now over the lip of the crater and down into it" "Fernandina crater I immense." "Eruptions emptied the lava chamber deep below and the top of the mountain collapsed, forming this huge caldera." "No-one knows when it will explode again." "The walls of the crater have not yet stabilized after the last eruption and are continually collapsing." "She and her companions start on what seems to be a suicidal journey." "They descend into the crater." "The crater floor is almost a kilometer below." "The walls are steep and dangerously unstable." "The slightest disturbance can send tons of rocks hurtling downwards and each year the iguanas have to find new paths down." "Many of the migrants are killed each year but still they come." "At last they reach the crater floor." "Ash lies thickly here." "In some areas steam from below keeps it warm and there, just below the surface, it's a constant 30 degrees centigrade the perfect temperature to incubate iguana eggs." "There is more room down here." "But any attempt to dig in a place that might disturb the eggs already been buried there will lead to violence." "She must be cautious." "A place of her own at last." "Even after all this, there is no certainty of success." "Some years, an eruption will destroy all the eggs... nor are the females' labours yet over." "They still have to climb out of the crater and trek ten kilometers down the volcano back to their home grounds." "July brings relief from the hot season" "Trade winds from the southeast drive cool air up the sides of the volcano and the moisture they carry condenses into low-lying fog." "This is the garua." "For the next six months, these mists will be the only source of moisture on the islands." "Twenty-five kilometers to the east of Fernandina lies the Alcedo volcano." "There, the arrival of the garua is the signal for the tortoises in the crater to climb up to the rim and collect the liquid the mists bring." "There are several kinds of birds up here." "A finch collects ticks from the tortoises, just as mockingbirds pick skin from the iguanas." "And tortoises invite them to do so by adopting a special posture so that the birds can reach every possible part of their skin." "Tortoises, after all, can't scratch themselves, neither can they clean their nostrils, so this arrangement suits both parties" "In the western part of the archipelago the garua sweeps around the slopes of Fernandian and over the lava fields, blocking out the sun for several hours each morning." "As the mists burn off, the marine iguanas begin their daily trip down the beach to the sea." "At this time of the year, cool currents sweep in from the coast of South American, a thousand kilometers away to the east and cold rich waters from the central Pacific often well up from the depths, producing lush growths of marine algae" "The algae grow with phenomenal speed." "And they need to, for along this stretch of coast live tens of thousands of marine iguanas." "The hatchlings are now three months old and they feed on the algae exposed on the rocks at low tide." "Sea-lion pups of around the same age don't go out to sea either." "They stay in the shallows, playing boisterously with one another." "And no only with one another." "For them, an iguana seems to be yet another toy." "By early afternoon, most of the iguanas have finished grazing and are sunbathing to get the heat they need to be able to digest their meals." "Some of the hatchlings stay together on their own patch of the beach, but others mingle with the adults." "And that is the safer place to be." "The hawk won't tackle a full-grown male iguana it's too big and powerful." "A young hatchling, however, is a different matter." "A young reptile dies..." "and a young bird is kept alive, for this is also the time that the Galapagos hawk breeds." "There are two chicks in the nest." "The bigger one is always fed first." "Only when it is satisfied will the smaller one get any food." "But this year has been a good one for the iguanas, so there's plenty of food for both chicks." "Back on the coast, the sea-lions too are giving birth." "The mother tears away the birth membranes so that her baby can get its first breath of air." "As it breathes, so it calls and that is vitally important, for the two must learn to recognize the sound of one another's voices and so be able to find one another in days to come." "The sea-lion's afterbirth is high grade protein and both crabs and iguanas are quick to claim it." "The rich up welling nutrients along the coast stimulate the boobies to begin their courtship." "A blue-footed boody needs to show its mate that it has blue feet and is not any other kind of boody, and their courtship dances certainly make that quite clear." "In some areas the boobies are breeding where the marine iguanas traditionally spend the night and the reptiles have to run a gauntlet of beaks to get to their dormitories." "As the iguanas settle down to sleep, they continually spurt liquid from their noses." "This is a salty fluid that drains into their nostrils from special glands that excrete the salt they take in with their meals of sea-weed." "The sun begins to sink, the day cools and the iguanas cluster together to keep warm." "During the night, the garua rolls in across the summit of Fernandina." "At dawn, mist clings to the coast because of the continued presence of cold water." "It's signal for the penguins to gather and court." "Like the blue-foots, penguins only breed when food is plentiful... and it has arrived." "The rich waters along the coast have attracted huge swarms of baitfish." "Penguins love baitfish." "One of their tactics is to drive a shoal into shallow water where there's less room for the fish to manoeuvre." "Forced near the surface, others can dive in from above." "Pelicans." "Once the pelicans have drained the water from their pouches, they can lift their beaks and swallow their catch without being pestered by penguins." "But now there are others to trouble them" "Noddy terns." "The blue-foots can fish much farther out to sea." "They often detect the presence of a shoal near the surface by the activities of dolphins... who are searching for the same thing." "The sea-lions also follow dolphins." "And when at last the prize is discovered," "There's a frenzy of feeding." "Harried from below by dolphins and sea-lions, the shoal rises towards the surface and gives the blue-foots their chance." "Back on the cliffs, the young blue-foots are exercising the wings they've not yet used and playing with the marine iguanas." "Such activities all help to develop the young boobies' skillsof manipulation and build up their wing muscles in preparation for the time when they too will need to catch fish." "The hawk chicks, well nourished on their diet of young iguanas are now two months old and almost ready to fly eager, doubtless, to go and find food for themselves." "Last year's broods of hawks gather from all around the island and demonstrate their competence in the air above the summit of Fernandina." "They're keeping a sharp eye on the floor of the crater below, for their biggest feast of the year is about to begin." "It's now October, a hundred days since the female land iguanas were here laying their eggs." "Those should now be on the verge of hatching." "All the hawks are aware of what is about to happen and all are determined to claim their share." "The first of the hatchlings emerges." "Though totally inexperienced, they obviously sense the danger posed by the hawks." "The eggs in each clutch hatch almost simultaneously and the youngsters will stand a better chance if they all run for cover together." "One decides to make a break for it." "The others see that the attention of the hawks has been diverted." "It's hot work, waiting around." "The ash is now 50 degrees centigrade." "There are just too many talons around to escape them all." "Once they reach the crater wall, there is more cover." "But the hawks can still outwit them." "They are only six inches long;" "they have not yet fed and are dependant for their energy entirely on the little yolk that remains in their belly;" "And they still have to climb a crater wall a thousand metres high." "The rim of the crater at last." "But this is only a brief triumph." "Neither the journey nor its dangers are over yet." "A short distance below is the steaming fumarole and nesting area which their mothers passed three months earlier on their way into the caldera." "Up to a dozen snakes have gathered here." "Some slither into the burrows where the females had laid their eggs, listening for the vibrations made by hatching iguanas as they dig their way up to the surface." "The hatchlings can outrun the snakes if they get a reasonable start." "But the snakes are everywhere." "There are few that make their escape climb up a plant or a boulder every now and then to get a better view of the way a head there is a long way to go get" "Their final destination is the vegetated slopes of the volcano," "Thirteen hundred metres below." "Down on the coast, their cousins, the young marine iguanas, are now six months old and increasingly confident as they graze among the waves." "It will be several years yet before they're big enough and strong enough to join their parents cropping on the sea floor." "The reptiles of the Galapagos live in an isolated world." "But it's no island paradise." "They're surrounded at all times by danger from the land, the sea and the sky." "The very rocks they live on regularly split apart and erupt fire." "But it's these very perils and privations that have changed and refined these species to such a degree that today there are no other creatures anywhere else in the world like the dragons of the Galapagos."