""Wild Passions"" "It's not a nine-to-five job." "It's not about forgetting about your work when you get home from the office" "Only on three occasions have venomous snakes actually gotten me." "The thing that can go wrong is if we mis..." "It's not really work, is it?" "Yeah." "It's just a way of life ." "A way of life for us." "When I get to see something that nobody's ever seen before, that's a thrill that I don't think I'll ever get over." "It's getting that image in a way that it's never been captured before." "It's like gambling." "You go out and you never know what you're gonna get." "And more than likely, you're not gonna get anything." "But the payoff is that we live in paradise." "And we have a life that nobody else has." "They're images that enchant." "Through them, we're face to face with creatures we've never imagined... witnesses to the stark drama of struggles for survival" "voyeurs of nature's most hidden moments" "What does it take to capture those images?" "Confronted that cobra?" "Swam with that shark?" "You're about to meet some of the world's most talented filmmakers." "On any given day, they're at work on wildlife films for National Geographic." "You'll learn what they do, how they do it, and what it takes to bring back unforgettable images." "I think a lot of people think it's a dream job." "In many ways, it is, I suppose." "But it's a helluva lot of hard work." "It used to be much harder." "The first wildlife filmmakers were true adventurers." "The wilderness was wilder then, and conditions were much more primitive" "Filmmakers often developed their own film in the bush." "And transportation was more often four-legged than four-wheeled." "Early pioneers even had to invent their own equipment." "Those intrepid explorers brought back images that werea revelation to the public." "People had never seen moving pictures of animals in the wild." "The footage was hard-earned, but it was guaranteed to keep audiences amazed and enthralled." "Today, dependable cameras, hi-tech gear, and all kinds of vehicles make the job easier." "But the challenge has gotten tougher." "The public sees incredible things on film every day." "In fact, they want to see more incredible things." "So we in the business are actually pushing the pinnacle of perfection higher and higher and higher." "We're competing against ourselves." "We're making it more difficult for ourselves to come out with new things." "And when you're doing film work there's a certain amount of pressure to get the shot." "And you tend to do things that push the envelope a little bit." "Sometimes, you can push a little too hard." "For the first test of National Geographic's Crittercam, the camera was attached to the fin of a shark." "But the shark swam off prematurely, and things took a horrific turn." "A fisherman tried to help by hooking the shark." "He didn't realize that cameraman Nick Caloyianis was just ten feet away" "But the shark did." "Wanna keep pressure on these points, now." "A little more pressure." "Up over here." "Up over here." "The shark tore open Nick's hand, and bit his leg to the bone." "Nick was medevaced out and went through nine operations in 21 days." "It took him three and half months to recover." "And then he returned to work on another film about sharks." "Accidents do happen." "It certainly wasn't the shark's fault." "I would never blame the shark for what happened to me." "Nick's attitude isn't unusual." "In fact, most wildlife filmmakers don't think it's dangerous work." "I don't think it's dangerous work." "I think it's certainly not dangerous work if you're considering the animal." "We've gotta remember that snakes are on the defensive all the time." "They're not an offensive animal who's gonna attack you." "You would think there'd be things down there that are constantly stinging and biting, but surprisingly, that's not the case." "Press them harder, though, and they'll admit to their share of close calls." "I lost a finger to a puff adder, first of all, in handling that for photography." "Very nearly lost my life." "I got spit in the eye by a spitting cobra." "And then, no, actually l got bit by a coral snake, and the coral snake died." "I fell out of the tree in Guyana 55 feet." "I was bitten by the insect that gave me I was caught up in a war in Rwanda." "I've been charged by elephants and hung up with microphone cables and couldn't get away." "Oh, I dunno, you have to be careful." "Some years later, I was bitten in the backside by a leopard." "I'd jumped down off a cliff and I landed right in front of it, and it came out and got me in the butt l got out of the car." "The cubs were playing to the one side, and the female, the mother was lying on the other side I started walking towards them with the camera, and the next thing, the motherjust came at me." "She actually stopped probably five meters away, growling and hissing and then moved off." "I got in the car." "The other thing was African bees." "We were attacked by African bees to the point where we thought we were going to die." "All of us were stung 40, 50, 60 times in the head and the face." "A couple of years after that, I was filming underwater in this crystal clear spring in * * *01:08.29" "Two males started a fight." "In the confusion, one of the male hippos charged and got me by the leg." "Shook me around like a rag doll for awhile." "I had a hole through my leg big enough to stick a coke bottle through." "But danger doesn't deter the best wildlife filmmakers." "They'll go to incredible lengths or heights to get the shot." "That's what Neil Rettig is famous for." "Here, he's climbing 150 feet up to film the world's most powerful bird of prey the harpy eagle." "It has a wingspan of more than six feet, and talons the size of bear claws." "The harpy will attack any intruder that gets too close to its nest including a precariously perched cameraman." "The first time an eagle flew at me, I was scared to death." "The problem is if you're climbing up, and you don't know where they are, you have to look in a 360 degree radius around to try to spot when they're coming, because if you didn't see 'em, they'd definitely hit you." "They're incredibly powerful." "If you weren't roped in, they could knock you right off the limb." "leatherjacket that was totally shredded by the end of th" "It was just like a big hole in the back, you know." "How do you end up in a spot like this 150 feet up, warding off attacking eagles?" "Like most filmmakers," "Neil's been following this path from his earliest days." "I grew up in an area that had a lot of wildlife." "My parents were very supportive." "I would collect turtles, and salamanders, and snakes, and so forth." "And I really had an interest in birds of prey especially." "Today, when he's not on the road," "Neil spends every spare moment raising hawks on his Wisconsin farm." "You're a good boy." "I got into falconry in the late 60's and early '70s." "Birds of prey are just so free and fantastic." "Neil's hobby became a career back in the 1970s, when he learned of a giant eagle that had never been photographed." "A complete novice at the time," "Neil shot the first film ever made about the harpy." "Now a highly-respected old pro, he's returned." "He's spent six months here, hoping to capture the first flight of a young harpy chick." "I think all of us have a lot of experience sitting in a blind for weeks at a time, and not shooting a single inch of film waiting for something to happen, and maybe it never will." "The young harpy spent weeks testing its wings and Neil's patience." "And then one day he went maybe 60 feet out into the canopy of the nest tree" "and I was ready, you know, I had my finger on the shutter release and I was ready to roll the camera thinking," ""This is it." "We're gonna get this first flight."" "And it just took him forever." "He slowly walked down the limb and he kept walking." "And I go, "Oh, my God, he's gonna walk all the way back."" "But then, finally, he just suddenly flew." "I was rolling the camera and I got the first flight." "Some unusual skills are required for filming birds of prey." "Everybody ready?" "Did it go over?" "Neil uses a cross bow to rig cable for tracking shots through rain forest canopies." "We have a vertical tracking system where we can lift the camera from the ground to the top of a huge tree." "We have a horizontal tracking system." "You get a floating sensation, tracking through the forest." "All these things take a lot of time and it's a lot of hard work." "Neil became known as a man who could film in high places." "For awhile, every phone call I was getting from producers had something to do with climbing." "No climbing was required when Neil went to film in the Arctic." "A plane put him down on top of remote Prince Leopold Island." "But the job did call for someone who wasn't afraid of heights." "It was just incredibly bleak." "I mean the cliffjust falls away, a thousand feet straight down." "The cliffs were bathed in sun the day Neil arrived." "But things went downhill after that." "We had the worst weather I think I've ever experienced out on the field." "I mean blowing gales, and sleet, and freezing rain, and howling wind." "Trapped in their tents by the harsh weather," "Neil and his soundman were going stir crazy..." "Arctic style." "All the eggs have fallen off the cliff" "All the eggs have fallen off the cliff" "All of them." "When the weather did clear, Neil had other problems." "He was trying to film a colony of murres, nesting in crumbly stone on the sides of the treacherous cliff." "To get the shot, Neil had to go right to the edge." "The wind literally would buffet you and, you know, it threatened to blow you right off the cliff." "Of course, you're not going to survive falling 1,000 feet." "So we're talking about this 200-pound apparatus that we had to set up right on the edge of the cliff with these rocks that are flaking away" "And to get the shot, we wanted to actually sweep the camera out with a wide angle lens to sort of give you a birds-eye view of what it'd look like to look straight down." "Neil got the shot and then, a bonus." "There were thousands of nest sites spread out along this cliff face." "And there was an Arctic fox that used to raid the nests, but he never came to the area where... we were filming, which was the ideal spot for filming." "One day, the fox came along and I was just thinking," ""God, wouldn't it be great if he started raiding these nests right in front of the camera?"" "And sure enough, he went in front of the camera, raided the nests, maybe 10 times, 10 different nest sites." "I mean, it was just like perfect choreography." "And that was probablythe most rewarding sequence l've ever done in the wild." "It was just luck." "It just happened while I was there, you know, that's a rarity." "Today, filmmakers like Neil Rettig are well-established professionals in what could actually be called a career." "But it wasn't like that when renowned African filmmaker Alan Root started out" "Wildlife photographer wasn't something you could find in any career guide's booklet." "Fortunately, because the whole business was in its early days, the standards, I have to say, were pretty low." "So anything a cut above home movie footage would get onto television, because it was all new and exciting to them." "And I really appreciate that, because the youngsters today have a much harder nut to crack to get in." "Actually, just drop me down here." "I think there is more pressure on me because this is my first film and I obviously want it to be a good film." "Go right, Pete, go right, go right." "But as long as I'm learning, that's the key thing." "Still running, still running." "Matt Aeberhard's here in Tanzania to make a National Geographic film about jackals." "Stop!" "They're a tough animal to keep in frame." "Missed it." "Missed it." "Despite the frustrations and challenges, for Matt, this is the fulfillment of a dream." "It's taken some real doing to get this far." "After failing at University, I was really forced to really go for something and do my best." "He landed a few menial jobs in film, including work for a British company that made wildlife films." "I made teas for people, worked long hours, I made sure I was noticed." "And gradually, one thing led to another." "It led to an invitation to come work for a wildlife filmmaker in the Serengeti." "Driving out to the Serengeti was, yeah, one of the best days of my life." "I believe I cried when I saw the Serengeti, because I'd arrived and it really was the culmination of a good deal of difficult driving, boring work, and finally I'm here, doing what I want to do." "You ready, Peter?" "Matt spent five years working for someone else before attempting a film of his own." "This is his big chance." "He won't get many more if he doesn't deliver." "He's chosen a difficult subject." "Jackals are unsympathetic heroes." "People watching the film might be disgusted by the fact that these jackals are preying on little bambis." "But that gives me a good challenge." "I don't have a problem with the fact that people might hate the jackals one minute if I can make them like the jackals the next minute." "Make them feel something." "If they feel something, that's good." "Jackals can be doting parents." "And Matt wants to show that by capturing a key scene the moment when the pups emerge from the den to greet their mother." "Stop." "No, useless." "Matt's too late." "Half a scene won't do" "Well, I missed the beginning." "I should have been earlier, because I knew exactly where she was going." "Every day bring's a frustration, but you just have to continue on and eventually it will work out." "Isn't that right, Pete?" "Maybe tomorrow, or day after, you might get it again." "Absolutely, absolutely." "A couple of hours away, veteran Dutch cameraman Anton Van Munster is shooting a National Geographic film about a family of cheetah." "It looks like something's about to happen." "Less than 15 seconds from beginning to end, and the cheetah never went out of frame" "Okay, stop here." "Go quick." "Now, Anton moves in for the close-up." "It puts him right on top of the kill." "Turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, turn, stop like this." "Of course, I've seen it more than once by now." "But I still can hardly bear to watch." "It's terrible." "But sentimentality in nature doesn't exist." "Things couldn't be going better for the seasoned veteran." "As for Matt..." "Oh, we missed it." "Go one... to the left, yeah." "Right, right, right, right, go around these..." "Keep on this side..." "Go right, Pete, go right, go right." "And now to the left." "Go, go, quick." "Yes, of course." "Okay, stop like this." "Stop like this." "There we are." "Missed it again." "Fantastic." "We missed what happened here just by a couple of minutes." "Matt would be happy just to get close to his animals." "It's clearly no problem for Anton." "I'm happy that there's glass." "And while the cheetah are climbing all over Anton's car," "Matt's is breaking down." "The linkjust snapped blow a gasket here relentless problems" "But good wildlife filmmakers are persistent." "Once again, Matt waits at the den, hoping to catch the pups emerging to greet their mother." "Finally, the right place at the right time." "A crucial scene for Matt a testimony to the gentle side of the jackal." "Capturing key moments is a challenge for all wildlife filmmakers." "How do you get great scenes like these?" "What does it take to be a good wildlife filmmaker?" "The first thing you need is patience that verges upon stupidity, because you're down there, and typically you're cold and uncomfortable, and you have to be sort of mentally marginal to stay there for hours on end." "To me, the challenge is the most important thing." "If somebody says to me, you know," ""Here's a species that's never been filmed before, and you probably can't do it."" "That would like feed the fire within me to actually accomplish it." "Good wildlife filmmakers are primarily naturalists." "And their interest in wildlife filmmaking stems from their interest in animals." "If you understand the animal behavior, you have a better chance of being able to film it, as opposed to understanding the camera technique and trying to film some animals?" "Never going to work." "Derek and Beverly Joubert have spent a lifetime in close contact with the animals they film." "And they've learned every trick of the trade." "We almost try and become part of them so that we know exactly what they're doing and what they wouldn't want us to do." "For the Jouberts, wildlife filmmaking isn't a job;" "it's a way of life." "Over here we've got a handy item." "It's an elephant's pelvis and it's great for having our wash basin." "And then, of course, our famous toilet" "You don't sit there for long because the teeth are still in the elephant's jawbone." "Life in the bush is basic." "But the Jouberts' reward is an unusual intimacy with wildlife." "When we're sitting somewhere and an elephant comes to us, we will just sit and soak up the atmosphere and almost communicate with him." "That is something that you would not get in many places." "Such moments are unforgettable like Howard Hall's extraordinary encounter with a Patagonian right whale." "It was a remarkable experience, because after we'd been with the animals a few days, one of them actually became curious and wanted to play with us." "And it was amazing." "We found that the whale would come right down to me, come right down, and sit on the bottom next to me and lean over toward me so that I would scratch his eyebrow." "And he loved for us to scratch him." "And we're talking a huge animal, we're talking this gigantic behemoth of an animal, coming down, settling only a few feet away with his eyeball only 18 inches from you, and then you just reach out and scratch his eye," "and you watch him looking at you while you do that." "Now you may think, you know, you look into the eye of a whale, you're not going to see any characterization or emotion there." "But you can." "There are filmmakers who are drawn to a particular animal." "We've found bats to be particularly fascinating subjects." "For me, birds of prey." "Water hogs, they're amazing things and as I've said, such humorous little guys." "In some cases, you'd have to call it an obsession." "Okay, hold it, just hold it a second there, yeah." "That's my favorite bear there" "Polar bears are Tom Mangelsen's passion" "Beautiful bear, that guy." "You can't help but get attached to them, you know, you just watch them, and you know certain individuals, that I let myself kind of get involved in that." "I'm always happy to see, you know, a bear that I recognize." "Tom Mangelsen is an award winning photographer and filmmaker." "He's come here to Cape Churchill in northern Canada every year for the past ten years." "With his assistant, Cara, and an old friend, Spence," "Tom traverses the frozen landscape in his tundra buggy, searching for yet another great shot of the bears." "I think they're just beautiful to begin with, you know, they're designed for this landscape." "They're powerful, they're strong, they're able to live solitary, predatory existences." "Extraordinary beings, you know, nice to watch." "But getting so attached to your subjects can take its toll." "Tom followed a female he called "Pretty Bear" for six or seven years." "He was thrilled to discover two cubs trailing behind her last year" "So it was difficult for him to watch when one of the cubs sickened and later died." "It's hard not to be emotional when you see something that's just, that is kind of horrific as a cub dying in a snowstorm, and a mother trying to protect it from all comers, staying there with it, even though the thing's," "poor thing's been dead for two days." "Tom's emotional connection to the bears leads us to see them in a different light." "The pictures I probably enjoy most are the ones that are hopefully more aesthetic and soft and more painterly, maybe." "That's probably most people's favorite overall, the one called the "Bad Boys of the Arctic."" "It looks very human, you know, the guy's kicked back looking like he's you know, ready to turn on the TV or watching the football game or having a beer." "I named that image "Polar Dance"" "because it looked like they were dancing." "It looked like a classical dance that people would do." "Actually, it's two large adult male polar bears play fighting." "You guys, this could be so cool." "Alright." "That's nice to see." "In the distance, a mother and two cubs saunter into view." "You've got to be impressed by an animal that can raise two eight-month-olds in this landscape." "I mean, look at that, that's harsh out there." "Those little guys have been probably walking for 20 miles, maybe." "She keeps looking back, checking on that one that's kind of lagging behind a little bit." "Tom decides to take a chance to get closer to the action." "Be a lot nicer to see her low." "It's risky going down on the ground." "But the mother bear seems a safe distance away." "She's not gonna leave the cubs to get us." "But Tom doesn't see the huge male walking up from behind the buggy." "He and Cara race up the steps," "leaving the camera behind." "That's a little excitement for a change, huh?" "That was too close!" "Good thing Spencer saw him, huh?" "You see how they can just come out of nowhere?" "Too bad your camera's down there, 'cause it's a great scene." "Oh, it's a wonderful scene." "That's one of the shots l've been trying to get for the last five or six years." "I don't know if I'll get another chance at it or not." "That was our first mother and cubs." "Ahh!" "Jeez!" "I can't believe it!" "In this business, things don't always go right." "But there's something you gotta get, you gotta get that bit of behavior that is absolutely vital for the film and you just go through hell sometimes to get it." "It's a very bitter cold, wind chills of minus 100 Fahrenheit." "You can freeze your flesh in five or six seconds." "It's so incredibly hot." "It's 115 Fahrenheit and it's just muggy." "And, of course, days without having proper showers and baths and things like that." "You're often out on small boats." "Conditions are rough." "You occasionally get to reveal what you had for breakfast, which is pretty unpleasant." "Millions and billions of mosquitos, and black flies, and * * * *01:35.03 and every little kind of bug you can imagine would get in your eyes and your nose and your ears and your throat." "You're up to here in muck, going through just a disgusting stench of water." "Neil would turn back and look at me and I said," ""Isn't this a glamorous business?"" "We've had film assistants that have come out to us and that have paid us to let them go." "Problems just go on and on and on." "And it's amazing how many good films get turned out every year." "When you really want to do something bad, it's amazing what you can put up with." "Not many people would want to get this close to a deadly black widow spider." "One bite could kill you." "Yeah, she's getting a little close." "But it's all in a day's work for George and Kathy Dodge." "You gettin' her?" "Where'd she go?" "We come in close contact with venomous animals of all kinds." "That doesn't necessarily concern us." "I mean, the point is getting the shot." "For the National Geographic film, "Bite of the Black Widow,"" "George and Kathy decided to get more personally involved than usual." "All that they really asked us to do was film a black widow underneath a blanket." "We thought, Well, let's put the person under there and add a little movement." "I better cut soon." "I don't want to risk her getting too close." "Good one!" "Yeah, yeah." "Yeah, now, get her out of here." "It was a nice idea as long as the black widow didn't move too far too fast." "Get her!" "Okay, I'm trying." "If we timed things just right, we'd get the black widow out from under the cover before it actually reached his flesh." "While many filmmakers head out into the bush in search of nature's largest animals, the Dodges specialize... in filming the smallest and many would say the creepiest." "You can only see elephants and lions and zebras and wolves and bears for so long, I mean, there are only certain, limited species of each one of these animals." "But insects... beetles, wasps, bees, flies, I mean, they're countless, they're countless." "We could never run out of subjects." "But if you think it's hard figuring out what an elephant or lion is about to do try insects." "Like a black widow spider is going to lay eggs, well she isn't going to tell us." "We don't speak Black Widow." "So she isn't going to tell us," ""Oh, I'm going to be laying these eggs at exactly one o'clock tonight."" "We had 12 black widow females and they were all ready to lay eggs, all in separate cages, all ready to be put on the set." "One of us will go to bed and the other one will stay up and watch the black widow for three hours and then we shift back and forth like that." "Oh, she's really doing it, huh?" "The least bit of interference would cause her to abandon the whole process just a light going on, or any sudden shock to the container would throw off the whole scene." "Even when the black widows performed on cue, other problems invariably cropped up." "Okay, roll camera, she's starting." "Even though we had two cameras, this animal's got eight legs." "Several times we'd get egg laying, but not a good shot, because one or two of her darn eggs would get in the way." "And then the mating of the male and the female now you're dealing with 16 legs in the way." "How do you get a clear decent shot of the male mating with the female where you can see what's happening?" "It wasn't easy." "It wasn't easy at all." "George and Kathy even managed to get the black widow to bite on cue." "How did they do it?" "That is one of our little professional trade secrets, I'm afraid" "We don't even tell our family." "Our family will ask us... you know" ""Well, how did you do that shot?" "How did you do this shot?"" "We don't tell anybody." "Sometimes, the animals don't do what the Dodges want them to." "For the National Geographic film, "Ants from Hell,"" "George and Kathy wanted to shoot a timelapse sequence of fire ants devouring a frog." "The frog needed to be taken down, all the way down to a skeleton, so there was literally nothing left." "It took a lot of studying to see exactly how long does it take a colony of ants to take down that size of frog." "But apparently, the fire ants hadn't read the script." "The very first colony didn't eat the frog, they buried it." "So we dig up the frog, put him back, start on another colony, and they eat the frog half way and abandon it." "It took quite a few attempts, but we finally got it and it came out very nicely." "George and I are challenged, challenge ourselves to go after those images which haven't been captured before." "I mean, to whatever degree that takes us, extreme macro or telephoto, it's getting that image in a way that it's never been captured before." "My particular favorite shot that we've ever done is a close up of the harvestman eating the aphids." "No one had ever seen a harvestman eat an aphid before." "We not only saw it, we filmed it." "We're bringing this to the public so the public can appreciate this animal and its uniqueness." "This is what makes ourjob worthwhile." "This is what makes doing wildlife photography so exciting." "I found the jumping spider to be a very interesting subject, because it has sort of a soft cuddly look to it, which is appealing." "Soft and cuddly." "Did you hear that?" "Soft and cuddly." "This is what I love about this woman." "She loves all animals... she calls a jumping spider cute and cuddly." "It doesn't matter what we shoot or what we photograph, she empathizes with the animal, gets to really like it." "I couldn't find another woman like this on the face of the earth, you know, if I spent the rest of my life trying, and especially one that looks as good as this." "I'm one lucky man, I'll tell ya." "While there are wildlife filmmakers who work alone, it's striking how many of them team up with their spouses or partners." "I'll tell you when you hit 24 frames." "Because in this business, a good year you might be gone 250 days out of the year." "And what kind of relationship can you have with somebody that's waiting at home?" "So the ideal situation is if your partner can be part of the team." "Most couples, you know, they see each other at the beginning or end of the day." "And there's a big chunk in the middle where they're interacting with other people." "And we have ourselves." "And very often, we're off in wilderness areas and we just have to get on and thank goodness we do." "Look how easy that was." "That's right, that's right." "We live with the job." "L mean, I could wake up at two o'clock in the morning and, you know, "Kathy, Kathy, I just got the greatest idea."" "There sure are difficulties." "I mean, working at nighttime is an incredible difficulty... because she wants to sleep a little bit longer than me." "We have the domestic crossing over into the professional world, back and forth." "There would be squabbles taking place over who was gonna be responsible for vacuuming up the back guano, let's say, that's dragged into the carpet." "We have these goals and things that we wanted to do in life and we've dedicated to that." "If Beverly didn't share the dedication that I had or vice versa, it wouldn't work." "And we would not be a filmmaking married couple out in the bush." "So, what do we do?" "Are we gonna get end takes?" "First let me do this and then we'll do a front take and then we'll add some questions." "One such couple is Richard and Carol Foster." "The husband and wife are among the world's leading wildlife filmmakers" "They make a perfect team." "Richard's the cameraman, while Carol does sound, still photography and research." "Back there." "Oh, they're so cute." "We're both naturalists." "And we both think in the same way... even though we do separate things, then we come together when it is a film" "Carol and I compliment each other very well." "We're actually both very different kinds of people." "I'm much more laid back." "Carol rev's much higher than I do." "I tend to get a bit mentally lazy sometimes, and she gives me a quick kick, you know, when that happens." "And I try to calm her down when she gets too hyper, you know, so we have a pretty good effect on each other." "It works well." "We couldn't make these films as individuals." "We really couldn't." "It's too wide a breadth of stuff to get done." "And we both have respect for each other in what we do." "Recently, this filmmaking team had to confront a grave challenge." "They were in Venezuela, filming one of the world's biggest snakes he anaconda for National Geographic." "At first, it seemed like the danger would be in getting the shot." "They were following a researcher whose favorite method of finding the snakes was to feel for them underwater with his bare feet." "To get his respect, which was, actually, I was quite happy to do, was to take off my shoes as well." "We've got stingrays, which if you tread on one and it stings you, it's three months out of your life." "They're very, very bad, very poisonous" "You've got electric eels, which put out 500 volts and they'll knock you straight out of the water if you get shocked by them" "The snakes actually are not aggressive when they're in the swamp, because they're used to being trodden on by other animals." "It's only when you start grabbing them and hauling them out, that's when they start turning around and biting you." "But as it turned out, the Fosters faced a much more serious threat than the anacondas during their time in Venezuela." "And all of a sudden I had these sharp pains in my spine." "And when I got up, my right leg wouldn't work at all." "And I was dragging it." "And then my left leg went." "And then we decided we better medevac me out of there." "The mysterious illness puzzled doctors" "Only one thing was certain:" "Carol wasn't letting it stop her." "I didn't want to go back to the States or anything." "I wanted to go back to the film, because I had spent so much time getting it to that spot, so I says, "l'm going back to the field."" "And I was either in a wheelchair or somebody was always carrying me." "It's a good thing you're light." "I know." "They carried me." "And I says, "l'm going to every scene."" "Over time, Carol regained the use of her legs." "Okay, Frank, you've got her." "Okay, you've got her." "Now, less than nine months after her stint in a wheelchair, she's joining Richard on an arduous shoot." "For a National Geographic film about bats, the Fosters and their team are descending into a huge bat cave, a few hours from their home in Belize." "Grand Central Station of a cave, this, isn't it?" "It's a monster." "The steep descent is treacherous." "But it's a shoot Carol wouldn't want to miss." "The Fosters have brought along a unique thermal camera." "that registers heat rather than light." "It's just the thing for filming in pitch black caves." "Hidden in the darkness are all kinds of creepy crawlies" "not to mention, thousands of bats." "Going into a bat roost, it's a pretty unhealthy place." "These bats are all sitting around the roof, and they crap down on you, and there's piles of guano on the floor, and the temperature is higher than it is outside." "It's sort of a Turkish bath feeling about the whole place." "There's airborne diseases that the bats propagate in the guano." "The main feeling is you want to get the job done and get the hell out, quite frankly." "But it's worth going in there just to get the images." "Okay, we're gonna need that, so we're gonna need to take that in." "Soon, the team is setting up for a shot they never could have attempted before." "The cave is too big to light." "But with the thermal camera, it's heat, not light that counts." "It's like a starry night." "Look at that" "Yeah, exactly like a starry night." "You want more detail on the stalactites, or you just want 'em darker?" "Um, detail, I think, if you can." "That's really nice." "Keep it there." "You wanna record that?" "The images are everything Richard and Carol had hoped for." "They're showing the bats in a new way, using technology early filmmakers could never have imagined." "But for this husband and wife team, being able to capture this scene together is a personal triumph as well" "For recently, Carol's mysterious illness was finally diagnosed as multiple sclerosis." "Now, I hope I'm going into remission, and then, I'm still able to go into some caves and work on the bat film." "And I really tried hard because I, you know, I have to always be there, because I like it so much, you know." "We're going to fight this thing all the way through and, you know, with modern drugs, who knows?" "There may be a cure next year." "So you just keep that, keep your body in shape as much as possible and carry on making films." "For dedicated professionals like these wildlife filmmaking is in the blood." "They'll keep at it as long as they're able." "They do it because they love it." "And because they know it's important." "Someday, their films may be the only record we have of wildlife that is fast disappearing." "The fact of the matter is the cameramen and the film crews need to be out there, because tomorrow, it's not going to be there." "To see, you know, 25 hammerhead sharks go by, you're bound to be impressed." "But 15 years ago, it would have been 500 hammerhead sharks." "As a cameraman, I have an opportunity to make a difference." "People see these wonderful animals, and they don't want them to disappear." "From the first hardy pioneers who dazzled new audiences" "to the conservation minded professionals of today, wildlife filmmakers are adventurers" "driven to bring back images that hold us spellbound." "I can't imagine a job which has so much reward, certainly for me." "We have fun every single day of our lives." "I think that there's nothing else that I'd rather be doing right now on this earth." "Thousands of feet beneath the seven seas lies the history of the world buried in the wreckage of lost ships." "It is a realm of precious artifacts and priceless treasures." "A world of ancient mysteries long beyond our grasp." "Until today." "Now the sunken marvels of the ocean deep are up for grabs, from ancient Roman ships to Spanish galleons to luxury liners like the Titanic." "I dream about gold and emeralds every night." "And you gotta believe it's there and you gotta want it bad." "Some people are out to plunder the past." "While others archaeologists and scientists like the man who first found the Titanic, are out to preserve it." "They are all armed with million-dollar high-tech tools, and the will to spend years on the arduous search." "Just running out on a boat with a metal detector and hoping to jump over the side and pull up a beached basket of gold coins that's stuff of fantasy and Hollywood." "that really doesn't happen very often." "It is a world where controversy reigns where there are confusing laws and no rules." "Does anyone have a right to excavate shipwrecks?" "Should the past be protected?" "Or should it be picked clean for profit?" "So it's a very big difference between doing something to fill in a missing chapter in human history and doing it for personal greed." "Explorers and archaeologists." "Entrepreneurs and salvagers." "Some will risk everything reputation, fortune, even their lives to possess the treasures of the deep." "The Mediterranean Sea." "On its shores grew the great civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome." "And from its banks, ancient peoples sailed beyond the safety of land in small wooden ships." "For hundreds of years, Roman ships controlled these waters, creating a vast empire." "But the moods of the sea are harsh and unpredictable, and a Roman vessel 100 feet long had no defenses against storm and wave and wind." "Over the centuries, countless ships were lost and countless sailors killed." "Now the man who discovered the Titanic" "Dr. Robert Ballard, is again hunting for shipwrecks, ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean." "For hundreds of years, scientists have looked in the ocean for our history." "And for most of that time they've only been able to look a very short distance of one or 200 feet, which represents an insignificant amount of the ocean." "And what we're trying to accomplish is something that's never been done before and this is to try to excavate a ship of antiquity that is thousands of feet beneath the sea." "To bring up ancient vessels buried a half-mile down." "It's never been done before and Ballard only has five short weeks to do it." "You know, it's ironic that we have sent robots to Mars and we've mapped the far side of Venus in fact, that we know more about the moon's surface than the ocean." "To make the impossible happen" "Ballard will need a floating laboratory as mission central." "The Carolyn Chouest, a U.S. Navy vessel, will journey 80 miles west of Sicily into international waters, where no one has a claim on lost vessels." "Ballard believes the Mediterranean is strewn with ancient wrecks and he has long dreamed of finding one" "We're sitting right now in ruins that are on the island of Sicily." "To get to Rome you have to cross the Tyrrhenian Sea;" "to get to Carthage you have to cross the Straits of Sicily." "To travel from civilization to civilization here in the Mediterranean you must cross the Mediterranean, and many of those ships didn't make it" "Many of those ships went to the bottom and many of them went into the deep sea." "Between ancient Carthage and Rome, it's 12,000 feet deep." "And no one has ever gone to the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea to look for those ships that sank most surely sank there until now." "It was a decade ago when Ballard and a team of archaeologists first surveyed an unexplored Mediterranean region called Skerki Bank." "In 1988, he made a startling discovery nearly 3,000 feet down, the remains of an ancient Roman ship lying untouched for almost 20 centuries" "The find confirmed, for the first time ever, that an ancient trade route had flourished across the open sea, from Carthage in North Africa to Rome." "Now Ballard has returned to Skerki Bank, where he'll attempt to excavate the ancient Roman ship." "Working in close collaboration with archaeologists," "Ballard hopes to uncover something nobody has ever seen before." "My greatest dream is that these ships are buried and well preserved, and that their cargo in preserved and, and who knows, maybe there's people that are preserved." "I'm not sure I want to find people, but it would be fascinating." "We won't know until we dig them." "Could there really be the remains of ancient seafarers at the bottom of the Mediterranean?" "It is an extraordinary idea, and to find out Ballard will use an extraordinary machine." "The NR-1." "The big gun of deep-diving submarines." "It is capable of going all the way down to 3,000 feet and staying there for a month." "Built during the clashes of the Cold war, the NR-1 was a crucial weapon in the U.s. Navy's arsenal for 30 years, designed to search the ocean depths for downed planes and lost missiles." "It's the best in the world, outfitted with lights, sensors, cameras, and a mechanical arm for digging, all of it powered by a nuclear reactor which won't need to be refueled for 20 years." "Even now, its sonar equipment is still classified, so sophisticated NR-1 can find a soda can sitting on the seafloor a mile away" "The NR-1 is a marvel, but it's a cramped one." "The 11-man crew shares one bolted-down kitchen table just big enough for two people at a time." "For this mission," "Ballard has added something brand new to the sub's digging arm a powerful suction pump that will dredge the ocean bottom." "Ballard believes the seafloor is sandy and soft, ready to reveal whatever secrets lie hidden underneath." "What is actually down there?" "Will Ballard find the timbers of an ancient Roman trading ship, and the bones of the men who sailed it 2,000 years ago?" "Sunken treasure." "It has drawn people into the seas since the first cargo ship apart on the first shallow reefs." "Relics, gold, gems, pieces of eight it is the stuff that countless dreams and schemes are made of." "Obsessed with the promise of riches, undersea treasure hunters today scour the world's oceans, crowding serious archaeologists." "The king of the undersea dreamers and schemers is a stubborn rebel name Mel Fisher." "In his quest for treasure, Fisher let nothing stand in his way, and came to be known as a swashbuckler a very successful swashbuckler." "In 1997, family and friends joined with fisher to mark the spot where he struck gold nearly 25 years earlier" "The reason we picked today was rather appropriate." "It's Mel Fisher's 75th birthday." "Here, here." "Long live the king." "Long live the king" "But the plaque and let me unveil it here take it off." "You notice we have a picture of the Atocha, and it reads:" "In sincere appreciation to Mel and Deo Fisher in their extraordinary efforts in accomplishing mankind's most elusive goal." "They've followed their dream." "In the 1960s, Mel fisher is a man with a mad dream." "Often short of money and deep in dept, he hunts the shallow waters off coast for treasure." "He is determined to find the shipwreck called the Atocha, a Spanish galleon that had sunk in 1622 in a hurricane, reportedly carrying king's ransom in sliver and gold." "Year after year, with the help of his wife and children," "Fisher combs the Florida sea." "Until 1975, when his son, Dirk, finds the first real evidence of the ship nine bronze cannons." "Just a week later, while returning to the site of his triumph," "Dirk Fisher's boat capsizes in the dark of night." "Dirk, his wife, and another diver die tragically." "Fisher is devastated." "But he vows to continue and to honor his son's memory." "The Atocha seems so close." "But she continues to elude Fisher, to tease him for over a decade." "Then in 1985, in 60 feet of water, he finds her, the Atocha, the mother lode of all treasure ships." "It's worth 400 million dollars so far." "And today," "Mel Fisher is counting the riches still out there on the ocean floor." "So right over here about a quarter of a mile is all the kings taxes for five years, all the church collection money from all the Catholic churches in this hemisphere for five years, all the wealthy merchants, there was 28 of them on board" "all their lifesavings for 10 or 15 years in business over here." "They were gonna go home and retire." "They didn't make it." "So there's probably another four and a half billion right over there." "Today, aging and ailing," "Mel Fisher is still bringing up treasure." "These days, it is emeralds." "His passion for treasure has been passed on to his youngest son, Kane Fisher." "Is there more come from their cursor and they want our men for this" "When wefound that. ." "Ah. ." "We found that court martial referee in our linds send the leve" "I got one... ." "Here me go." "That ahold a half carat that about 3000.a carat 6000" "You got to be real persistent and not give up, no matter what." "And you got to believe it's there." "And you got to want it bad." "If you want it bad enough, you'll get it." "You just got to keep looking and don't stop no matter what." "I dream about gold and emeralds every night." "And you'll never know what's five feet away from where you left off." "That's what keeps it exciting." "The Atocha puzzle still isn't solved." "I don't know when we're gonna figure it out." "And you just keep going and going." "It seems like you never get done working a shipwreck." "We've been working those wrecks for 34 years now and still finding stuff." "It's exciting." "That's what keeps you going." "Today, Mel Fisher is big business, and almost respectable." "But a swashbuckler makes enemies, big enemies." "Charging that Fisher has seriously damaged the seafloor with his salvaging techniques, the federal government has dragged him through the courts." "And Fisher's had to pay hundreds of thousands in fines." "But Fisher knows how to change with the times." "Conservator Sid Jones, who worked extensively with Fisher on the Atocha, acknowledges the need to protect history." "In the past treasure hunting, back in the '60s or the '50s when it was really getting started, there wasn't much thought given to recording data or preserving the artifacts." "Of course, there was a large emphasis on finding something of value, but we've learned in time that every artifact that comes from these ships has value." "Once you understand the complete picture, the items not only have a monetary value, but they have a historical value as well, which didn't always exist in the early phases of treasure hunting." "After finding and carefully cataloguing his treasures," "Fisher sells most of it off piece by piece." "Fisher believes that two billion more is just waiting to be recovered." "Deep in the Mediterranean, the NR-1 is still hunting for archaeological marvels with no luck." "After three weeks of trying, the sub and its robot arm have been unable to make a dent in the ocean floor, which unexpectedly turns out to be sticky and thick like clay." "Ballard's master plan is just not working." "Do the wooden hulls of the Roman vessels still exist just beyond reach?" "Or has time stolen them away." "Ballard wonders if he'll ever find them." "The deep sea is always surprising me." "I every time I think I understand it, it throws me another curve ball." "But that's okay." "That's part of it." "I think it wouldn't be fun if it if I knew it that well, and it wasn't full of surprises." "Ballard decides to change the way they use the NR-1." "He sends the sub out to do what it does best, to act as a high-tech bloodhound, to roam over Skerki Bank and to explore as much as possible with its exceptional sonar senses." "Sir, request permission to rig ship for deep submerges." "Rig ship for deep submerges." "Rig ship for deep submerges, aye sir." "Rig ship for deep submerges." "Will the NR-1 discover the unknown, the unexpected?" "Ballard will just have to wait and see" "By working to develop new underwater technology," "Ballard has revolutionized deep sea archaeology." "At the same time, he has inadvertently helped to blow the world of treasure hunters wide open" "Now anyone with $150,000 to spare can buy an ROV, a remotely operated search vehicle, right off the shelf and set off for gold." "Still there are only a handful of successful deep-sea salvagers." "Seahawk Deep Ocean Technology, out of Tampa, Florida, is one of them." "Seahawk hit the jackpot in 1989 discovering a 17 th century Spanish galleon, heavy with gold and jewels, off the Florida coast in 1,500 feet of water." "Seahawk is looking for treasure again, this time in the seas off the coast of georgia." "Michael Reardon, Seahawk's current expedition leader, sees himself as a treasure hunter with a difference." "That's one of our goals, is to choose shipwrecks that are archaeologically important as well as having a commercial cargo." "So we're playing a fine line between the archaeological community and the out-and-out smash-and-grab treasure hunters, which we're not." "Reardon is after a 19th-century paddle wheel steamer, which they've code named The Golden Eagle, to keep her identity hidden from other salvagers." "Now they've narrowed the search to a mere 200 square miles." "It's very difficult locating shipwrecks." "Un, with all the sophisticated equipment we have today, it's still quite a chore." "Keep in mind right now we're 433 feet above the seafloor, trying to put a small vehicle on a shipwreck." "There is no road sign over there." "It has taken Rearden and his colleagues years of hard work to reach this point." "Now, using some of the same high tech tools to Ballard." "They are hoping to claim their fortune 500 feets down." "Yeah." "The vehicle is on the bottem." "Roger that, I copy." "The vehicle is on the bottom." "According to Seahawk, the Golden Eagle, in 1865, found herself caught in a hurricane with nowhere to hide." "They fought the storm for two days all hands and passengers bailing and bucketing water out." "And finally, the seas and the weather calmed down, and it went under." "She went to the bottom, carrying a bellyful of gold coins $400,000 at the time, now valued at 20 million." "Six years of work coming down to a dive with a remote vehicle and, hopefully, when we get in on the site, it'll be the right wreck." "We have a very good sonar images of the wreck, and dimensions are almost exact the same with target vessel a code name Gold Eagle." "...get the target at the right." "As the ROV descends into the glittery murk of the deep sea, project manager Brett Hobson discerns the ghostly outlines of the past." "That's the beautiful part of these old wrecks." "They're little time capsules and nobody's seen it." "And we're just sleuthing through trying looking for clues." "And it you definitely feel like a detective." "So far, everything we have seen is a, telling us it could be the one." "Looking straight down, now, right?" "Yes." "We've got the way overthere near the site, ok?" "It's very quiet here and the scenes is very dark." "The light, the first one illuminated when we went down." "It's a very weird feeling." "As the ROV makes a closer pass, they see things that don't match." "Round." "Really round." "Well, we've got some very flat-sided bulwarks here." "See the big cutout going down to the keel, and the on the right?" "I don't know what else it could be." "It looks just like what I had hoped we would not find." "No paddle wheels I know of has a propeller like that." "I think we're in trouble." "It's very disappointing at this moment to be sitting here with a target that we have pinned high hopes on and now have proved that it, it's not the right vessel." "But can't think of the right words to describe how I'm feeling right now." "It's not good." "It takes time and luck to find a pot of gold in a vast, deep ocean." "And Reardon has run out of both." "Reardon abandons the ship to the sea." "There's no profit to be made from the wreck and unlike Ballard, treasure, not history, is what drives him." "In the Mediterranean, the search for history does not let up" "With only a few weeks left," "Ballard and the NR-1 continue to hunt Skerki for new wrecks." "Ballard also deploys Jason, a remotely-operated search vehicle, designed and built by engineers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute." "Archaeologists have already spent manyhours carefully surveying and mapping artifacts on the seafloor." "Now it's time for Jason to retrieve them." "Guided by the team, the robot vehicle plunges 3,000 feet to locate fragile relics." "Most are roman amphoras." "They're 2,000-year-old terra-cotta containers, the cargo holders of the ancient world, filled with olive oil, dried fish, or wine." "Safely cradling its fragile haul, an elevator of metal and mesh slowly traverses the half mile separating the centuries." "For the first time in 2,000 years, human hands will hold the ancient artifacts." "Next stop for these delicate pieces of the past is the ship's laboratory, where they'll be examined by archaeologist John Oleson, expedition archaeological director Anna Marguerite McCann, and conservator Dennis Piechota." "Oleson is delighted to find the simple clay pots." "Well, to find several cooking pots together, adjacent to one another, just as they would have been left on a kitchen bench, is extraordinary at this depth 2,600 feet." "Treasure hunters would find little of value here." "Yet to archaeologist Jon Adams, a shipwreck is a slice of time unexpectedly preserved." "So when a ship sinks it is, it's a cross section of society structure, contents, personal possessions, contextual relationships, etcetera" "lost at a single moment in time." "Nobody decides what to take away, what to leave behind when a ship sinks" "It all ends up on the seabed at the same time." "And ships have been described, rightly so in a way, as time capsules." "As they continue to explore," "Ballard and the archaeologists are excited to see things they've never seen before." "Skerki is turning into more than they ever expected." "Could you zoom in on that?" "Keep zooming." "Isn't that beautiful." "They've identified the remains of a ship, but it's definitely not Roman origin." "Nobody knows, at first, where it's from" "It's particularly interesting, because it seems to be a relatively small ship, and we don't see cargo, just ballast stones, which help steady a ship when it's not carrying cargo, or if it's a pleasure craft, such as a small personal yacht," "or possibly a type of warship." "Look at the reflection on those glasses." "Keep driving straight." "Don't stop." "It's glasses." "I'm just amazed that there's glasses." "Glass." "Lamps that brightened the darkness centuries before." "And despite thousands of pounds of sea pressure, they have survived unbroken." "Obviously one of our big concerns is that these artifacts are very, very fragile." "Jason weighs 3,000 pounds in air and he's got a tremendous amount of momentum." "And we want to pick them up without breaking any of them." "We've never picked up glass before." "Once the objects reach the surface, they help reveal the nature of the mysterious vessel." "It comes from the 16th century or 17 th century, 1,500 years later than the Roman ships when Arab traders sailed these waters." "Look at this." "Could someone hold that open?" "Look at that." "Isn't that amazing?" "They are not gold or studded with emeralds." "Yet for Ballard, a delicate glass object is the real treasure." "They are evidence that Skerki Bank may have been a crossroads for many countries and civilizations." "What has surprised me the most is that we thought this was one event, that this was a fleet of ships, a group of ships that sank together, and it's not at all." "We have ships spanning over one thousand five hundred years of history, if not more." "I am just amazed." "I thought that there would be a ship here and then, way far away, another ship." "And yet, in this particular area, 20 square miles four miles by five miles we have found, now, six ships." "This area is it's sort of like a graveyard." "Ballard is no stranger to undersea graveyards." "He is the man who discovered one of the most famous burial grounds in history." "The Titanic." "The largest, most luxurious ocean liner ever built." "Called a "Floating Palace," the Titanic sails April 10, 1912 on her maiden voyage." "She is believed to be unsinkable until her tragic rendezvous in the North Atlantic." "Sideswiping an iceberg, the great ship sinks in less than three hours:" "1,523 people, two-thirds of all those aboard, die in the icy waters." "For decades explorers are obsessed with finding the final resting place of the great liner." "But no one is more intent on the hunt than Robert Ballard, who spends 13 years looking." "Finally, in 1985," "Ballard and French explorer Jean-Louis michel discover the remains of the ruined giant over 12,000 feet down" "Ballard always treated the grand wreck as a site to be explored." "But he did it with respect." "To him it was a shrine for the dead to remain untouched, intact." "Ballard and the crew even held a memorial service for those who died in the tragedy." "When I found the Titanic, certainly I became emotionally attached to it." "And Jean-Louis Michel, who was co-discover of the Titanic with me, was equally moved." "And I can remember both of us saying, well, we'll never let this ship be spoiled or desecrated." "Ballard discovered the Titanic, but he never claimed the laws of the sea." "Inadvertently, he was opening a Pandora's box." "Once the location of the Titanic became public knowledge, it was a target for salvagers." "1994." "Ballard's worst fears come true." "A new expedition, led by Connecticut businessman George Tulloch, probes the rotting remains of the Titanic." "Tulloch spends tens of millions of dollars to send down robot vehicles and bring up jewelry, eyeglasses, furnishings anything within reach from the devastated liner." "Once Tulloch retrieved the objects, he legally claimed the Titanic for his own." "Ballard never thought this day would come." "I don't think in my wildest imagination did I think they would go out and salvage it." "I mean, I was convinced they wouldn't." "And it just caught me by surprise." "I was really shocked." "And there was nothing I could do about it, because, since I didn't claim it," "I mean, it didn't even cross my mind to claim it!" "Eighty-five years ago this month, the luxury ship, the Titanic, sank on its maiden voyage across the North Atlantic." "Tomorrow, mid-Southerners and people from across the world will be able to see the treasures that that disaster left behind." "Like Ballard, George Tulloch expresses deep reverence for the Titanic's dead." "But he argues that people will better understand the tragedy if they can see the artifacts firsthand." "I think Titanic is by itself capable of saying it is, it is incomparable in terms of tragic suffering for that moment in time." "And I think the objects from that moment deserve to stay with us." "Tulloch says his company will never sell the artifacts, never sell off the possessions of the dead." "But his company will profit handsomely from the traveling exhibition." "I think the blessing we have is that the court says that it's ours the company that I'm the president of." "And we don't feel that it's ours." "We feel that we're the guardian of it." "Tulloch's historian, Charles Haas, does not want to deny ordinary people an opportunity to experience the past." "One only has to look at the museums of the world to see that part of the archaeology process is recovering artifacts from the ocean floor." "There are ample demonstrations of Mediterranean vessels of all kinds of shapes having their contents brought up and placed in museums for people to enjoy." "I think it's certainly preferable to have the Titanic's artifacts guaranteed to be placed before the public and teach them, than to allow them to sit on the ocean floor where they'll be ravaged by time and the elements down there," "and accessible, really, by only a very few people." "But to archaeologist Jon Adams, there is no scientific reason for Tulloch's excavation of the Titanic." "We know a lot about the Titanic." "We know the names of the people on board." "We know its itinerary." "So the question the potential archaeological researcher would ask is, if you actually go and investigate that wreck archaeologically, in other words, pull up pieces of the material remains, what is he going to tell you that you don't know already?" "Now, this is further muddied by the fact that there are still people alive whose relatives died on the ship." "Is there any difference between exhibiting a teacup from the Titanic and bringing up an ancient drinking glass from the Mediterranean floor?" "Tulloch doesn't think so." "One of the people that would criticize is in the Mediterranean is sucking up the clay containers from Roman and Greek shipping vessels." "There's something about Titanic that makes people a bit crazy, if they feel that it's theirs." "For Ballard, there is an enormous difference between an archaeological expedition and salvage for profit." "Every object that's recovered is recovered because an archaeologist, an expert, says, I want that." "Sometimes they would say see that broken jar?" "Pick it up." "Well, how about the unbroken one?" "No, actually the broken jar has more scientific value." "Bring it up." "So we'd bring it up." "And so it's a very big difference between doing something to fill in a missing chapter in human history and doing it for personal greed." "Nearly a decade after discovering the Titanic," "Ballard dove on another grand wreck, the British luxury liner Lusitania." "High-tech treasure hunters had stripped as much of the broken vessel possible" "looking to sell off the remains." "The salvagers even brought up three of the boat's propellers." "One propeller made it to a maritime museum." "The second was believed to be melted down and recast as a very expensive set of golf clubs." "And the last one met an even gloomier fate." "I can remember going out and trying to find the propeller of the Lusitania and finding it in this junkyard," "just sitting there amongst all this other junk." "And I can remember when we were diving on the Lusitania to have that empty shaft something was missing its propeller was missing." "And if the propeller was in a museum, if it was serving some purpose," "I could understand that, but to find it in a junkyard, waiting to be sold for scrap, you have to wonder, why did you do this?" "What was going through your brain?" "And it had to have been just a lark." "And that's that's really sad." "Ballard's Mediterranean expedition is down to a precious handful of days." "And now the NR-1 finally pays off." "The sub uncovers two new sites, including the oldest they've found, containing a Roman wreck from the first century B.C." "The evidence is now inescapable." "Skerki Bank has been a major intersection throughout Mediterranean history." "Ballard is anxious to find more." "But the seas suddenly turn dark and angry." "Well, we just found the best ancient ship we've ever discovered and we can't get to it." "We got to get in the water." "We can't get in the water." "They're telling us that we've got a storm that's coming that's going to be sea state five." "This is our second major storm on this trip." "We lost 32 hours to the last storm." "How many hours are we going to lose to this one?" "You know, I want to get down." "I can't get to it." "But there is one way to get beneath the waves." "Ballard decides to send down the NR-1 during the storm." "Once under the surface, the sub will be free of the weather, free to continue exploring." "On board is archaeologist Jon Adams, eater to see the new find close-up." "Unlike most deep-diving subs, the NR-1 actually has three windows on its underside." "For Adams, they are portals to the tragedies of the past." "When you're diving, you can't get half-a-mile down, like we are now." "And it's easy to lose sight of the people." "I suppose their the last moments for them on board this vessel, before it sank, must have been the climax of a crisis that might have actually been going on for several hours, as the well organized machine that the ship is gradually breaks down" "and down it goes." "So it's quite an awe-inspiring sight." "In this graveyard of lost vessels, the NR-1 explores the very last site." "The new ship is another Roman trading vessel dating from the first century A. D." "And a cargo rarely seen by scientists." "An orderly pile of large cut stones and two pillars, carefully wrought pieces, like giant toy blocs, still waiting after 2,000 years, for hands to assemble them." "Perhaps they were the pre-fabricated pieces of an ancient building, carved out of an Egyptian quarry, destined for Roman shores." "It will take months, even years, before the archaeologists know the answers, if they ever do." "As always," "Ballard is concerned about protecting the sites for posterity." "When we discovered the Titanic, we did not file a claim of ownership." "And I was later told that had we done that, had we recovered one little object, we could have claimed it, and in so doing, helped protect it." "By bringing up the Skerki artifacts," "Ballard establishes his right to claim the sites in court, if ever it becomes necessary." "Oh, this is very heavy very heavy." "For now, Ballaard will place the artifacts recovered at Skerki Bank in the Sea Research Foundation, where they will be preserved according to the highest archaeological standards." "Last one." "Together Ballard and the scientists have proven that the new world of deep sea archaeology can work wonders." "I feel very good." "I feel that this, you know, really is an historic expedition." "This is the first major deep sea archaeological expedition, an incredible team of people from incredibly diverse backgrounds, working together for the first time to try to do something that had never been done before." "I think we have shown that the deep sea is a repository of human history on a scale we've just never comprehended before." "But are the archaeological glories of the deep sea at risk from salvagers and treasure hunters?" "Yes, Ballard believes, until they learn to respect the past." "I have no fundamental problem with treasure hunters, if they don't destroy history in the process." "I don't think it's our right to destroy history." "It's our right to find it and document it, but not our right to destroy it." "As long as there are marvels in the seas, people will pursue them." "Some will be treasure hunters, dreaming of gold and gems." "And some will be scientists, dreaming of the astonishing discovery that next awaits them." ""THE NEW CHIMPANZEES"" "Chimpanzees." "So like us, we are both captivated and repelled." "As we move through the looking glass into their world we are transformed." "Chimpanzees, our forest-dwelling counterparts, unite us with the rest of nature." "Eerily, they recall our prehistoric ancestors." "Their social life reflects ours, too." "With paramilitary patrols" "political struggles for power and gain even outright wars." "The tender affection they show for one another their gestures and expressions all seem strangely familiar." "Their invention of tools forced us to redefine what sets humanity apart from the beast." "And now we discover that chimps developed not only tools, but entire cultures which they pass on to their young." "Even medicine seems within their grasp" "And when stalked by death, they seem to feel a sorrow we can share." "With a shiver of recognition, we glimpse the mind of the chimp and realize we are not alone." "Come with us on a voyage of discovery, a journey into our collective past." "We retrace our steps back into the forest of Africa, the ancient homeland our species abandoned some six million years ago." "We left behind, then, our closest relation the one being on this planet most like us." "For there is a mind in the forest, a mind very much like our own," "And it lights the eyes of the chimp." "Chimpanzees share more than 97% of our genes." "And it shows." "The invention and use of tools was supposed to set us apart from the other animals." "But this chimpanzee is "fishing" for safari ants with a wand specially selected and pruned for the task." "Chimps make and use many tools skills passed on from mother to child part of their cultural heritage." ""Ant-fishing" requires real expertise." "Safari ants are a rich food source, but they pack a vicious bite." "With one fell swoop, they're down." "At eight years of age, her daughter still has much to learn." "But someday she will master this technique, not just by trial and error" "but by watching her mother at work." "For the past 35 years, scientists have been watching and learning from her mother, as well." "She was an infant herself when she met her first human being, who named her Fifi." "That human was Jane Goodall." "Jane came to know Fifi, her mother Flo and her entire family quite intimately" "Goodall was the first human to be accepted by wild chimpanzees." "What she discovered revolutionized our concept of chimps and of ourselves." "All across Africa, others have followed Goodall's lead." "A second species of chimpanzee is studied by Takayoshi Kano." "Called bonobos, they're famous for their human like appearance, and the way they substitute sex for violence unlike the more aggressive chimp studied by Goodall and Christophe Boesch." "Boesch has unveiled hunting strategies and elaborate tool use among rainforest" "Chimps leading him to suggest these things might have evolved before our forebears left the forest." "And Richard Wrangham believes he may even have discovered Chimps practicing a primitive kind of medicine." "The new research takes us ever further into the chimp's world, giving us a new perspective on our shared legacy." "Chimpanzees and humans sprang from the same primate stock." "Our paths diverged only some six million years ago, with our human forebears moving onto the plains leaving the forest to the chimpanzees." "But shared characteristics are written deep in both our primate souls." "Chimps, too, are capable of creating distinct cultures." "Various "nations" of chimps cling to life across the African landscape." "Chimpanzees once thrived throughout the forests of equatorial Africa, while bonobos were restricted to the Congo basin." "Today, both species survive in isolated fragments, and are studied at a handful of sites." "Gombe, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, was where Jane Goodall began her study 35 years ago." "Fifi is the only chimp still alive from that time with six surviving offspring." "Freud, her eldest, is now the dominant male in her group, while her younger son, Frodo, is the largest chimp at Gombe and working his way up the male hierarchy." "Freud now leads the tightly bonded party of males that form the core of the group." "Male chimps stay in the group of their birth, and cooperate when there is common cause." "Every week or so, the males form a paramilitary patrol to defend and test the borders of their territory." "In single file and total silence, they follow their leader in search of trespassing neighbors." "Hair standing on end, they listen for the voices of their foes." "Each community of male chimps jealously guard their territory and the females in residence." "A stranger turns and flees." "Though groups of males rarely engage in battle, an individual caught by a border patrol is at serious risk." "In the 1970's, Jane Goodall described a harrowing chain of events." "Her study group split in two, and over the course of four years, the males of one group systematically hunted down and brutally killed every adult in the other group" "chilling evidence that warfare is a painful legacy from our primate forebears." "Gombe's steep slopes the stage for all this high drama tumble from open grassland to riverene forest, from the top of the Great Rift to the blue basin of Tanganyika." "Today, a new generation climbs the path blazed by Jane Goodall." "Charlotte Uhlenbroek is studying pant hoots, the long range calls of chimps." "She follows one male all day, recording the precise time and circumstances of any pant hoot he makes" "Her Tanzanian associate, Issa Salala, follows another male and does the same" "At the end of the day, they will compare their notes, to see whether they've witnessed two sides of a conversation, and to try and decipher its meaning." "The pant hoots are certainly conveying some meaning." "Um, what, what I'm trying to find out is exactly how specific are the meanings of these different calls." "I mean, um, does a particular pant-hoot convey something about a food source?" "Does it say, Come here boys?" "Does it say I'll meet you up in the next valley?" "Or are they directed at family members at allies, at friends?" "Or are they just, generally, Anyone that can hear me, this is my message?" "We haven't got our ears tuned in." "I mean, it's like different cultures very often, it's difficult to hear a slightly different, uh, pronunciation." "So, certainly, we're not hearing all the difference out of these." "Sometimes, there's still just a cacophony of screams out there and you very hard push to pull them apart;" "but, I'm sure the chimps can," "I'm sure they, they know exactly what's going on." "Sometimes words won't suffice." "Males perform displays dramatic performances designed to establish their dominance and intimidate rivals." "Fearless, Frodo sometimes uses the human researchers to enhance his displays." "Even Charlotte has fallen prey." "He'll give me a whack." "He'll just, just kind of add a little flourish, by incorporating me, but it's not directed at me." "He, if he wants to hurt somebody, he could have done it." "Females and their young are dominated by this threat of force." "But when the fruit crop is ample, everyone feasts." "A mother's care is the primary influence on a young chimp's life." "Orphans find life hard." "Mel was orphaned at the tender age of three." "Only the generosity of others has allowed him to survive for six more years." "Still, he seems to miss the affection he would have known within his mother's arms something this little baby seems to understand." "A temporary respite from a life of loneliness." "Beyond the bond between mother and child, political relationships are the life's blood of chimp society." "Even while relaxing, chimps are jockeying for status." "Grooming is, quite literally, currying favor." "Alliances become apparent by observing who grooms whom." "Dominant animals and their allies get the best pickings." "Food is a precious commodity." "They often compress fruit into a pulpy "wodge,"" "something like a tobacco chaw, to extract every last drop ofjuice." "But the calls of colobus monkeys whet another appetite not so easily satisfied." "When a monkey troop is spotted nearby, the most avid hunter recruits other males to join forces in a hunting party" "Red colobus monkeys nervously watch the gathering of bodies below." "Craig Stanford studies the relationship between colobus and chimps." "He hopes to shed light on the origins of human hunting." "We know that, at some point early in human evolution, meat became an important part of the diet." "We don't understand exactly how that happened was it scavenging meat or hunting meat" "Well, we know that the earliest stage of human evolution happened in a habitat just like this." "East African woodland that's got open areas onto which our ancestors eventually moved and adapted to." "So, to be able to study hunting here is the best way to give us some kind of window onto the earliest origins of meat eating in our ancestors, four or more million years ago." "Frodo is the best of the Gombe hunters" "He's 17 years old and yet he's killed 10% of the colobus population in the last three years." "It's really quite an incredible animal and a great hunter." "That was Frodo." "All the hunters, including Frodo, will try to catch a monkey for himself" "By joining forces, the chimps hope to strand some monkeys in an isolated treetop, with no route of escape except into the clutches of a chimp." "Although we see elements of cooperation at Gombe, what we thing we're seeing mainly is individual, selfish behavior by male hunters, done within a communal setting." "It's a little bit like a baseball game in that baseball is a communal game in which individual players are doing their piece and in the end, the end result is going to be success or a failure." "The more hunters there are, the greater the odds of success and, yet, each individual hunter is performing selfishly." "As the chimps climb up, the colobus retreat to the highest branches too slender to bear a chimp's weight." "The male colobus stand their ground against chimps up to four times their size." "They will even take the offensive momentarily driving the chimps back." "Holding his tail out of the chimp's reach, this male buys precious time for the escape of the females and young." "Excited by the cries of hunter and prey, females appear below." "Eighty feet above the ground," "Frodo displays his daring technique." "But this time, he misses." "With chimps climbing everywhere, one monkey leaps into the arms of death." "Even a rear attack by the defending colobus cannot save him." "The young hunter displays with his kill, but his triumph is short liver." "Freud simply confiscates the carcass." "Freud settles down to share with his allies." "Meat is a valuable currency , a payment for favors." "Females come begging for a taste." "The orphan, Mel, searches for scraps but he's soon sent packing." "Frodo, frustrated and hungry, tries to muscle his way to a place at the table." "But Freud will have none of it leaving Frodo to rage." "His friends rush in to placate him to little effect." "With up to 11 males hunting together, multiple kills are common at Gombe." "As many as seven monkeys have been taken on a single hunt." "Chimps like a little salad with their entree." "They often eat leaves when they eat meat, sometimes eating kinds they never touch otherwise." "On average, the Gombe chimps consume 20% of the Colobus monkeys in their range each year." "A taste for meat begins early." "The free for all approach to hunting works well in Gombe's low and relatively open woodland." "Catching monkeys high in the treetops requires a different strategy elsewhere" "Christophe Boesch studies chimps in the Tai forest of the Cote d'Ivoire prime African rainforest." "Most chimps live in green and shadowy depths like these." "The forest canopy an interwoven web floats over a hundred feet above its reflection in tea colored pools below." "Following his chimps, he's discovered that they're capable of an extraordinary level of cooperation." "I mean, the chimps of the Tai forest or the tropical rainforest." "The canopy layer is continuous, the biggest mammal they hunt, the red colobus, they are about a third the weight of the chimps, what means that when colobus sit on a thin branch, the chimps can't go there," "if he go there, he fall down on the ground." "So, there is a big problem, they have to use, solve it and the only way to solve it here is by hunting in group." "So that a chimp will drive the prey away in a given direction, so that the colobus are constantly moving in this direction, and the driver is really just pushing them in a direction, he's not trying to capture them, that is, he's not running," "you see that he's just walking in a constant direction." "This gives them the constant direction of flight, where the chimps on the ground can then organize them and, if they see that the group splits too much in different directions, you would have blockers, individuals that come up in specific trees where colobus might escape," "sort of keep them in constant direction." "And so that, gives them the possibility for them to make the kind of a trap." "So that, by having a driver behind, some blockers on the side, they just need somebody actually to come in front of them, ahead of the movement, and to then close the trap, if you want." "Only the most experienced hunters play this role." "They have to race ahead then climb almost a hundred feet above the canopy into the crowns of the tallest trees to ambush their prey." "And when they are successful it's incredible because you can have suddenly all the forest is screaming." "All the chimps know there have been a capture." "The chimps have made a capture call, everybody knows 'meat' that meat is so rare, it's so difficult to acquire and it's only because, uh, adult males have worked together that there is meat," "so it's something very special for all group members and there is a huge excitement with that." "It's really a, a team work and it works only if the team wants to work and the team doesn't see each other, it's too dense in this forest." "So, they are always anticipating that the other one will come and often they don't see if they really did theirjob and it works only if everybody does theirjob." "This kind of work, on the long run, only if meat is shared according to the work these hunters have been doing" "You see, alpha male is not the best hunter or is not hunting and he doesn't get meat." "You have now an alpha male who's fresh in this position, that is young and he's not always hunting and he can really be there displaying for minutes and not get a tiny piece nothing at all." "This division of the spoils based on right rather than might reveals a different division of power." "Females, who are allies of the hunters also gain access to the carcass" "bringing their infants closer to the meat than the blustering alpha male." "If this complex division of labor and food seems almost human, so does the chimp's love of play." "An infant chimp may seem secure within the bosom of his group, but this is not always true." "A male has stolen a baby chimp from its frantic mother, who follows in desperate pursuit." "In the Mahale Mountains, south of Gombe, researchers have recorded this terrible event not once but seven times and are at a loss to explain it." "The alpha male is now in possession of the screaming infant." "He actually beats back the mother with her own baby." "Both mother and baby are members of this male's group, and the infant was presumably sired by one of the group's members." "Males have been known to kill babies sired by outsiders, but this kidnapper could very well be the baby's father." "The infant is killed by a savage bite to the face." "Group members share in the macabre feast just as if it were a monkey." "Infanticide and cannibalism dark reflections of our common legacy." "But the mirror of our primal past reflects light amidst the dark." "Aggressive impulses may be rooted in our distant ancestry, but so is our capacity for peaceful coexistence." "It is in Africa's dark heart the Congo basin that we find a gentler tributary of our primate legacy." "Takayoshi Kano has led the research here in Wamba," "Zaire, for the past 22 years." "He comes here in search of the second, little known species of chimpanzee." "Sugarcane is a sweet lure used to call down the elusive bonobo." "Dr. Kano, and his associate Chie Hashimoto, have discovered that bonobos are quite distinct from the chimps studied by Goodall and Boesch." "At first glance they are different." "Although they've been called pygmy chimps, they're not smaller, just more slightly built." "Hunted elsewhere in Zaire, they're safe here but wary still." "The sugarcane buffet proves irresistible." "At ease on two legs, as well as on four, they simply rise up and walk so their hands are free to carry the cane." "Eerily, their long, shapely limbs and upright gait recall our own prehistoric forebears." "And their natural two-legged gait is only the first surprise they have in store for us." "An impressively stern female enters and snaps a young sapling." "Once she picks herself up, she does something entirely surprising for a female chimp." "She displays!" "And the males give her sway." "For this is the confident stride of the group's leader, its alpha female, whom Kano has named Haru." "Females play a very different role in bonobo society than they do among chimps." "The reins of power are shared equally between male and female held by a strongly bonded group of high ranking mothers and their adult sons." "The son of a dominant female can take great liberties." "High-ranking females cooperate to dominate adult males and support their sons in social conflicts." "Though tough with other adults, bonobo mothers almost never discipline their babies even when they steal the food right our of their mouths." "Haku, an 11 year old adolescent male, has lost the loving attention of his mother." "As an orphan, he has been forced out, to the very fringesof his own community." "He's old enough now to begin to make his mark but, without a mother's help, his chance of success is nil." "Males stay with their mothers for their entire lives, and rely upon their backing." "With no mother to back him up," "Haku must be wary of Ten, the alpha male." "Ten was just about Haku's age when he first rose to power." "Lately, Haku has begun trying to assert himself." "But Ten had an advantage." "His mother was the alpha female before Haru, and he rose to power on her apron strings." "He will not tolerate any display from this "motherless child."" "Haku has spirit but to no avail." "Ten's annoyance with this upstart is soothed by one of the other high ranking males in a surprising way." "Instead of fighting, bonobos use sex to defuse aggression in this genuine "make love, not war" society." "Bonobos have largely divorced sex from its reproductive role." "Sex is used by all bonobos, regardless of gender or age, to form bonds and mitigate tension." "So Haku is not likely to suffer physical harm." "But without family backing, his bid for status is probably doomed." "Adolescent females must face a still greater challenge." "They leave the group of their birth, and visit neighboring groups in search of a new home for the rest of their lives." "This female, called Shin, has chosen Dr. Kano's group, but she must first pass muster with the formidable Haru." "Female bonobos also use sex to forge strategic alliances with each other." "The males, including Ten, readily mate with Shin." "But Shin must still win the approval of Haru and the other females." "Finally, Shin is embraced by a high-ranking female, who will act as her sponsor to the group." "Shin settles down to enjoy the sugarcane within the circle of her new community." "With equality between the sexes and the substitution of sex for violence, the social lives of bonobos are very different from that of their sibling species the chimp." "While chimps may wage war." "The gentle lives of bonobos show that violence, although part of our primate inheritance, is not inevitable." "Their social lives are fascinating yet it is the mystery and potential of the chimpanzees' inner minds that intrigues us most." "How deep is the mind of the chimp?" "Christophe and Hedwige Boesch have been mapping the chimpanzee mind through an extraordinary kind of tool use." "There was this great day, it was beginning of December in seventy-nine." "I was following chimps through unknown lands," "I didn't know where I was anymore, they were drumming, screaming, I followed with my compass, behind." "And, suddenly, there was great excitement and I was hiding under some vegetation and there was a clearing in front of me with a big tree, big branch sticking out and I heard some banging so I approached without making a slightest noise" "and I hear the chimps coming, they passed me," "I could fee their warmth, I could smell them, they all started climbing up these trees with big tools in their hands and banging on something which I finally realized they were cracking nuts." "The sight is unforgettable something of prehistoric times, the image of these great animals using these big tools." "To crack nuts, the chimps seem to have grasped the concepts of hammer and anvil." "The anvil is a tree root; the hammer, a wooden club, or sometimes even a stone." "Although it may seem effortless, it takes a decade of practice before the chimps develop real expertise." "When you look at these images of chimps cracking nuts, it looks terribly easy and people don't realize how difficult it is." "I made an experiment:" "I asked a primatologist who came to visit me here," "I gave him some nuts and a nice place in the forest and I told him," "yeah, crack some nuts now." "You will see how easy it really is." "It took him 25 minutes to open the first nut." "He took him 40 minutes to eat three nuts." "And you can imagine, if you really have to fight 40 minutes for three nuts it's not worth it." "I remember the very first time I saw a female mother who was looking at her five year old trying to crack a nut and she was fighting with a very, very strange formed club and she was changing her position all the time" "and changing the grip of the hammer and didn't succeed." "And she was starting to whimper, not knowing what to do." "And then the mother came, the infant immediately stepped a bit backward and the mother took the hammer and in a very slow motion move, she turned the hammer and just the move, this turning the hammer, took her a whole minute," "so it was even slower than I did, and as to emphasize, that's the way you should hold the hammer and she cracked for some nuts for her and then left and the infant tried again with exactly the same grip as the mother." "She still had some trouble to crack the nuts so she changed position, changed the place of the hammer, but kept all the time exactly the same grip as the mother showed her." "So, that's really correcting an error in an infant which is really the highest form we would consider of active teaching and that just was kind of a surprise for the first observation in animal, for the animal doing that." "A young chimp's tutor is its mother, who teaches it most of the skills it needs to survive." "The Boesch's research has shown that female chimps are the most expert and dedicated toolusers, which may shed some light onto the origins of tooluse among our own ancestors." "Already here we have a slight sexual difference in favor of females in that they crack more then males." "Another technique to crack nuts up in the trees is much more often done by females and they have to anticipate bring the hammer up on a branch in the tree and then they have to handle it up there," "hold the nuts in a fruit in the hand, hold the hammer, hold the baby and still crack somehow and eat these nuts." "And then we have a nut species Panda nuts, very hard, you need stone tools to open it." "Stones are a rarity in the forest, again, this technique is more often done by females." "It could make you think that maybe tooluse in our ancestors was also a female activity and the first toolusers and tool invertors may well have been females." "Females also transport learned skills between chimp communities when they move from group to group at adolescence." "But, sadly, as chimp populations become increasingly isolated this kind of cultural exchange will come to an end." "Only recently have researchers all across Africa realized that some of the differences between their study groups were cultural due to the invention and passing along of learned traditions." "In the Kibale Forest of Uganda," "Richard Wrangham has found that it is culture which enables some chimps to eat foods others must forgo." "So, here we got a safari ant nest and in five years we have clear evidence that the chimps here do not every eat these, but in Tai and in Gombe this is what they do." "A wand onto the nest and then sweep the ants up, biting, no neat test, you've got to be pretty quick and you've got to know what you're doing." "Now, having just tasted them," "I can understand why chimps like to eat them, but, on the whole, I'd prefer not to, myself." "Every chimp group has its own unique tool kit." "Only at some locations have they learned to use wands to capture ants or termites." "At Tai, they use bone picks to dig out the marrow, just as our earliest ancestors did." "They will also use a wodge of fruit as a sponge, to help squeeze out every trace of sweetness from the pulp." "While at Gombe, as well as at Tai, chewed leaves make a sponge to quench the thirst at shallow puddles." "We have only begun to realize the depth of the traditional knowledge generated by the various "nations" of chimps." "One puzzling cultural practice is the eating of hairy and unpalatable leaves" "They ball them up in their mouths, forcing them down whole." "Well, here I've got one of the leaves that is swallowed hole by chimpanzees." "This particular one is the one that the chimpanzees tend to swallow, at dawn, why they do it at dawn is not certain." "Well, one possibility is they're helping to remove worms." "This is so new that we don't even know the name of this." "We think it's part of a tape worm and it looks as though, when the chimpanzees have this tapeworm, they swallow the leaves in order to expel the tapeworm." "Scientists are now searching for drugs among the plants they believe chimps take as medicine." "We have long tested human drugs on chimps someday we may test drugs discovered by chimps on ourselves." "Chimpanzee cultures also mold their methods of communication." "Besides their calls, they use a symbolic language of gesture." "Some gestures we hold in common a kiss soothes a little domestic discord." "Others we seem to recognize two males clasp hands and raise their arms in a salute as they begin to groom one another." "Other gestures, such a leaf grooming, we are only beginning to decipher." "When a chimp wants to be groomed, they pick a leaf and just, uh, run the thumbs over it, sometimes bring a mouth to it and then drop it." "What does this mean?" "Well, in functional terms, it means nothing, but it's a symbol." "It's a symbol for the chimps." "What it means to them is I would like to be groomed or sometimes it means I'm interested in you." "If these gestures are truly cultural, we should be able to see them evolve as fashions change." "Christopher Boesch believes he has." "Leaf-clipping is a behavior where they take a leaf, makes a specific sound and in Tai they do it before displaying." "The interesting thing is that, two years ago, chimps in Tai started for the very first time to leaf clip when they were making a resting period They were asleep, they would change position, would do some leaf clipping, and sleep again." "A new context of use." "And, interestingly the individuals have started to use the leaf clipping in this new context were younger or were females." "There is much we could learn from the chimps, but we are running our of time." "Poaching for meat and the logging of forests are driving them towards extinction." "Today, Jane Goodall is fighting to save them and their heritage." "We're finding that across Africa where different researchers are studying different chimpanzee groups, there are different traditions, different cultures and the tragedy here is that the chimpanzees are disappearing so fast, not only, eh, is it sad that the individuals are going," "but their whole cultures are going, too and that's the area where we have most yet to learn." "The group studied by Christophe Boesch is disappearing fast." "The cause is a mystery." "Only rarely does he find any evidence of their passing." "It's only in one of the oldest female we had." "And she was found by the group actually dead on the floor with her last baby dead and the oldest juvenile sitting nearby watching." "The losses are tragic for the species, and for all involved." "I have lost, in the last six years, about half of the chimps." "There were 80, there are now only 40 left." "So, it's a dramatic reduction and, but for us it's depressing, yeah, sure" "Predation and disease have always taken their toll, but death at the hand of man may prove too much to bear." "We have some clear proof that poachers are killing chimps here in our group." "And I have the feeling that the toll they pay to poachers is just too much and it's this part which is the causes of the decline of the population and, if that is true, it's very worrying not only for the study group" "but for all the chimps in this park." "Each death is felt dearly." "Yet it is when chimps are forced to confront death, that we seem to catch a glimmer of the chimpanzee soul." "What is striking is that they feel compassion." "I mean, they really feel the individual has something not normal and that they need help." "In one case, I observed a fresh juvenile being killed by a leopard." "So, you have an individual that looks actually very similar to a wounded one but he's dead and it was very surprising to notice that the chimps reacted totally differently, as if they knew this individual is not just injured," "this individual is dead." "And all the adult males stayed around the body for all this time, groomed it a lot what they would never do with a live juvenile and, in a kind of a way, asked for the other group members to show respect for the dead." "And the only young that was authorized to come to the body was the younger brother of the dead." "So, yeah, it makes you think what they feel and how they understand." "We can only guess what this female, called Castor, understands about her own tragedy." "Her infant is mortally ill." "Since her baby is too feeble to cling to her, she resorts to carrying it with her foot as she climbs in search of the food she needs to survive." "Still the baby clings to life." "How do we really realize that somebody's dead?" "How would we realize if we didn't have all the science and all these things." "So, I think, in a way, they certainly know that something, special is happening" "that they would like to fight against it, but that they can't and they realize it after a while." "Finally, the emaciated form of her infant lies deathly still." "Then with a gesture so human it's painful to watch, she seems to bid her baby farewell with a kiss." "If chimps share with us the emotions that bring us to tears, perhaps they share others, as well." "Jane Goodall wonders." "Do chimpanzees feel perhaps a sense of awe, similar to that which must have lead to the first religions of our ancestors worship of fire, of sun, of rain, worship of rushing water that is always coming," "always going, yet always here?" "Face to face with our nearest relations." "Our mutual family history is glorious and tender, brutal and shocking." "As humans, though, we are distinct, and must choose how our own nature is expressed." "But it's clear that, for good or ill, we are part of nature just another of its promising but flawed creations." "Through the study of the chimps, science, which once strove to set us apart from the rest of nature, has now brought us back within its fold discovering this mind in the forest." "What grabs you is when you feel that there's an animal out there that has a human like mind that can solve problems, that has extraordinary social relations and has got this beginnings of the diversity of culture." "It's when we see into the mind of the chimps that we get that strange tingle" "What it means in a deep way is that as long as these chimpanzees are surviving," "humans are in touch with their ancestry and we know we're not completely alone" ""Asteroid:" "Deadly Impact"" "When he first came to the high desert," "Gene Shoemaker wondered if he was too late." "Was the West all explored, the battles fought, mysteries solved?" "But geologists are taught that truth lies in the rocks and dirt underfoot." "Step by step he pressed the Earth for its secrets." "What Gene Shoemaker found has made the ground itself less firm" "Planet Earth not nearly as safe as we always assumed." "It's like being in a hail of bullets going by all the time." "They are bullets." "They're bullets out there in space." "These things have hit the Earth in the past;" "they will hit the Earth in the future." "It will produce a catastrophe that exceeds all other known natural disasters by a large measure." "Before Gene Shoemaker, few people gave it much thought" "One of the most powerful forces in the making of our planet, and perhaps the deadliest hazard we face" "This is the story of impact!" "March 23, 1993:" "Great telescopes around the world aimed their sights deep into the night" "They were peering far into space searching for traces of the Big Bang at the outermost reaches of the universe." "But at one tiny telescope on a lonesome peak in California, three old friends were rummaging in a part of space much closer to home." "Five, four, three, two, one, I'm on..." "Gene Shoemaker, geologist, was looking for rocks not on the ground but in the sky." "That night he and his team found something astounding a portent of another kind of Big Bang." "Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 first appeared as a faint smudge in space." "It grew into a blazing streak of light" "By the time it smashed into Jupiter every major telescope in the world was watching." "The impact unleashed fiery plumes large enough to incinerate the Earth." "And it raised a terrifying question could it happen here?" "And what if it did?" "When we get to something in the ballpark of a mile in diameter hitting the Earth, it'll produce a catastrophe that exceeds all other known natural disasters, by a large measure." "In fact, the energy delivered would be like taking all of the world's nuclear weapons, putting them all in one pile and setting them all off at once actually, it'd be a little bit more energy than that." "Once, scientists had said it could never happen." "Now many were shocked;" "some talked about the end of the world." "If something sneaks up on us then there's very little we can do." "In fact, today, the most likely situation is zero warning." "The next impact of a mile-sized object will probably happen without any prior discovery of it at all." "The first thing you will know is when you feel the ground shake and see the plume of fire coming up over the horizon." "He'd been taught cosmic collisions are inconceivable." "But Gene Shoemaker likes to make up his mind for himself." "It was a path that I personally travelled in small steps." "I had to teach myself that the, the fact, if, if one really pursues the observations, the world is telling us that big things do fall out of the sky." "What the world told Gene it said most eloquently at Meteor Crater." "The gaping hole in the Arizona desert, nearly a mile wide, spoke of sudden disaster catastrophe falling from the sky with deadly impact." "There were similar craters in other places." "But most geologists said they were the remnants of ancient volcanos, formed over eons of time by constant, predictable forces." "Nothing this big happened quickly or suddenly." "Fiery rocks falling from the sky have long been believed to predict disaster not cause it." "Meteorites have been feared as omens and cherished as relics around the world." "For thousands of years they were our only way of touching the sky mysterious messengers from space." "The intrigue they held for ancient oracles still captivates modern scientists." "It was inside a meteorite-a Martian rock that landed in Antarctica that researchers discovered the most compelling intimation ever of life beyond the Earth." "Meteorites are chunks broken off larger celestial bodies." "When they crash through Earth's atmosphere, most lose speed and power." "So even big ones, measuring up to 10 feet across, usually don't cause damage on a large scale." "Still, if you or your house happen to stand in the path of a stone from space repairs will be necessary." "Tons of meteorites rain on the Earth every day most smaller than a pea but that's enough to light up the night." "This fireball was seen by thousands of people along the eastern seaboard in 1992." "Many were attending high school football games, and some had brought their video cameras." "A piece of the meteorite touched down in Peekskill, New York and cratered Michelle Knapp's 1980 Chevy Malibu." "I was sitting in my house watching TV and the next thing you know," "I heard this loud noise, sounded like a car accident." "It was a chunk of stone speckled with iron, about the size of a football." "They told me the rock was estimated at 4 billion years old which is about as old as the Earth itself and that's exciting." "The Peekskill meteorite did make the local news, but like most meteorites, its impact was minimal." "In 1972, a rock the size of a bus blazed so brightly it was seen in daylight and was filmed by a tourist near the Grand Tetons." "There was no impact, confirming what most scientists thought that Earth's atmosphere would incinerate even giant boulders, or break them into relatively harmless pieces." "What was it, then, that violently shook the Earth on June 30th, 1908?" "A blinding fireball exploded over a remote part of Siberia." "As far away as England an eerie glow lit up the sky." "Two decades passed before scientists could mount an expedition to find the site where the blast occurred." "It was an arduous trip to an uncertain destination;" "but the scientists knew they had arrived when they saw the staggering devastation on the banks of the Tunguska River." "Over hundreds of square miles the forest lay flattened in vast concentric circles." "The scientists suspected the destruction had been caused by a huge meteorite, an asteroid." "They set out to unearth it." "Long months spent draining the swamps and digging into the wasted land yielded nothing." "For years to come," "Tunguska would remain one of the great mysteries of the Earth." "At about the same time, on the other side of the globe, a similar mystery haunted this giant bowl in the Arizona desert." "In the early 1900s Daniel Barringer, a mining engineer, found little chunks of meteorite around the crater." "He drilled the crater floor in search of an asteroid but came up empty handed and deeply disappointed." "Geologists weren't surprised, but years later, a young Gene Shoemaker was intrigued:" "what had happened here?" "It did seem like a giant wound in the Earth." "It appeared as though the ground had been dealt a devastating blow." "Massive beds of rock that once lay flat were broken and thrust violently into the air." "The rim was strewn with giant limestone boulders that could only have come from deep beneath the surface, flying hundreds of feet in the air." "But like all geologists, Gene had been taught that even the most dramatic landscapes took shape at a creeping pace" "Meteor Crater could not in fact be a meteor crater." "People say, Ah, yes, meteorites fall out of the sky." "We accept that." "A chunk that big" " I accept that that falls out of the sky." "But it was a, it was a, an intellectual leap to go from a fist-sized stone to a mountain, and, and have a mountain come down out of the sky." "As an undergraduate student, I didn't learn anything about impact." "It wasn't part of geology at that time" "Geologists are the kind of folk that like to say," "I'd like to see what the process is." "I'd like to see it happen then I'd believe that it's happened in the past." "Gene Shoemaker was one geologist who saw something happen that would lead him to question the fundamental principles of his profession." "He was in his twenties when he took on a job at the top secret Nevada test site." "Here he witnessed a new mechanism by which craters could be made..." "It all takes place in utter silence, until finally, the shockwave..." "BAM... and then it's followed with, with roiling thunder." "It's throbbing, I mean, you can feel the sound in your whole body, uh, and, and it's, that's a very dramatic thing to watch, too." "Never before had so much energy been harnessed or released." "Could nature do the same?" "This crater had not taken shape over thousands of years." "It was created in an instant." "And it reminded Gene of another place he'd seen." "It was the largest crater, at the time formed by a shallow, underground explosion and so, I could go directly from this to Mother Nature's crater." "My hunch was that I would go have a look at Meteor Crater and see what the structure was because it had never been thoroughly mapped and described." "And so I didn't know what the structure was until I went." "By having mapped this first, I went to Meteor Crater and, voila." "I was astounded that all of those parts of the crater that I could see in the little nuclear crater were reproduced here on a giant scale, including, right down to the pieces of melted material." "Around the crater Gene found tiny beads of glass rock that had been melted and sprayed out;" "he'd seen these too in Nevada." "Some rocks would reveal a newly discovered mineral... coesite" "An intensely squeezed form of quartz that no volcano is powerful enough to produce." "In this microscopic sample was encoded a story of violent devastation wrought by a 100-foot asteroid, hurtling so fast the atmosphere could not slow it down." "Gene Shoemaker had found the fingerprint of impact." "It was the first conclusive proof of an impact crater on Earth;" "an affront to centuries of scientific conviction, and a challenge even to the professor's devoted students." "Dr. Susan Kieffer once studied with Gene in graduate school." "One day, Gene said I'm going to show you what an impact is." "So, he grabbed a, a fairly large rifle and we..." "This is my favorite rifle This is it?" "I don't want to see this rifle again, after what happened that day." "Do you recognize this, Sue?" "And then Gene told me to shoot the, the rock... which I did." "What happened is it just kicked..." "The rifle came back and hit me in the nose, and broke my glasses and he looked at me and said," "Haven't you ever fired a gun before?" "And I said, No!" "It's all right." "Here's Annie Oakley... with her nemesis" "The ideas that Gene was proposing not only made individual people uncomfortable, but, at a gut level, whole schools of academic thinking." "That was the battle that had to be fought against." "And he, I feel, really did it almost single-handedly." "That's a nice lookin' crater." "Sue's lesson was simple but revolutionary a relatively small object travelling at great speed will blast a huge hole upon impact, and, at the same time, almost completely disintegrate." "The mysteries of Tunguska and Meteor Crater were solved." "It came from over there, from that direction." "You look up in the sky and we see a brilliant fireball, that's being made by the asteroid or meteorite as it's coming in, and it gets brighter and brighter and brighter." "Gene's explanation of Meteor Crater was controversial;" "but the reason he studied craters in the first place seemed down right crazy." "When he was 20 years old, more than a decade before the space program" "Gene had a hunch America would soon go to the moon." "And why would you go to the Moon?" "To study the Moon." "And who do you send to study the Moon?" "You send a geologist." "Right?" "I was going to do whatever I could do to stand at the head of the line when the time came to be the geologist chosen to go to the Moon." "Can you imagine any greater adventure?" "I couldn't." "I thought, well, I better learn something about craters." "Oh, Gene, look, that's good." "Uh, I, uh, oh, look at that, I'm ready." "That looks so nice and slimming..." "Gene dared confide his dream only to one person" "This was, uh, 1951." "When we first met, I just thought that she was the neatest gal I had ever met." "That's it." "His wife Caroline would become his lifelong accomplice in dreaming and scheming." "What attracted me to you..." "What's that?" "I think it's your enthusiasm about things." "He gets this big smile and, and you know he's just full ofjoy and enthusiasm for what he's talking about." "Gene has a way of getting what he wants." "We choose to go to the Moon." "We choose to go to the Moon..." "In the early sixties, it seemed Gene might actually get what he wanted most." "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy," "America was going to the moon, and he was already an expert on craters." "There were many thousands of them on the near side of the moon alone." "Gene believed they could yield tremendous knowledge about the role of impact in shaping not only the moon but the Earth, as well." "The Moon is this slate that nobody's been erasing." "The record that we're seeing of bombardment, all of those craters that we see on the Moon, are a record of the, of the flux, uh, of the hail of bullets coming by that's hitting" "both the Earth and the Moon." "If we want to see what a very fresh, big impact crater looks like when it's first formed, you look at the Moon." "That guy up there." "The people who ran the space program didn't look at the moon that way." "They were pitted in a furious race;" "what mattered to them was getting there, not what could be learned once we arrived." "There's no question that NASA managers, NASA engineers and, indeed the astronauts themselves, were not particularly interested in doing science in space." "Uh, that was not their mission, they had signed up to, to, uh, beat the Russians to the Moon and the farthest thing from anybody's mind was actually doing some science and collecting some samples." "But, nevertheless, eh, even though he was considered, uh, probably a weirdo by, by some in the engineering community," "Gene did not give up in trying to, uh, push this idea, uh, that doing geology on the Moon was important." "But geology on the moon was a hard sell." "Few scientists thought Gene was right about the effect of impact on the Earth, much less the moon." "Many believed lunar craters too were old volcanos." "Before Gene got to ride a rocket, he took a fateful trip in a more modest vehicle." "The Shoemakers were on vacation in Southern Germany." "Gene was eager to come here to visit the Ries Basin a 15-mile wide depression that was universally believed to be an ancient volcano." "Gene and Carolyn went strolling through the medieval town of Nordlingen in the heart of the crater." "And there Gene came upon the largest geologic sample he'd ever found:" "St. George's Church, 500 years old, was built of local stone." "Just looking at the rock made me stop and say," "Whoa!" "Wait a minute." "What's this?" "I think I know what this is because" "I've seen something like that before." "The walls were riddled with glass formed from shocked and melted rock." "Gene didn't need a microscope to know they contained coesite." "He was, was thrilled beyond words and, and I was for him." "Just to go along and just admire all, all of this evidence for impact and, and the formation of a giant crater and here it is in, incorporated into the cathedral and it was just, just a very strange and interesting feeling and," "and saying, Ah, yes, you know, we know what this is now!" "The Ries is nearly 20 times as big as Meteor Crater." "It was the first big impact crater on the Earth which we could prove was an impact crater and that just changed the whole ball game." "This was impact on an entirely different scale brought on by a mile-wide boulder that drastically changed the landscape 15 million years ago." "Suddenly, giant circular scars of impact were recognized all over the globe" "some were 200 miles wide." "Now we really understood there were big craters made on the Earth and, of course, that meant those big craters we saw on the Moon which I was also pretty sure were of impact origin now we had a way of saying, yes, it's happened on the Earth," "the proof is here, but they're also on the Moon." "Gene had finally earned the credibility to convince NASA and the United States Geological Survey to establish a program aimed at doing geology on the moon." "Gene was appointed to run it." "Dr. Shoemaker, as the man in charge of the Astrogeology Program, what are you telling the astronauts to look for when they start exploring the Moon?" "Small features of the Moon that will be close by around the landing site." "And, of course, we also want them to bring back a large number of samples." "Gene brought the Apollo astronauts to his favorite hole in the ground to teach them geology." "This seemed to me like a natural place to train astronauts who were gonna go to the Moon and look at craters." "In fact, the best place in the world for it." "You really get a feel of what a crater's like, and everyone of them wanted to get on the Moon, so they wanted to have a good idea of what they were gonna get into." "For added realism, Gene's team blasted a replica of a lunar crater field not far from his home." "There, he participated in the design and testing of many of the vehicles and tools used on the moon." "Gene's youthful dream was becoming a reality." "His vindication as a scientist and his greatest adventure would soon be won." "17 seconds and counting..." "guidance internal 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9..." "Engines on, 5, 4, 3, 2, all engines running." "Launch commit." "Lift off, we have lift off 49 minutes past the hour." "17, Houston, you are go for orbit, go for orbit." "Uh, no, I've, I, I'm not going to make it to the Moon." "Just at the critical time when I could have been standing at the head of the line to go to the Moon, my adrenal cortex quit, my adrenal glands stopped functioning and I knew that that would, uh, uh," "that would just knock me out of the running-medically." "When you had that idea in your head for 15 years, it doesn't go away right away." "Gene remained with the lunar program as one of its chief scientists." "His dream of doing geology on the moon came true vicariously;" "his friend and protege," "Dr. Jack Schmitt, flew aboard Apollo 17." "As Gene watched, his theories about the effects of impact on the moon were confirmed live on TV." "...job to get down and back up." "They just hit rocks, so they'll come out easy..." "Every rock you looked at." "You pick up a, a rock or look at a, at a large boulder and there's a little pit, uh, there that's caused by a micrometeor impact." "It became clear that the dominant geological process on the Moon was, if I go down there, that thing's about 15 feet deep..." "I was immensely pleased and proud of Jack, but of course, I was wistful, too." "I couldn't help feeling that there, but for that failed adrenal gland, go I." "I'm getting in your back here." "Got it?" "I used to have dreams that I, that I got there." "You know, I got to the Moon." "I was there doing geology." "Even after, you know, for a long time." "I had to go do other things." "His feet would never leave the ground, but Gene was intent on making his own way into space." "He'd found the scars of impacts that happened in the distant past." "Now, he'd be one of the very first to find out if there were bullets out there that might strike the Earth in the future." "It was an obscure, lonesome effort and involved frequent nightlong drives to an observatory far from home." "But, in time Gene found a new collaborator and companion for the road" "a housewife who decided she, too, would become an astronomer." "For Gene, it was a journey from deep disappointment to new dreams and adventures." "I had some real misgivings because I thought this means that I'm going to go to Palomar and I'll have to stay awake all night long and observe." "Because I'd never stayed awake all night in my life." "It was kind of a surprise to me to discover that I really loved the observing." "I could, if I was very busy, stay awake all night." "In the early morning hours the Shoemakers would wend their way up Palomar Mountain, home to what was then the most powerful telescope in the world." "The 200 inch Hale was the temple of deep space astronomy it was called the Big Eye, and was not designed for observing asteroids." "In fact, before Gene came along, no one here or anywhere else had ever systematically searched for asteroids that could hit the Earth." "Down the slope from the Big Eye was a tiny telescope that was virtually unused." "The Little Eye was just what Gene needed." "This is kind of suited to our, our style, a level that we, we call it our Mom and Pop operation and that's basically the way we've done it." "It turned out to be a perfect instrument for our purposes." "Compared with the giant up the slope, the Little Eye did not look far but it looked very wide." "It was ideal for patrolling the inner solar system for stray bullets." "Most astronomers saw the solar system as a harmonious arrangement of planets orbiting the sun." "They paid little attention to the hundreds of thousands of asteroids chunks of iron and rock left over from the formation of the major planets." "Most of them orbit harmlessly between Mars and Jupiter the Asteroid Belt." "But if an asteroid veered out of its normal orbit into one that cuts across the path of the Earth, it would be anything but harmless." "Most scientists believed that asteroids almost never became Earth-crossers." "Were the Shoemakers searching for something that wasn't even there?" "The answer would not come easily." "Asteroids look so small on film that Carolyn had to look for them with a microscope." "Even then, they would be almost invisible amid the stars." "But slowly, they emerged from the dark tiny dim blurs." "Since they're so much closer to Earth than the stars, they seemed to streak through the sky." "In 1989, other astronomers captured the first ever close-up of an asteroid using a giant radar dish." "This huge rock was more than a mile across." "Later radar images showed even more ominous asteroids mountains tumbling through space." "Toutatis... a giant boulder doing 70,000 miles an hour regularly cuts across the path of the Earth." "951 Gaspara first of only two asteroids ever to be actually photographed is as large as the island of Manhattan." "243 ID A is more than twice as large." "Like Gaspara, it isn't an Earth-crosser." "But if it were, it could blast a hole as wide as the state of Texas." "Gene didn't make it to the moon, but together with Carolyn he's discovered scores of new celestial bodies." "Between them they've found hundreds of asteroids and dozens of comets, and helped transform the map of the sky." "The solar system would never again seem stable or predictable." "The harmony of the planets turned into a threatening cacophony." "What we've been able to show, using this good old telescope right here, and by seh, concentrating on, uh, surveying a near region around the Earth, we've been able to show that the Earth revolves around the sun" "in its own swarm of asteroids." "These things will hit the Earth in the future, they have hit the Earth in the past." "These are the Earth-crossing asteroids." "In the 1980s, new evidence emerged of the terrible threat impact poses to life on Earth." "Deep beneath Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is a 190" " Mile-wide crater, made by a 100 million megaton impact." "It dates to the time, 65 million years ago, when two thirds of all living species, including the dinosaurs, disappeared from the face of the planet." "On March 22nd, 1989, an asteroid came within six hours of striking the Earth, but was not detected until much later." "Other asteroids have come even closer." "One would have hit the Earth if it had come just four hours sooner." "I don't think that people took the notion of a, a, of the hazard of, of impact seriously, uh, in the early days of our, of our work here." "Uh, first of all, it took a while for the news to get out." "The news that would change everything began to break on the night of March 23rd, 1993." "The Shoemakers and their collaborator," "David Levy, decided to take some pictures of the sky despite persistent clouds." "This was not a good night for observing, much less for making historic discoveries." "Five, four, three, two, one, open." "Open." "I'm on." "Okay, you're on it." "I could hardly see the star I was supposed to be following, because Jupiter was so close that the glare of the big planet was, was swamping the eye piece." "45... plus 37, 59..." "Okay." "plus 37, 59..." "Okay." "I started to examine the film," "looking at all the things that I knew would be there, the ghost image of Jupiter, and the spikes from, that we see on the films when we've got a very bright star or a bright planet." "And then I started to go by something and I thought," "That's a galaxy?" "No, that's not a galaxy." "And here was this most unusual looking object." "And I thought, It looks like a comet." "It looked like a comet all right, except it was a comet that was stretched out." "Our films don't have enough resolution to really see what the details are because we're covering a big area of the sky and so the comet's actually quite tiny." "The team called their friend, astronomer Jim Scotti, who was manning a more powerful telescope, and asked him to check their finding." "He promised to call back as soon as his telescope could be repositioned." "Well, by now, it's about two hours that has gone by and then" "I decided the time had come," "Jim had had enough time to take a look and I called Jim Scotti and he answered the phone in a voice that I had never heard before and I said, Jim, are you okay?" "and he says," "Uhhh, yes." "David, the sound you heard is me trying to pick my jaw off the floor." "And I said, Do we have a comet?" "And he said," "Boy, do you have a comet." "And he started describing what he saw and I was repeating everything to the two of you and every sentence:" "It had these five tails, at least five discrete nuclei, but, he said, I think there's more." "And, meantime, that music, we had, we had just had Beethoven's First Symphony, it was playing in in our room, just happened to be on, and the Fourth Movement started and it starts with this very" "slow little introduction." "As, just as, as Jim said, Boy, do you have a comet, then the symphony went into its full motion," "And then, right at that point, Jim says, Boy do you have a comet." "The comet essentially an asteroid with a long tail of dust and gas had been torn into several pieces by Jupiter's gravity." "Of course the big kicker, the, the big news that it was going to hit Jupiter, didn't arrive until about six weeks later." "Here is this man looking at a computer screen and it's saying," "Your comet, with your name on it, is going to collide with Jupiter in 14 months, and Gene was sitting there and he was looking at it, and his, he was shaking his head and he said, I don't believe it," "I'm going to see an impact in my lifetime," "I just don't believe this." "Now the question is what would, what was going to happen, were we going to have a big show or was it going to be something that no one could see?" "Even as Shoemaker Levy 9 approached Jupiter, some eminent scientists remained skeptical it would make much of an impact." "Many astronomers believed the giant planet would swallow the comet into its vaporous depths." "On July 16th, 1994, when the comet's leading fragment was due to cross Jupiter's path, scientists and reporters gathered at the headquarters of the Hubble Space Telescope." "Gene found an empty office to call for news from distant ground-based telescopes." "We have heard that there have been some observations from Spain..." "Dan?" "Gene Shoemaker here... fine." "in which a..." "I want to hear this... uh, what we're, the question is, uh, how soon will Brian be..." "There would be no reliable data until the Hubble Team downloaded the day's first images of Jupiter." "See, there's nothing in the sky..." "And they did, in fact, detect the plume..." "In the auditorium," "Gene had little more information than the gathered reporters." "we should all take these reports very carefully and cautiouslyat this time, they need to be confirmed." "Look!" "Oh, my God!" "Look at that!" "The tiny spot on Jupiter was in fact a fiery plume about half the size of the Earth." "Whoa!" "Whoa!" "Look!" "I'd like to introduce Dr. Heidi Hammel" "We just downloaded the first two orbits which I have a raw laser printer output, this is as raw as it gets." "Um, we can actually see the impact site itself." "And I'll remind you, this is for "A" the first one, not the brightest one, so we're gonna to have a really exciting week." "I think we're very, very privileged tonight to see an event that's, that's not once in a lifetime, it's, it's once in a millennium." "Gene's vindication was a long time coming now it arrived with a million megaton bang." "Few scientists have seen their ideas demonstrated on this magnificent scale." "That was one great moment in our lives." "And it vindicated what Gene had been trying to tell everybody all these years and, that it, eh, the, eh, the SL 9 impacts spelled it out in black and white that:" "Gene, ya got it right." "Over the next week, some 20 separate pieces of the comet rained spectacular devastation on Jupiter." "If anyone had any lingering doubts that collisions take place and that they can have frightening consequences, watching those events on Jupiter convinced us." "To actually finally see an impact on a planet was a, was crossing a threshold." "That event finally convinced most of my geological colleagues that, yes, there really are large impacts, not just on Jupiter, but on, on the Earth, as well." "Could you imagine what SL 9 would have looked like, in its 21 pieces, if they had been near the Earth?" "Had any one of the fragments of SL 9 hit the Earth, uh, one of the bigger fragments, we, we probably would have had a dark cloud covering the whole Earth in the time of an order of an hour and a half." "And we saw that the clouds on Jupiter lasted for months, as fairly dark clouds." "What about even before the cloud, what about the rising temperatures with the in-falling material?" "What about before that?" "If people knew that a fragment was going to hit the Earth," "I wonder about the mass hysteria that could have resulted." "Where would you go?" "People would say, Where can we hide?" "What can we do?" "You would feel as though you were in an oven turned on to broil." "An enormous hole has been gouged in the Earth, then finally the sky will just turn black, absolutely, completely black, everywhere, all over the world." "Impacts today are a risk, they're a hazard, they're something we need to protect ourselves against." "If we don't learn how to protect ourselves against impacts then on the long term, we are likely to be wiped out by impacts." "If it happened to the dinosaurs, it could happen to us." "In SL 9's wake, scientists and weapons experts from Russia and the United States" "met at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory." "You've got fires." "You've got massive tidal waves." "The topic was the end of the world." "Multiple mechanisms to produce extinction." "You're gonna have everything burned down around you..." "Asteroids big enough to kill a quarter of the world's human population collide with the Earth about twice in a million years." "Smaller bodies, capable of wiping out a major city, could hit once every two to three centuries." "it's going to glow for about a half an hour and set everything on fire around you." "Then it's going to be pitch black." "One thing that makes the comet and asteroid impact hazard so important, relative to other hazards, is that it is the one hazard that is capable of killing billions of people, of putting at risk our entire civilization." "We could have any number of storms or earthquakes or volcanos and they can do terrible damage locally, but they do not put the entire planet at risk the way an impact does." "Incredibly, impact is the one great natural disaster which we may be able to prevent." "Many of those gathered at Lawrence Livermore were veterans of the Cold War, and already knew something about confronting assault from the sky." "These bombs obviously, of course, characteristically of about a hundred times their mass in a, in chemical high explosive." "In this case, a nuclear explosion, you blow off some material, you get a reaction..." "If an approaching asteroid or comet is detected in the near future, the scenario might involve the most powerful long range rocket in the world the Russian Energia." "Tipped with an accurate American warhead, the rocket would be detonated off the surface of the asteroid, nudging it out of its Earth-approaching orbit." "But before you launch a missile, you need to know where to aim." "Only a fraction of large Earth-crossing asteroids have been located." "This may prove to be the greatest oversight in human history." "I can tell you with confidence that for the 10% of the big ones that have been discovered, there is no danger, but I can tell you nothing about the 90% that we have not yet discovered." "So, yes, we understand the general nature of the risk, but we have not yet taken any real concrete efforts to protect ourselves or even to look and see if there's anything headed our way." "More telescopes have joined the search" "Even the U.S. Air Force has contributed technology and expertise." "Big science has taken up the hunt for asteroids." "Still, the most experienced team in the business is leading the charge from a tiny new telescope in their backyard." "Both Carolyn and I, we're eyeball scientists." "We like to look at the sky." "It's kind of an old fashioned brand of science-eyeball science uh, eyeball observations but there's still, there's still a window there for the eyeball scientist who's got the right idea, uh, to go and make wonderful discoveries." "Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker should know it's the story of their lives." "Now, they await with all of us the next messenger from the stars." "The question is not if, but when..." "The rainforest canopy floating a hundred feet above us has been an unknown world ...until now" ""Yes!"" "A new breed of explorer is now venturing onto the green roof of the world" "going where no one has gone before." "We join the adventures of these Heroes of the High Frontier" "In the darkest depths of the darkest forest, the crew assembles." "The pioneering spirit harnesses modern technology as a courageous band sets off on a voyage of discovery." "A flame ignites a quest to a place of our world, but, until now, always just above our reach... the rainforest canopy." "Almost a century ago explorer William Bebe wrote:" "Yet another continent of life remains to be discovered, not upon the earth, but one or two hundred feet above it." "There awaits a rich harvest for the naturalist who overcomes the obstacles and mounts to the summits of the jungle trees." "The rainforest canopy is home to more living creatures than anywhere else on the face of the earth." "Many are born here and will die here, too, rarely, if ever, touching the earth." "Their lives, their whole world has been a mystery." "The canopy is the last biological frontier on earth." "Biologist Terry Erwin began exploring this world just 16 years ago." "Since he had no way to reach the canopy, he brought it down to earth." "Clouds of insecticide welled up - and a rain of entirely new and unknown creatures came down." "So many creatures of so many kinds, it seemed there were 20 times as many species on this planet as we had thought." "The canopy was a hot-bed of evolution." "Just what was going on up there?" "There was only one way to find out." "A combination sling-shot, fishing pole is Nalini Nadkarni's own invention for shooting a line a hundred feet up." ""Yes!" "Oh, my God."" "Accuracy is essential." "To get that all important first line up over a limb, a climbing rope is hauled up to which she attaches her Jumar ascenders." "Ever since her first climb, for 19 years," ""I realized, at that moment, that first rope climb," "I knew where I was going for the rest of my life," "I was going up in the canopy."" "It takes hard work and courage to conquer this new world" " But when they climb, Nalini and the other canopy researchers are also returning to a very old world." "Our ancestors lived in trees." "Perhaps, we are returning to a place buried deep in our primal memory." "A place of primal fears." "Braving these dizzying heights the first canopy researchers discovered a complex web of life." ""We really felt like pioneers, we felt like we were frontiersmen, going to where no human had ever gone before and, and everything we picked up was something new and something different" " New species, new interactions."" "Nalini learned that giant forest trees actually sprouted roots from their uppermost branches." "Jay Malcolm found that animals believed to be extremely rare, were actually common creatures if you knew where to look for them." "Meg Lowman investigated the chemical warfare between animals and plants," "a source of the canopy's bewildering diversity." "And Neil Rettig spent months up a tree, unveiling the life of one of the world's most magnificent eagles." "Working in the canopy has taught them that this is where the rainforest lives where light is turned into life." "The canopy is a powerhouse of the forest." "It's where sunlight changes into stored energy." "It's where trees reproduce, where the flowers and the fruits are, where pollination takes place, where fruit dispersal takes place so I think it's really where everything's happening in the forest." "This is where the birds feed." "You can see where, where all the, the bark and the, um, eh, the epiphytes have been sort of knocked off because this is where the birds themselves and the monkeys come and feed on these big fruits." "I can't believe I'm in top of this tree..." ""Today I got up much higher than I ever had before," "I was able to shift the ropes around and I was actually able to get to the very top of this tree." ""God!" "Wow!"" ""I can see forever!"" "Just 25 years ago, up the rivers of Surinam and Guyana, came an expedition in search of one of the canopies greatest predators." "It was the personal quest of a 23-year-old Neil Rettig." "He and two friends sought to witness and film the life of the Harpy eagle." "The Harpy's life in the wild was practically unknown until Neil strapped on spikes like telephone repairmen use and jury-rigged a reinforced cable big enough to wrap around the huge girth of a rainforest giant." "Somehow, they scaled one hundred and fifty feet to reach the nest." ""When I think of the crazy things that all three of us did (Wolfgang, myself, and Allen), it's unbelievable." "I mean, we're lucky we're still here."" "They built a blind from which they could watch the nest." "They used a ladder to climb from the crown of one tree up into the nest tree itself." "While exposed outside the blind, they were under constant scrutiny and frequent attack by the most powerful eagle in the world." "When the blind was complete, Neil looked through his lens to meet the fierce gaze of the Harpy for the first time." ""The harpy eagle will, will always be my favorite bird of prey." "I feel like I'm part of it or it's part of me."" "After a month of observation, a tiny ball of fluff appeared between the mother's powerful talons." "Neil was the first to ever glimpse, not to mention film, a newly hatched Harpy chick in the wild." "But his exhilaration almost proved fatal." ""I had just finished spending three days in the blind watching the chick hatch and I was completely overwhelmed with, with excitement;" "and I started climbing down, using the belts and the climbing spikes, and I was just thinking about other things," "I was daydreaming," "I was so excited that the chick had actually hatched and I filmed, in the early morning when the chick was a tiny little baby, and I just, I remember leaning backward" "and just falling into space" " And it was like slow motion." "I remember falling down and trying to grab a hold of the, a palm tree, crashing through the vegetation and landing on my back and then, then I couldn't breathe." "And I looked up and, uh, Wolfgang, my, uh, associate was coming out of the blind and the eagle came and ripped off a piece of his pants and flew away with it" " He shot back up in the blind and he said he'd come down in the dark." "Well, finally, they, they, he climbed down and they carried me out in the stretcher and, one week later, I was, I was climbing again, that's how crazy I was."" "Protected by luck and a motorcycle helmet," "Neil suffered only a few broken ribs from his 55 foot fall." "He continued to film, capturing the parents hunting like sharks among the green billows of the canopy." "Sloths are a favorite prey of the Harpy." "Usually, they eat part of the carcass before bringing it to the nest" " But, this time, dinner is delivered alive." "Neil, who had survived a fall from five stories, was felled by a tiny insect bite." "Infected by a parasite, he was forced to leave." "I knew someday I had to go back and complete the entire study and actually document what happens when that young Harpy makes its first flight." "Neil was one of the first to venture up into this high flung new frontier but he and other pioneers will soon climb into canopy's all over the world." "The rainforest canopy is like an eighth continent, an archipelago of floating islands that encircles the globe in a belt above the equator." "Originally, it covered 12% of the planet's land area, but more than half of it has been destroyed by logging and agriculture." "Yet, it remains home to more than half of all the animals and plants living on earth." "Canopy explorers are discovering that each island of rainforest has a nature all its own." "Malaysia's canopy is one of the highest and most unattainable in the world." "Like giant lollipops, trees rise a hundred feet before spreading their crowns into the clouds." "From miles around, animals are gathering here for a great event, unique to Southeast Asia's rainforests." "They are coming for a feast." "In the course of a just a few weeks, most of the trees here will bear fruit, laying out a banquet in the sky." "The seeds of the tallest trees helicopter down a hundred feet into the canopy below." "From there, it's another hundred feet down into the dark." "Orangutans make an endless pilgrimage through these tree tops in search of food." "They travel alone except for females and their young." "They maintain detailed mental maps of huge tracks of forest, memorizing the location of each favorite fruit tree and the shortest routes between them." "While still a baby at mother's breast, an orang begins a lifetime of learning just where and when to find ripe fruit." "When a wave of mass fruiting hits a valley, it gives the orangs something even more precious than food" " A chance to socialize with their own kind." "Infants get a rare chance to play with other youngsters their own age." "Long thought to be loners by nature, we now know that orangs enjoy each other's company" "...when there's enough food to go around." "Even the big males are welcome to join the party." "Gibbons, too, relish the sweet, abundant fruit." "Orangs would usually threaten a gibbon who dared to eat in the same fruiting tree, but with plenty of food of around, the little ape can eat his fill in peace." "Then he swings away with effortless grace, hundreds of feet above the ground." "Orangs are too heavy for such acrobatics." "Instead, they descend to the under story, where they put their weight to good use." "Still 50 feet above the forest floor, they sway back and forth on the pliable saplings, working their way between the taller fruiting trees." "Moving among the trees presents special challenges for all canopy creatures especially those without limbs." "A snake requires exquisite balance." "This one is quite comfortable with life out on a limb." "The flying snake glides from tree to tree." "It flattens its body into a ribbon- shape, swimming through the air." "It's not easy to escape such a talented predator." "Ribs raise wings, as a warning at first." "Flying dragons soar through the open colonades of a Malaysian forest, just one leap ahead of their predators." "These are the gothic cathedrals of the canopy, but there are places that resemble the tangled webs ofjungle lore" " The lush forests of Costa Rica." "Here, epiphytes, the plants growing on the trees, may weigh more than the foliage of the trees themselves." "Woody vines called lianas knit the canopy together providing by-ways for all sorts of creatures and making a prehensile tail a useful and common adaptation." "The booming calls of howler monkeys attract the attention of a passing jaguar." "For canopy animals, it is the forest floor that is a dangerous place." "Ajaguar would love to snatch a howler, if only it could reach their treetop refuge." "The close-knit canopy is a green roof shading the forest floor." "A dark netherworld populated by the undead." "Most seedlings that sprout here slowly starve in the endless gloom." "But vines make their own luck, they flail about following every sunbeam to its source." "Some climb using tendrils that coil tightly, pulling the plant skyward." "Others take a more direct approach, wrapping their stems around any support that leads up to the light." "When they finally break out into the tropical sunshine, they turn the power of the sun into the stuff of life." "No sooner is light turned into substance than it is consumed - transforming the sun's energy yet again." "Orchids don't have to fight for their place in the sun, they start life up here already." "They are epiphytes, so-called air plants, which thrive without any connection to the earth below." "But one infamous plant makes the most of both worlds." "The tiny seedling sends down roots." "Just thin strands at first, heading a hundred feet to the forest floor below." "Once it connects with the earth, it gains new power." "Its leaves compete for light with the host tree, while its roots multiply and merge into misshapen limbs." "They wrap around the trunk of the host in a deadly embrace, constricted and starved of life, the host usually dies and rots away," "while the roots solidify into the trunk of a forest giant with an empty heart." "The strangler fig may be a killer, but it also provides food for countless animals and support the thousands of epiphytes in lush hanging gardens." "Epiphytes are the particular passion of Nalini Nadkarni." "She practically lives up here when she's working." "She studied the cloud forest and each day is reminded of how it got its name." ""I think one of the most amazing feelings of working in the canopy is when the mist and fog and cloud roll up the mountainside and it hits the forest, it hits the tree in front of you," "and you suddenly realize you are being enveloped in a cloud."" "This daily misting provides just what epiphytes need." "Mosses catch droplets drifting past." "With each drop, they gather a bit of dust, some from as far away as the Sahara Desert." "Soil builds up and the hanging gardens grow in size and diversity, building more soil." "A kiss from a desert wind, blown wet and warm feeds the forest." ""I suddenly feel like this is what an epiphyte feels like, this is the nourishing mist and fog that's coming through." "So I feel it on my face, feel it on my hands and I understand better what an epiphyte is."" "Nalini has discovered that the moss mats, that blanket the oldest branches, play a vital role." ""These mats are just full of roots, they sort of knit the soil together..." "I'll just finish clipping these last roots, and then the moment of peeling them away." "Watch this." "And what you see is this soil and it's just riddled with roots." "It smells great, it's like this very earthy smell, which is kind of funny when you think of where, where we are, but you can see that the branch is actually not all that thick." "Um, the branches always look a lot more thick when they have their moss mats on them." "So there are lots of invertebrates, insects, earthworms that live in this material high, high above the forest floor, you have to get up here, you have to look in these plants, you have to look in this soil to figure out, really, what's happening," "what's going on up here."" "Nalini's perseverance and her daring led her to a remarkable discovery." ""A really amazing thing about these moss mats are that they can actually nourish the tree itself, they can feed the tree." "Some species of trees can put out roots from their own branches and trunks that go into this soil and take in food and water." "And, so, the epiphytes are getting support, they're getting their place in the sun, but the tree is getting nutrients and water from the mats that the epiphytes make." "So, it's kind of like the epiphytes are paying rent to a landlord and it's just a really amazing situation."" "Suspended in three dimensional space, these hanging gardens are like coral reefs in the sky" " Creating opportunities for a whole community of life." "They provide good pickings for a Kuati." "Flowers are nectar, even ants for protein, even ants for a protein snack" " With a bite." "But ants are just the appetizer." "Fruit is the main course." "Following its nose, the Kuati is led to the very summit of a great tree." "Monkeys with prehensile tails are better equipped to feed up here." "Though the Kuati is no canopy specialist, he is not to be denied." "He searches for the ripest fruit." "His cast offs feed a band of Kuati females and their young on the forest floor." "The seeds would never survive beneath their parent tree anyway, where specialized fungi and insects wait to prey upon them." "Animals connect the sun lit canopy with the earth below in many ways." "Flowers are designed to attract animals, but leaf-cutter ants are not invited guests." "They strip palatable blooms en masse." "Millions of ants working together collecting the bounty of the canopy and sucking it down into the earth below." "Whether it's carried or just float down, it is rapidly recycled back into living matter." "Fingers of slime mold spread over the leaf litter, breaking it down into plant food." "The gossamer threads of fungi help the roots of trees absorb 95% of the nutrients - building forest giants that rise up into the light." "The leaf litter hides many miracles." "A strawberry frog guards its eggs which develop in a puddle of rainwater." "As soon as the tadpole hatches, she moves it to a more secure nursery, encouraging it to wriggle up onto her back." "No bigger than a thumbnail, she undertakes a phenomenal commute, heading straight up." "She climbs in search of a bromeliad - an epiphyte with a rosette of leaves that channel rain and mist into a central reservoir." "This tiny ocean in the sky comes complete with miniature sea monsters ...mosquito larvae, feeding on rotting debris." "This debris also acts as fertilizer for the plant." "She drops her tadpole off in the first empty reservoir she finds." "But her work is not yet done." "She has other tadpoles stashed in other bromeliads, and every two days she makes the rounds." "Her offspring's telltale vibrations signal her to lay another egg - but this egg isn't fertile, it's dinner - it's her tadpole's only food - a brilliant strategy for survival until a thirsty coati happens by." "It takes researchers years to discover such elaborate strategies and just seconds for a coati to send them astray." "The sky-high world of epiphytes is made up of millions of such little life and death dramas." ""I love epiphytes." "I don't know why I do." "I think it's something about they live in the treetop, and ever since I was a little kid, I like climbing trees... it was a world I could escape to, no grown-ups, no grown-ups climb trees so it was just my little world" "where I could go up and read and..." "It's been 17 years and every time I put on my Jumars and go up a rope, it's that same feeling of exhilaration, of what will I find today, what will I learn today..." "The rain forest canopy yields its secrets to only the most determined explorers." "It took Neil Rettig fourteen years to return to Guyana and his work with the Harpy eagle." ""I think what's at the center of the connection with the canopy is, for me, a link back to my youth, when I was a 23-year-old wild adventurer." "Just the odors of the flowers and bird calls open up all these memory banks that had been shut down for all those years-it was unbelievable." "It was just like I had never left."" "A Harpy's calls help lead Neil to its nest just a few miles from his old study site." "Neil was now one of the world's best wildlife cinematographers but he was as thrilled as ever to set his eyes on a Harpy chick." ""It was like having a reunion with an old friend."" ""Possibly, one of the new adults was the baby from 1975."" "For six months, Neil kept his vigil." "As he watched the chick grow, he wondered if he would finally capture the maiden flight of a harpy on film." "Every day brought Neil and the chick closer to their goal." "While Neil watched the chick prepared, exercising and testing its wings." "Then one day, Neil turned the camera on just in time." "A long awaited milestone for the chick, its mother, and perhaps most of all-for Neil." "Such long term dedication has coaxed a few of its secrets from the canopy, but as the light of a day fades, a cloak of mystery descends." "The next frontier in canopy exploration beckons out of the gathering dark." "Few have dared to climb into this high flung wilderness at night, when it comes alive with a whole different community of animals." "They come out to reap the bounty the canopy built by day." "Bats are the unsung heroes of the rainforest." "They hover over the branches, sniffing out the ripest fruit." "Only just able to carry its prize, it flies to a roost where it can feed in safety." "Bats play vital roles in pollination, insect control and the reproduction of trees." "The bat eats the sweet flesh of the fruit but discards the seeds." "They fall far from their parent tree's shadow, where they have a better chance of surviving." "Animals help many canopy plants reproduce." "Epiphytes face unique challenges spreading their seeds around the hanging gardens." "One solution, a sticky coating that keeps the seeds from falling to the forest floor and attracts a particular species of ant." "These ants are strong enough to win the tug of war with the plant." "They carry them to their nest but they eat the nutritious coating leaving the seeds to sprout." "The seedlings grow turning the nest into a garden overflowing with the ants favorite food plants, some of which are never found anywhere else." "A canopy mouse quenches its thirst in a mouse size bromeliad." "Mice eat epiphyte seeds and are, in turn, eaten themselves... by Boas." "It's flicking tongue tastes the victim's presence as it follows it out onto the thinnest vine." "Sometimes, there's no where to go, but down." "It spreads its limbs like a parachute." "The mouse crashes through foliage hurtling six stories down." "It weighs so little-air resistance slowed its fall enough so that it landed safely, one of the benefits of being a small creature in the canopy." "Small animals thrive in rainforest canopies the world over." "In the Great Amazon Basin, they could travel from treetop to treetop for thousands of miles." "The woolly opossum was thought to be one of the rarest of the Amazon's creatures." "Its prehensile tail is naked at the tip to give it a strong grip." "They are built like little wrestlers." "Babies cling tightly to their mothers, who grasp the thinnest of lianas with powerful feet." "Those without a family in tow have more freedom of movement." "They are all searching for sweets." "They drink nectar and eat fruit." "The mother must seek her dinner elsewhere." "Using aerial roots as a ladder she follows another sweet scent." "So sweet is this perfume it distracts the opossum from its meal." "The aroma of ripe banana proves irresistible." "Mother and offspring are lucky to have missed this treat." "The wooly opossum finds the morning light unnerving." "By now, it should be hidden in the darkness of its lair." "But it has no need to fear, the trap was set by biologist Jay Malcolm who is exploring the night-world of the canopy with some startling results." ""These wooly opossums are the single most abundant mammal in this forest, more abundant than any other kind of rodent, more abundant than any kind of monkey, or any other kind of mammal and that was a total surprise." "People knew that there were things up there, we just didn't know how many or where, so, when we started doing this, everything we found out was brand new." "Gaining access to the canopy and putting traps up in the canopy has really allowed us to enter a new world, a new realm of, of research." "And, we, uh, know almost nothing, there's new species of small mammals, so, there promises to be a lot more surprises."" ""Off you go."" "From museum rarity to common critter - they just had to look for it in the right place." "To service as many traps each day" "Jay learned an ancient technique of tree climbing." ""This is called the picoino or foot-belt, it's the same method that the Amerindians have always used to climb up palm trees." "The way it works is what you're really doing, you're sort of pushing out against your heels, so you're really sort of turning your feet into a pair of pliers."" "To climb seven stories in a manner of seconds, a feat that requires incredible strength and stamina." "Should he lose his grip, even for an instant, he would crash to the ground below." "Having attached a small pulley, he raises a simple and ingenious frame for his trap." "Once it is in place, he slides down like a fireman on a very long and rough pole." "Then he simply raises his trap into position where it will await an overnight guest." "Jay finds that he captures opossums only within the undisturbed canopy." "Canopy animals are stopped short where the fabric of the forest is slashed by a clear-cut." "Thirteen years after the chain saws stopped, this place is still a no-man's land, a desert." ""An area that's been cut over and used, and you know what it's like walking down there, it's hot, full of all sorts of burrs and messy stuff, from a life standpoint it has been, basically, trashed" " There's not much left there, it's just a, a tragedy."" "Despite efforts to save it, the rainforest is being consumed at an unprecedented rate, lending an air of urgency to canopy exploration." "But in the face of such a huge problem, you have to dream larger still." "A lighter than air arc ascends with the dawn." "Suspended beneath is the canopy luge, a sled bearing excited researchers on the trip of their lives." "Among them, is one of the founders of the field," "Meg Lowman, who has explored canopies the world over, but, today, she goes where no one has gone before." "Their mission-to trawl the green sea of the canopy and to get some inkling of the biological richness it contains." "right or left... exactament..." "The blimp maneuvers the luge carefully." "Sidling up to a tree crown a hundred and fifty feet in the air." "As soon as they are close enough to reach, nets are wielded frantically." "...encore" "They scoop up insects and collect whole branches in an all out effort to gather as many samples of canopy life as quickly as they can." "It would have taken weeks of difficult and dangerous climbing to get the samples they amass in just one morning on the luge." "The luge is part of Operation Canopy, which invites the best researchers, the world over, to join its venture." "They also use the canopy raft, a web-like platform dropped over the crowns of several trees." "Walking atop the swaying trees is like walking on the face of the sea." ""I guess I feel really special walking on the tops of trees and I really tiptoe all the time because I'm frightened of disturbing these poor little buds or snapping a branch, but, in actual fact, with the raft and its wonderful mesh floor," "our weight is dispersed really nicely"" "Meg's work in the treetops has shown that over millions of years plants evolved poisons to defend themselves from being eaten, while insects evolved ways to overcome these toxins." "Rain forest plants and insects are waging a bio chemical war." "The arsenal of poisons and antidotes created by canopy plants and animals are a pharmaceutical gold mine." "They are the stuff that medicines are made out of." "Who knows what cures to what dread diseases may be hidden among the samples collected by the crew of Operation Canopy?" "Each evening the best canopy scientists in the world share a meal along with their ideas by swapping techniques, samples and data they are beginning a new era in canopy research." "They have blazed a trail into the last biological frontier" " Opening this eighth continent to exploration." "Upon their shoulders the next generation can scale new heights." "Today, canopy tours offer a thrilling new perspective on life." "But the greatest thrill is realizing we are part of this beautiful world floating above our own, for good or ill." "The same pioneering spirit that brought up into the canopy has given us the power to destroy it." "The first canopy explorers have given us a unique opportunity to save this amazing world." "We have a choice." "It is up to us which path we take." "Central Africa. 1915." "A small band of British soldiers marches through the jungle on a bizarre and secret mission." "In Europe, the first World War has become a murderous stalemate... but the clash of kings and empires reaches far beyond Flanders " "to a pivotal naval battle for control of the Great Lakes of Africa." "In command of the British expedition is Lt." " Commander Geoffrey Basil Spicer" " Simson... an officer whom the fates of war will label a hero, a madman, and a god." "June 1915." "Under the guidance of South African John Lee, 400 African labourers are hacking a highway through the unbroken rain forest" "...150 miles of manual labour in the tropical heat." "Lee's bush road leads across jungles through swamps and over mountains to the Great Lakes of Africa" "...Tanganyika, Victoria, Nyasa." "Two already are in British hands ...but Tanganyika is the jewel of the German empire" "...a prize that London desperately needs to turn the tide of the African war." "420 miles in length," "It is a vital lifeline needed to arm and supply a jungle army." "Whoever controls the lake, controls the surrounding territories." "One man rules her waters." "Kapitan Gustav Zimmer of the Imperial German Navy commands a powerful marine unit of 150 men" "...his fleet of three heavily-armed gunboats has obliterated the puny armada of the Belgian Congo" "..." " To win the battle for Central Africa," "Zimmer's navy must be defeated." "Yet for the job of destroying him, the Royal Navy selects a former military surveyor who has never led a brigade into battle." "Lt." "Commander Geoffrey Basil Spicer-Simson is an old Africa hand who has spent the first year of the war behind a desk in London." "Then chance, not choice, gives him an opportunity for greatness." ""Why did we go to Tanganyika?" "Because the Germans with four ships on the Lake" " Were commanding the lake, and by means of these steamers were able to supply their troops on the frontiers with provisions and munitions." "It was important that this should be stopped."" "Spicer's orders are almost surreal ...London wants him to tote his own toy navy from England to Central Africa" "a pair of 40-foot motorboats ...to be dismantled and freighted to Cape Town" "...then tugged overland by steam tractor to the Congo ...a trek of over nine thousand miles" "...with Zimmer's gunships waiting at the other end." "Spicer assembles the team." "Former architect of the Rhodesian railway," "Paddy Wainwright is the chief engineer" "...I'm tropical disease specialist," "Dr. Hother Hanschell, will be the Medical Officer." "As a casual friend of Spicer's," "Dr. Hanschell knows Spicer is not your average leader." ""Spicer-Simson was a vain man worthy of ridicule and on occasion, great admiration at the same time." "This paradox was only possible because of the very nature of Spicer-Simson's own behaviour, which was quite often bizarre."" "28 men will make the journey - they are gunners, mechanics, and engineers" "...not one has ever served under Spicer." "The plan to take Tanganyika from the Germans is a simple one." "Get to Tanganyika, and destroy the German fleet by stealth and surprise." "But their own warships are converted supply boats." ""The two boats taken to Africa by the expedition were... not at all suitable as they were, but they were the only ones obtainable at the time." "My orders were to get away at once."" "Spicer gives his mahogany warships names befitting pleasure boats" "...HMS Mimi and Toutou are quick ...top speed, 20 miles per hour." "Spicer tests them on the Thames" "and has a 3 pound Hotchkiss gun mounted in the fore and a.303 Maxim in the rear." "June 15, 1915." "Stage One." "The Naval Africa Expedition leaves England on a 6,100 mile voyage for the Cape Colony." "While Spicer and his men enjoy a placid southbound cruise," "John Lee's army of African tribesmen hacks its way north." "By early July, at Cape Town in British South Africa, the caravan transfers from ship to train." "July 19, 1915." "Stage Two." "The entire expedition consisting of men, boats and hundreds of boxes of supplies are moved north by rail." "At Fungurume, in the Belgian Congo, they will meet up with Lee." "Two thousand, seven hundred miles of European-built railways pierce the heart of a colonized continent." "After two weeks," "Spicer and his men reach the village of Fungurume as expected." "Morale is high." "But then, just as his expedition is about to begin its overland odyssey," "Spicer fires the man who blazed the trail." "He dismisses John Lee, and offers no explanation to his men." "He alone will lead his men across the burning plains ...into a jungle few Europeans have crossed since the days of Stanley and Livingstone." "To prepare the boats for their waterless voyage, engineer Wainwright orders them stripped of all fittings" "...propellers dismounted... the axles of the carrying wagons reinforced to carry the eight and a half-ton loads." "While final preparations are being made, a critical member of the team arrives by a rather odd means." "Ex-policeman, Arthur Dudley has pedalled 200 miles overjungle trails to reach the expedition." "His role, to organize and lead the African labourers transporting the supplies." ""Dudley was Royal Navy Reserve." "He'd served in the Boer War, now he was fooling about in Rhodesia doing transport work." "But he was capable, just the sort of fellow for that." "Just enough sea knowledge and just enough military training to manage well."" "Two months after leaving London," "Spicer's navy-on-wheels is joined by the steam engines that will pull the boats through the forest." "The tractors are built for level country furrows ...but ahead of them lie some of Africa's most forbidding peaks." "But this strange caravan is being shadowed by Zimmer's African spies " ""we knew that the English intended to challenge our supremacy of the lake." "We also knew that the Belgians were building a boat." "Where they were building, or wanted to build, was unknown."" "If Spicer and his men make it to Lake Tanganyika, Zimmer vows, they will not leave Africa alive." "August 18, 1915." "Stage Three." "150 miles of some of the least forgiving terrain on Earth await the British troopers" "...a wild land of disease and sudden death." "At first light, Geoffrey Spicer leads his men out of camp." ""There were no roads such as we call roads in this country, and except for about 25 miles the whole route ran through the thick African forest."" "The dry season will last only a few more weeks ...then the autumn rains will come" "...if mud swallows the tractors," "Spicer's mission... and his only shot at glory - will be over before it begins." "The steam tractors are in the lead," "each hauling one of Spicer's little ships, and ten tons of wood for the insatiable engines." "Four hundred Africans... men and women ...carry water, food, ammunition, medicine" "...a procession that stretches for nearly two miles." "On the first day, at the first river crossing," "Mimi and her tractor nearly tumble into the current." "It is the first test of Spicer's leadership." "Undaunted, Spicer has chief engineer Wainwright come up with a plan." "Wainwright has more trees cut, reinforces the bridge, and the convoy plods forward." ""The work was completed at 2:30 p.m." "and the trailers were towed across and a start was made along the road at 3." "good progress was made along the road and at 6 p.m. a camp was formed for the night."" "Spicer knows there are more than 140 rivers and gorges still to cross." "The path they are following continues uphill for 60 miles, then they reach the Mitumba Mountains, a 6,400 foot range." "Day by day, mile by mile, the former desk officer grows more confident ...his boasts more outrageous..." "the men love him." ""...he appealed immensely to the ratings..." "They all appreciate a commanding officer who's a bit mad, eccentric." "And he was obviously mad." "Therefore he was marvellous." ""I'd say he could not refrain from telling absurd stories about his prowess at shooting the lions he'd shot," "although I'd never heard of any lions in Gambia."" "The caravan survives on the skill of its African hunters, living off wild buck and guinea fowl." "As for water," "Hanschell and a team of Africans find the nearest water source." "Much of the water is for the steam tractors." "The rest is filtered, boiled, then filtered twice more and used for tea, cooking and the next day's water rations." "The steam engines are insatiable consumers of water and firewood ...advance parties prepare storage caches of lumber." ""The journey through the Bush was divided up into three 50-mile stages, and at the end of each stage was built a depot to keep the sun off the provisions and ammunition."" "The Englishmen, many of them new to Africa, fear lions and crocodiles," "but Doctor Hanschell's duty is keeping the men healthy in a region plagued by unseen killers." ""One very valuable thing was the paymaster." "He began to get some boils on his shoulders, and out of the boils popped worms, big maggots rather." "The men all saw this, I showed it, and I said, 'Now see, here you are going through a country where the danger's from insects, not from wild animals but insects." "You see what they can do."" "From the spies, crude telegraph lines convey fragments of news to Kapitan Zimmer" "...he believes that Spicer has come to help the Belgians build new warships at Lake Tanganyika..." ""Around Lukuga and south of there by Kalemie there seemed to be only defensive building going on."" "But, about Mimi and Toutou , Zimmer knows nothing." "While the confident Germans wait, the English plod on... one agonizing mile at a time." ""Three and a quarter miles a day was the average for the boats." "Occasionally we did rather more, and on one occasion we covered 14 and 3/4 miles, but there were many days when we were lucky if we did a mile and a half." "One day, we did only three-quarters of a mile."" "By late August, Spicer knows he needs help if he is to outrun the rains." "At a village called Mwenda Makosi, the British commandeer 42 oxen to help drag the boats up the Mitumba Range." "When the rains begin, they will turn the plains into a quagmire too shallow for ships, too muddy for wheels." "Until then, heat is the deadliest enemy ...the thirst for water is unquenchable ...water for the engines... water for the oxen... a few cupfulls a day for the men." "Then, in early September... a sudden storm of fire." "Spicer has his men create a fire break." "He then orders that the precious mahogany boats must be pretected from flying embers." "For Doctor Hanshell, it is a day of sheer terror." ""...we nearly lost the whole thing by fire..." "Here was this war train bearing down on us at a terrific rate." "We'd burnt off, we set fire to it, only just in time, just in time, we moved the guns, the wagons and everything onto the burnt place, and the thing stopped... it was so damn near it came."" "In the weeks that follow, the oxen prove their worth." ""The top of the plateau was reached on September 8, 1915, and this was a very triumphant moment for the expedition, for there were some who had said that it was impossible to get there." "Our difficulties were by no means at an end, for on the downward trek from this point to Sankisia there was some risky work to be done in lowering the boats down the sharp spurs of the mountain..."" "They are still weeks away from the combat zone." "Using 42 oxen, 2 road locomotives, and hundreds of men, the expedition struggles to get down the mountain." ""On more than one occassion the wheels of the boats dropped into ant-bear holes." "The only way to get out was to fill up the hole with logs, gradually jacking the boat up until it reached the level." "It was only by good luck that they received no damage."" ""There is a great deal of thunder and it appears the rains are not far away." "The journey now, has become a race to get to the railway before the rains brake and the roads become impassable."" "Finally, the land is level, but the dangers remain deadly." "This is the country of the tse tse fly ...carrier of the sleeping sickness that kills both men and beasts... villages are nearly deserted ...the ghost towns of central Africa." "No rain falls... this is a dreadful blessing - drought scorches the plains." ""At one point the traction engines came to a standstill for want of water, and the members of the expedition were getting only half a pint a day."" "Lt-Commander Spicer offers local women a bolt of coloured cloth if they will trek eight miles to the nearest well" "...hundreds accept the bargain, and the convoy moves on." "For the first time since he tested them on the Thames," "Geoffrey Spicer's two-boat flotilla reaches water deep enough to sail upon" "...Mimi and Toutou are reassembled and lowered into the Lualaba River." "October 1, 1915." "Stage Four." "They will float, or drag their boats, 200 miles downstream ...strange apparitions to the resident wildlife." ""Progress on the river is very slow." "I think Mimi and Tou-Tou hold the record for grounding, as on October 7 they were aground 14 times in twelve miles."" "Even on water, Spicer's flotilla manages barely ten miles a day ...then, at the rail depot at Kabalo," "Mimi and Toutou must be ...packaged safely for another journey by rail." "October 22, 1915." "Stage Five." "The final phase of the long odyssey ...173 miles across precarious trestles and crumbling bridges ...to the Belgian shores of Lake Tanganyika." "Spicer rivals are already preparing their reception ...Gustav Zimmer has followed every mile of Spicer's incredible trek, still unaware of the unlikely cargo." ""...the effort to find out more about the area around Lukuga and Kalemie was resumed in earnest." "...we took down a lot of telegraph wires, and blew up telegraph stations." "As soon as the British reach their final destination, he will send his gunboats to destroy Geoffrey Spicer and his half-mad dreams." "October 28, 1915." "After four months and over 9,000 miles of travel, the unlikely odyssey of Lt." "Commander Geoffrey Spicer reaches the blue heart of Africa..." "Lake Tanganyika." "Finally, he has reached his battleground." "At Kalemie on the western shoreline, a defensive network of guns, troop quarters, and shipbuilding facilities guards the back door of the Belgian Congo." "For their British allies, the Belgians have prepared simple dwellings" "...Spicer claims the largest to be his headquarters... and hoists the banner of the Royal Navy" " An emblem of his growing lust for power." "Kalemie has guns, but no harbour." "To protect his boats from the Germans," "Spicer insists the Belgians construct a harbour." ""The decision to build the port was come to owing to the facts that it is impossible to operate without a defended port," "and the existing defences at Kalemie will amply protect the port selected." "Hundreds of tons of rock are blasted and positioned into the crocodile-infested waters" "to create an arced jetty." "Atop the rocks, traintracks and a launching slip are lain which will allow Spicer to slide his miniature Navy into the lake in minutes." "While the jetty is taking shape, the Belgians give Spicer the details of the 3 German ships he must destroy." "The smallest German vessel is the Kingani." "At 55 feet long and 12 feet wide, she is far larger and better armed than Mimi or Toutou." "Her compatriot, the Hedwig von Wissmann, is even larger, but slower." "Carrying two powerful guns and a crew of 22 sailors, she has room for 200 extra troops." "The Graf von Gotzen dwarfs them all." "An 800 ton monster, she is over 20 times the size of the British speedboats." "Her massive guns can blast Spicer's boats to oblivion with one shell." "The little British boats are seriously outmanned, outgunned and outsized." "To tilt the balance of power," "Spicer plots a surprise attack to capture the Kingani" "...it is an audacious plan... for a desk officer who has never led a combat mission." "Across the lake," "Gustav Zimmer plans his own strategy of strength." ""...we learned from intercepted Belgian telegram communications that they were looking for a building location..." "As soon as it was practical, the reconnaissance work began."" "December 1, 1915." "German Lieutenants Walter Rosenthal and Job Odebrecht embark on a stealthy mission of reconnaisance." "In four successive evenings, the two ships slip in under darkness, snapping off night exposures of the harbour." "The next evening," "Lt. Rosenthal risks his life in a daring solo mission." "" He wanted to swim ashore, to find out more about the drydock and the building of the new ship, despite the danger of crashing waves and crocodiles... he reached the drydock, took notice of two boats," "then swam back to the designated meeting place."" "But a panicky German officer orders the Kingani to leave without him." "Rosenthal is forced to hide out on the Allied side of the lake." "At daybreak, abandoned in enemy waters," "Rosenthal is taken prisoner" "...Zimmer is still ignorant of Spicer's Jungle Navy." "Mid-December, the rains come" "...work is impossible " "all they can do is wait." ""We are having heavy rains almost daily, and one or two members of the expedition on an average, are always down with slight attacks of fever."" "On December 23, Spicer decides it is time to go to war." "Far from his desk in London, Africa has freed Spicer's spirit." "His battle dress reflects his liberation." ""...to the amazement of the crew and to the Belgians and the natives, he didn't wear shorts, he wore a little, tiny little khaki skirt with." "Pleats in it."" "Spicer and Britain need allies" " The men of the Ba Holo Holo nation see the eccenttic white man as a natural chief." "Christmas Eve." "The mahogany gunboats undergo their first trial runs on African waters." ""On Christmas Day we took a rest, and it being the first time the whole expedition had been together, we had a big celebration." "December 26, 1915." "The Germans come to fight." "Spicer is reading prayers when an enemy ship is sighted." "Spicer ignores the enemy's approach" "...he alone will decide when his private war will commence." ""I finished prayers and then sent off the hands to get ready."" "Doctor Hanshell and other non-combatants head to the cliffs to watch the battle as if it was a cricket match." ""..." "The paymaster and I and the petty officer Murphy and so on, we had a grandstand view of it." "It all happened right under our eyes."" "At 11:25 a.m.," "Spicer and his fleet set off in pursuit of the enemy." "Spicer is in the Mimi and Lieutenant Dudley ...without his bicycle... is at the helm of the Toutou." "Spicer's plan is to sneak in behind the Kingani, and attack her from both sides." "The Kingani can only fire on them with her bow guns." "Kapitan Zimmer has sent the Kingani to blow up the Belgian harbour installation." "But instead, is confronted by Spicer's entire navy." ""She was well inside the bay before she was aware of the existence of the British boats on the Lake" "...and the Mimi and Toutou rapidly overhauled her and opened fire."" ""An early shot from one of our guns carried away her mast, and she got several hits below the water line."" "In the ensuing half hour, eleven enemy sailors are rounded up." "Lt. Dudley takes control of the captured Kingani, and brings her and the captured survivors back to base." "At Kalemie, Spicer is showered with sand... a traditional gesture that confirms his mastery of the earth he stands on." "Three German sailors are buried with military dignity." "The British have suffered no casualties" "...but the battle for the blue heart of Africa has barely begun." "In London, he was ignored, but at Lake Tanganyika, Geoffrey Spicer is hailed as a hero for his brilliant ambush of the Kingani." "He must now repair his damaged prize." "British and Belgian engineers patch up the Kingani's 11 holes, and refit her with a larger 12-pounder gun." "When they are finished, Spicer re-christens the German gunboat as if she were a French poodle, naming her HMS Fifi." "With a bolstered sense of confidence," "Spicer's behaviour becomes more outrageous, more bizarre." "Twice a week, he performs a ceremonial public bath, complete with cigarettes and vermouth" "...his body is decorated with symbolic tattoos..." "Spicer's men suspect he has gone mad... but the Ba holo holo warriors understand the white man's message" "...they call him "bwana chifungatumbo"" "...Lord of the Loincloth..." "February 8, 1916." ""." "We got information from native spies that the Kingani had been sunk by a new coastal artillery battery." "I decided to check into this myself and sent along the Gotzen, the Hedwig von Wissmann, and a smaller boat."" "The Germans still do not know the Royal Navy has invaded the Lake." ""..." "The Hedwig von Wissmann was to get to the Belgian coast in the early morning and enquire about the position from friendly spies, then head back to Cape Kungwe where she would meet with the Gotzen at around noon on February 9th."" "Then together, Zimmer and Odebrecht will attack the harbour." "At dawn on February 9, the dance begins, with control of Central Africa at stake." "It is a humid, hazy morning ...distant vessels shimmer like mirages in the heat." "Through the haze, Spicer spots the Germans." "Spicer leads the attack in his new flagship, the Fifi ...chief engineer Wainwright takes the speedier, more maneuverable Mimi." ""...the weather conditions made the estimation of distance very difficult... and until the enemy closed to within 5000 yards, he appeared to be a dark blob suspended above the horizon."" "For more than an hour," "Spicer's shells fall short of the fleeing German ship ...but the Mimi cuts off her escape... and forces the Germans to turn and fight." "As if protected from death by his magic tattoos, the Lord of the Loincloth refuses to take cover." "The battle of Lake Tanganyika lasts 90 furious minutes." "Hemmed in by Wainwright in the Mimi," "Spicer's cannon blasts a fatal wound in the Wissmann's engine room." ""In a few minutes the Hedwig von Wissmann burst into flames, and finally she up-ended and went down."" "From among the wreckage," "Spicer retrieves the German battle flag." "The first enemy banner captured in combat... anywhere - in the most deadly war in human history." "Twenty-one Germans survive the explosion ...seven others are killed..." "Again, there is not a single British casualty - now, only one target remains..." "the Gotzen - the mightiest of all warships on this deadly inland sea." "To the Ba holo holo people, the sinking of the Wissmann confirms Geofrey Spicer's status as an indestructible warrior... a man whose magic places him in the realm of the gods." "For miles up and down the Lake, elaborate clay fetishes are shaped in Spicer's image." "" And clay and wood images grew up all around the place." "The helmet and the beard and the jupe and the bare arms with scratches on to make the tatooing." "He was the great Bwana Ikuba."" "At the peak of his powers," "Spicer is told that his war against Zimmer is over ...the allies will import a new weapon... aeroplanes... to destroy the Gozten from the sky." "June, 1916." "Allied seaplanes launch a barrage of bombings on Kigoma." "Zimmer decides to scuttle his flagship." ""It was hard for us to blow up our last ships, but they could not be allowed to fall into enemy hands, for they would have construed it as a kind of victory." "We conceded to the stronger force, but our willingness to serve and our enthusiasm was not broken."" "Germany's dreams of an African empire are shattered ...thwarted by an unlikely hero and his jungle navy." "After almost another year of protecting the Lake," "Spicer and his men are ordered back to England." "His warships left behind." "The British Naval Africa Expedition is a total success." "Its military objective attained," "its men back home, unharmed." "He has led his men on a bizarre, nearly impossible mission, a small step on the long road to history." "He is awarded the Distinguished Service Order and 15 others including Henschell, Wainwright" "and Dudley are also honoured." "After the awards and the ceremonies the Lord of the Loincloth returns to the same desk he left in 1915." "As a warrior his duty is done." ""...the expedition was the smallest ever sent out" " There being only twenty-eight men all told." "And it was the only expedition that had come back without a single casualty.""