Recently in Nature Category

Emily Julius

Associate Producer

We began our shoot at the Philadelphia zoo early Saturday morning. They had been preparing for our crew for the last few weeks by acclimating the cats to strangers in the “back of house” area. Big cats don’t like strangers because they associate them with tranquilizing blow darts. They had been using a member of the zoo staff holding a box wrapped in a garbage bag as a stand in for the cameraman and his Varicam. We were skeptical as we squeezed into the tiny space behind the cage. We were going to be very close to these cats. The first cat up was Zenda, a female lion who needed to be weighed. The cat ran into the enclosure and immediately checked us out. She made a few noises letting us know that she wasn’t completely content with us being there. Then she relaxed and turned her focus to being weighed, in exchange for a bit of raw meat. The acclimating had paid off. She settled on the scale -- 306 lbs! The tiger cub was up next. This was part of the training process that will someday allow them to do a voluntary blood draw. It’s a two-person job. One keeper was poised to squirt evaporated milk into cat’s mouth. The other keeper was positioned to capture the tiger’s tail. They have worked their way up to getting the cat comfortable with them handling the tail, an amazing feet in itself. Now they are taking it even further. They take out an electric clipper and shave the tail! This part of the operation reveals a strange surprise. The tiger’s stripes are actually on its skin. The keeper feels for the tail vein and pokes it with a blunt needle. The tiger can walk away at any time but she lays still lapping at squirts of milk. They have been training her for months and this is the last phase. Soon they will be able to do the real thing. It’s a long involved process but by doing it they can avoid the trauma of blow darting the cats in order to do routine health exams.

Iana Porter We descend down the cable car into the flooded crater of the doomsday volcano. This 5-mile wide caldera incites the imagination. The power that created this is unfathomable. Volcanoes are so complex that it’s hard for the experts to predict exactly when they will blow or how lethal their eruptions might be. This makes for a slightly edgy feeling. We have come to Santorini island, Greece to film National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Bob Ballard on an unprecedented underwater expedition into the heart of Thera. It is one of the most powerful volcanoes in human history. 3600 years ago this was ground zero. A colossal eruption spewed ash into the sky, shot searing gas hurricanes and raging tsunamis for miles in all directions and turned day into night for over 100,000 square miles. When it was all over, the city of Akrotiri lay buried in nearly 200 feet of ash and the world was thrust into a "big chill," with temperatures cooling across the entire planet. At around the same time, the Minoans, Europe's first civilization, vanished mysteriously. Could Thera’s explosion have reached their palaces 75 miles away in Crete? For nearly a century, experts scoured the land for geologic clues to the magnitude of the eruption. But a frustrating obstacle persisted. The powerful eruption shot huge volumes of magma out beyond the island and into the surrounding sea. Where it has remained hidden until now.

Ramón Bonfil, Ph.D. Facing a great white shark in its natural environment is one of the most humbling and life-marking experiences one can ever have, as long as this is done under controlled and safe conditions. I know this from first-hand experience. In the last 5 years I have had the stunning honor of handling 17 live great white sharks with my own hands, all in the name of science. The most surprising fact people come to realize after seeing their first great white in the wild is that their typical behavior has nothing to do with the stereotype of ferocity and aggressiveness that has been force-fed to us through ‘killer shark’ movies and pseudo-documentaries. Great white sharks are surprisingly calm and cautious in their movements around cages with divers or with a boat floating at the surface. Only through skillful manipulation of bait can we provoke their aggressive behavior. After all, they are top predators and nobody likes to be teased when hungry. Why would anyone want to wrestle with live great whites for a living? The answer is surprisingly simple: because these vilified fish are under threat of extinction and we know very little about their biology and ecology. Despite their iconoclastic fame in pop culture, great white sharks are still largely a mystery to science. The research we and other scientists around the world are conducting on the movements and migrations of great white sharks by using cutting-edge satellite tags and other electronic instruments is allowing us to map, better than ever, the ways in which they utilize the ocean and how they move in this vast environment. Until very recently everyone thought that great whites were chiefly a coastal species that only seldom would venture into the high seas. But thanks to satellite tagging studies like the one we just started in Guadalupe Island, Mexico, we know now that great white sharks have a diversity of spatial behaviors that include fidelity to very specific coastal areas for months at a time in addition to regular coastal migrations covering thousands of miles. More surprisingly, we discovered that great white sharks migrate across entire oceans and back. On February 2003, one of the sharks we tagged in South Africa crossed the entire Indian Ocean to the coast of Western Australia, and then crossed right back to South Africa, covering more than 20,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) in less than 9 months!

Lawrence Cumbo - Producer, Director, Cinematographer Making films for National Geographic has brought me to refugee camps, prisons, and war zones, but nothing could have prepared me for what we witnessed in New Orleans a few months ago, in the city where I grew up. It was August 28, an early Sunday morning, when America woke up to a shocking surprise. Katrina, a moderate “category one” hurricane that recently skirted Florida, had blown up overnight into a massive hurricane. Now it was a "category five" and it was headed straight for New Orleans. After three sleepless days watching live news coverage, I was given the assignment to "go home" with a camera and to film. At this point, the situation in New Orleans had turned critical and desperate. People were dying, toxic water was still rising, and thousands were still stranded. Widespread violence had delayed rescuers, and there was no food, no water, no gas and no utilities. We rigged out a 4x4 SUV self-contained with everything we needed—gas, electric power, satellite communications. We also brought food, water and medical kits for ourselves, and ultimately for the survivors of Katrina. Finally, we drove from our headquarters in Washington D.C. to my parents' home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At New Orleans, we arrived to see a dying city. Personally, this is a place where I’ve celebrated births, weddings and even funerals—and standing at dusk near Claiborne and Tulane Avenue—it all seemed unreal, so massive, it was overwhelming. Our first time in the water, we dodged natural gas fires bubbling from the putrefied liquid laden with oil, raw sewage, and corpses. Block after block, the water was up to the rooftops of homes and businesses, punctuated by a quiet, eerie sound of dogs barking and wailing from every direction, helicopters shuddering in the background. The great, colorful neighborhoods where people lived and worked were inundated with putrefied water. Our 4x4 hopped medians, traversed sidewalks, bobbed and wove as we made our way down St. Charles Street. Our first stop was at the New Orleans Coast Guard Air Station to meet with Commanding Officer Lt. Bruce Jones, who shuffled us into one of their iconic orange rescue choppers. They were so desperate to show us what they had been dealing with over the past few days. Everyone was tired, and the rescue swimmer covered in bandages looked like young soldiers just returning from battle. These men and women are responsible for saving over five thousand lives; they were the first heroes we met. As soon as our chopper crossed over the Mississippi River from the west bank I saw the scale of this disaster—New Orleans was completely covered with water. Not just low-lying neighborhoods and flooded drainage canals, the entire city was a lake—the city park, the fairgrounds, the giant shopping mall, cemeteries, universities, fire and police stations, even lakes were underwater. The islands of hope—parts of downtown and the French Quarter—seemed as if they sat on the banks of a polluted lake. Did we see any bodies? Yes, too many. Months later these scenes have re-emerged and haunted my dreams. The first man I saw was lying at the foot of the Art Museum at City Park, covered in part by an American flag. He was someone’s son, possibly someone’s father or brother—and why was he still lying in the hot summer sun? I said a prayer while filming in silence. Then our phone rang. It was a dear friend calling, saying she’d fled the night before Katrina and had no idea if anything she’d owned had been spared. This became the pattern for us; we would go regularly on reconnaissance missions for all the friends, family and strangers who asked. It was a way to balance the dreadful and hopeless situation we faced. We ended up delivering food, diesel, water, inhalers, pets, and checked on many homes and businesses. On about the third day, I was filming from the roof of our SUV as we slowly rolled through hell. I saw a man alone, digging in a vacant lot. We’d read about folks burying their dead family members so they could find them later. We turned around and cautiously approached. I asked him what he was doing. He gave me a foolish look and responded, "I’m burying my trash." I was stunned and asked, "Why are you still here? And why are you burying your trash? Look around you!" He was surrounded by overturned cars, dead dogs, floating garbage, and downed trees and branches. He responded in his thick New Orleans accent, "This is my city, baby, and this is my trash, you wouldn’t throw your trash in your front yard would you? This city is coming back and I’m helping keep in clean."