That Gorgeous Blue Planet

"Our planet is a blue planet: over seventy percent of it is covered by the sea. The Pacific Ocean alone covers half the globe. You can fly across it non-stop for twelve hours and still see nothing more than a speck of land. This series will reveal the complete natural history of our ocean planet, from its familiar shores to the mysteries of its deepest seas."

– David Attenborough, from episode one

This remarkable documentary series took over five years to make and is well worth the 8 hours it takes to watch. Margaret and I have been watching it in 2 episode installments over the last several days and have enjoyed every moment of it. (I did intersperse a few of Attenborough's Life In The Undergrowth episodes, about insects. Margaret was not as fascinated by these.)

They actually discovered species while filming this. They discovered things about the way different species live and act. There were DISCOVERIES in the filming of this. I am fascinated that it's even possible to do that.

The Deep Sea episode is a standout to me, and we watched it the day before we swam in our ocean and found hundreds of little jellyfish. It was momentarily disconcerting, but we picked them up and played with them to no ill effect. (Though when I picked up a really big one, using a hand that had cuts on it, it felt like electric shocks all up and down my arm. Really, really cool.) We saw a bunch of Japanese kids throwing jellyfish at each other and went to look at the lot of them.

That's about what they looked like. They were really cool and made us feel like we are impervious to all jellyfish stings. (We suppose we might not be, but are acting on the assumption that we are, until proved otherwise.)

The big fear here is the Box jellyfish, which is perfectly see-through and really, really dangerous. Supposedly they don't happen in our bay very often, but they do happen sometimes, so keep your eyes peeled, etc. We're pretty confident that they can't hurt us, though.