JW, you rock even when it isn't officially "River Monsters":
http://themetapicture.com/oh-i-recognize-that-fish/
Friday, 28 June 2013
Wednesday, 19 June 2013
RM - Face Ripper
In the last episode of S5, JW revisits his old haunt of South America (SA in the future) to discover that the piranhas, whom he dismissed as relatively harmless scavengers and small-scale carnivores in the very first episode of the enture series of River Monsters have turned dangerous, and are attacking and killed both humans and their livestock (i.e. horses).
Why? Because of the arapaimas, another S1 character. Those fish tower over the piranhas (and most other SA fish, I wager) and eat not only the piranhas proper, but also their food - other fish. As a result, the local piranhas have become 'meaner and leaner' than ever before and are going after much larger prey with devastating results...
What can be said about this revelation? In the same S1 episode JW had personally discovered that while piranhas can ignore people as food items most of the time, they still are quite capable of killing and eating people if the conditions are right without any arapaimas being involved. Yes, piranhas are just predators and nature's clean-up crew members, but like any predators - from sharks to alligators to bears and lions - they can turn onto humans and their livestock, kill and eat them. The only thing different is that individually piranhas are small enough to be harmless to humans, that's all.
And speaking of humans... Human-created places such as slaughterhouses, cemeteries, battlefields, etc that dump their waste into fresh water or are regularly flooded by it are also places were the piranhas are especially hungry for the warm-blooded flesh (fish themselves are cold-blooded, remember?) Here we see no such place, but JW himself mentioned the local organized drug trafficking and the frequent disposal of human corpses in the rivers. Such action just fuels the piranhas familiarity with human flesh and its taste and makes them ever more dangerous for people.
Why didn't JW follow this course and instead stuck with the arapaima angle? Hello! He is a specialist in river monsters (fish, occasional giant salamander and caiman), not human monsters, who are much more dangerous and monstrous. The good doctor from the episode said that Oscar (the deceased human of this episode) was killed by piranhas without any evidence of foul play? Fair enough, it's back to the fish!
And I can't begrudge JW anything. If Oscar was killed by foul play, then it's up to the police to sort it out, not JW.
As for the episode itself, it was quite decent, save for slight overabundance of flashbacks from the previous seasons. Ah well, it was still quite educational, as fas as RM episodes go.
So - a decent episode with some new information (I, for one, didn't know that the arapaimas were introduced to Bolivia, for example) and without any particular drawbacks. I give it 4.5 stars out of five.
Why? Because of the arapaimas, another S1 character. Those fish tower over the piranhas (and most other SA fish, I wager) and eat not only the piranhas proper, but also their food - other fish. As a result, the local piranhas have become 'meaner and leaner' than ever before and are going after much larger prey with devastating results...
What can be said about this revelation? In the same S1 episode JW had personally discovered that while piranhas can ignore people as food items most of the time, they still are quite capable of killing and eating people if the conditions are right without any arapaimas being involved. Yes, piranhas are just predators and nature's clean-up crew members, but like any predators - from sharks to alligators to bears and lions - they can turn onto humans and their livestock, kill and eat them. The only thing different is that individually piranhas are small enough to be harmless to humans, that's all.
And speaking of humans... Human-created places such as slaughterhouses, cemeteries, battlefields, etc that dump their waste into fresh water or are regularly flooded by it are also places were the piranhas are especially hungry for the warm-blooded flesh (fish themselves are cold-blooded, remember?) Here we see no such place, but JW himself mentioned the local organized drug trafficking and the frequent disposal of human corpses in the rivers. Such action just fuels the piranhas familiarity with human flesh and its taste and makes them ever more dangerous for people.
Why didn't JW follow this course and instead stuck with the arapaima angle? Hello! He is a specialist in river monsters (fish, occasional giant salamander and caiman), not human monsters, who are much more dangerous and monstrous. The good doctor from the episode said that Oscar (the deceased human of this episode) was killed by piranhas without any evidence of foul play? Fair enough, it's back to the fish!
And I can't begrudge JW anything. If Oscar was killed by foul play, then it's up to the police to sort it out, not JW.
As for the episode itself, it was quite decent, save for slight overabundance of flashbacks from the previous seasons. Ah well, it was still quite educational, as fas as RM episodes go.
So - a decent episode with some new information (I, for one, didn't know that the arapaimas were introduced to Bolivia, for example) and without any particular drawbacks. I give it 4.5 stars out of five.
Wednesday, 12 June 2013
RM - Legend of Loch Ness
When I learned that JW was going to be investigating the legend of the Loch Ness Monster as the (apparent) RM S5 finale, I was worried. Another of my favorite shows, "Deadliest Warrior", finished its third season on a seemingly similar note - "Vampires vs. Zombies" and it was a failure of the DW's genre. But...
Whereas DW treated Vampires and Zombies as vampires and zombies (albeit very peculiar ones), JW's take on Nessie was a very different story. Firstly, he assumed that Nessie isn't a marine reptile (like a plesiosaur) or a mammal (a sea, dolphin, etc), but a fish. By itself that is nothing new, there are enough cryptozoologists who believe that Nessie, the other lake monsters (like the ones in the US) and their cousins the sea serpents are giant fish (usually eels). But... JW went one step further, and I'm not sure that it was in the right direction.
What is a trademark of a RM episode, beyond the actual catching of the fish? The geography. As a rule, in an episode, JW designates a particular fishing area to himself in which to catch the monster. The area may be small (Chernobyl in "Atomic Assassin"), it may be large (Mongolia in "Mongolian Mauler from the previous season comes to mind), but it is fixed. Here the particular fishing area was supposed to be Loch Ness, but JW went beyond it - to Iceland and Norway. Why? Supposedly because of the Viking connection, and here the problems begin.
There is no particular indication that the Vikings ever been to Loch Ness, and the St. Columba story that JW uses as a springing board for the Vikings has its own problems - in most version I came across the good saint saved the man from the pagan Nessie unharmed. I cannot feel but wonder if JW has bent the truth a bit here to make his actions to move from Loch Ness to Iceland and Norway more justified.
Why would JW need justification? Because his show is called River Monsters, no Sea. Unlike the bull shark, the Greenland shark doesn't appear to be particularly adapted to surviving in fresh water for a particularly long amount of time, and Loch Ness is a freshwater loch, not even brackish. This certainly makes the Greenland shark a highly unlikely candidate for Nessie.
On its own, of course, JW catching a Greenland shark had been a very exciting part of the episode, but RM has made itself into a more than just a fishing show - there is also plenty of research involved, and that research is usually honest and straightforward. In this episode JW's research (and logic) were stretched, and he himself abandoned his freshwater field of operation. This is why I give the "Legend of Loch Ness" episode only 3.5 stars out of five. Pity.
Whereas DW treated Vampires and Zombies as vampires and zombies (albeit very peculiar ones), JW's take on Nessie was a very different story. Firstly, he assumed that Nessie isn't a marine reptile (like a plesiosaur) or a mammal (a sea, dolphin, etc), but a fish. By itself that is nothing new, there are enough cryptozoologists who believe that Nessie, the other lake monsters (like the ones in the US) and their cousins the sea serpents are giant fish (usually eels). But... JW went one step further, and I'm not sure that it was in the right direction.
What is a trademark of a RM episode, beyond the actual catching of the fish? The geography. As a rule, in an episode, JW designates a particular fishing area to himself in which to catch the monster. The area may be small (Chernobyl in "Atomic Assassin"), it may be large (Mongolia in "Mongolian Mauler from the previous season comes to mind), but it is fixed. Here the particular fishing area was supposed to be Loch Ness, but JW went beyond it - to Iceland and Norway. Why? Supposedly because of the Viking connection, and here the problems begin.
There is no particular indication that the Vikings ever been to Loch Ness, and the St. Columba story that JW uses as a springing board for the Vikings has its own problems - in most version I came across the good saint saved the man from the pagan Nessie unharmed. I cannot feel but wonder if JW has bent the truth a bit here to make his actions to move from Loch Ness to Iceland and Norway more justified.
Why would JW need justification? Because his show is called River Monsters, no Sea. Unlike the bull shark, the Greenland shark doesn't appear to be particularly adapted to surviving in fresh water for a particularly long amount of time, and Loch Ness is a freshwater loch, not even brackish. This certainly makes the Greenland shark a highly unlikely candidate for Nessie.
On its own, of course, JW catching a Greenland shark had been a very exciting part of the episode, but RM has made itself into a more than just a fishing show - there is also plenty of research involved, and that research is usually honest and straightforward. In this episode JW's research (and logic) were stretched, and he himself abandoned his freshwater field of operation. This is why I give the "Legend of Loch Ness" episode only 3.5 stars out of five. Pity.
Wednesday, 5 June 2013
RM - Vampires of the Deep
In this week's episode JW chose to investigate the so-called "vampires of the deep" - the little known and enigmatic lampreys.
What does a lay person know about the lamprey? Probably little to nothing. The lamprey (and its cousin the hagfish) are the only jawless fish in the world; technically they belong to the vertebrate group, but in reality they have no bones, and have survived almost unchanged since the dawn of time. Impossible Pictures' mini-series "Walking with Monsters" (2005) feature two kinds of jawless fish: unarmored (Haikouichthys) and armored (Cephalaspis). Neither had any mouths and fed by sucking in various edible debris from the sea floor. The lamprey larvae feed in the same manner; the lamprey adults are active predators instead. Personally, I doubt that JW attaching an adult sea lamprey to his neck was a good idea, but that's why JW is the man, on the other hand...
The lamprey's natural history aside, was "VotD" an exciting episode? Yes. For one thing, there were plenty of fish species and fish catching featured in this episode. True, there were flashbacks to episodes past, but at a tolerable level still - no "Colombian slasher" this episode, no sir! JW's attempts at making suspense, on the other hand, were annoying, and at a level with "Atomic Assassin": pointless, for anyone with some logic and knowledge of the natural world would figure out the attacker's lamprey identity early in the episode.
But there was another tie to "Atomic Assassin" and similar episodes (such as "Russian Killer" from S4) - the ecological one, the impact of humans on nature. On one hand we have an infestation of sea lampreys in lake Champlain caused by human meddling, and on the other - there's the rapidly falling number of Pacific lampreys caused by the same meddling. This human factors transforms "VotD" from a very good into a really great one - it is particularly interesting to observe JW aid the Native Americans assisting the Pacific lamprey in utilizing the so-called 'lamprey ladder' to get to their spawning ground...
Thus, it is safe to say that in the end "Vampires of the Deep" was a very good episode, if not downright great: the only flaws was the pointless 'guessing game' of JW in the first third of the episode, and the unresolved question as to why the greater redhorse (the catfish caught in this episode) actually went after live prey (a fishing lure actually), showing behavior atypical to this species. Ah well, not even JW had time to solve and uncover everything in a single episode... Maybe next time. Lol.
What does a lay person know about the lamprey? Probably little to nothing. The lamprey (and its cousin the hagfish) are the only jawless fish in the world; technically they belong to the vertebrate group, but in reality they have no bones, and have survived almost unchanged since the dawn of time. Impossible Pictures' mini-series "Walking with Monsters" (2005) feature two kinds of jawless fish: unarmored (Haikouichthys) and armored (Cephalaspis). Neither had any mouths and fed by sucking in various edible debris from the sea floor. The lamprey larvae feed in the same manner; the lamprey adults are active predators instead. Personally, I doubt that JW attaching an adult sea lamprey to his neck was a good idea, but that's why JW is the man, on the other hand...
The lamprey's natural history aside, was "VotD" an exciting episode? Yes. For one thing, there were plenty of fish species and fish catching featured in this episode. True, there were flashbacks to episodes past, but at a tolerable level still - no "Colombian slasher" this episode, no sir! JW's attempts at making suspense, on the other hand, were annoying, and at a level with "Atomic Assassin": pointless, for anyone with some logic and knowledge of the natural world would figure out the attacker's lamprey identity early in the episode.
But there was another tie to "Atomic Assassin" and similar episodes (such as "Russian Killer" from S4) - the ecological one, the impact of humans on nature. On one hand we have an infestation of sea lampreys in lake Champlain caused by human meddling, and on the other - there's the rapidly falling number of Pacific lampreys caused by the same meddling. This human factors transforms "VotD" from a very good into a really great one - it is particularly interesting to observe JW aid the Native Americans assisting the Pacific lamprey in utilizing the so-called 'lamprey ladder' to get to their spawning ground...
Thus, it is safe to say that in the end "Vampires of the Deep" was a very good episode, if not downright great: the only flaws was the pointless 'guessing game' of JW in the first third of the episode, and the unresolved question as to why the greater redhorse (the catfish caught in this episode) actually went after live prey (a fishing lure actually), showing behavior atypical to this species. Ah well, not even JW had time to solve and uncover everything in a single episode... Maybe next time. Lol.
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