To finish the matter of sharks and AFO, let us look at
the second (and the last, for now), episode of AFO that dealt with a shark –
the bull shark. It went against the hippopotamus, and-
Well, yes, lost. It lost for a very simple, AFO,
reason: a hippopotamus, (we are talking a common hippopotamus here, not the
pygmy one), weighs about 2800 kg. The bull shark weighs only 280. The
hippopotamus fight the Nile crocodiles on a regular basis. The bull shark often
ends up eaten by the crocodiles on the same regular basis instead. Yes, these
are usually saltwater crocodiles, rather than the Nile crocodiles, but the two
species are similar to each other in most aspects, and while the Nile crocodile
is smaller than the saltwater one, it isn’t that much smaller, and may even
compete with the saltwater crocodile in terms of size and strength…which is
nowhere near to successfully fight and defeat a hippopotamus in water or on
land.
True, the hippopotamus is not all that – the African
elephant can defeat it quite handily, (or is it ‘trunkily’?), but the African
elephant was not in this episode (‘bull shark vs. hippopotamus’), it was
fighting the African white rhinoceros in its own episode. In this episode, the
hippopotamus owned the bull shark and killed it with a single bite, because
this is what it does to the Nile crocodiles: once it gets one good grip and
bite with its jaws, it usually can kill the reptile, (in no small part because
it has an unarmored belly). Where does the bull shark fit in?
A shark and a crocodile fit into two similar
econiches, if not one and the same, save that the sharks live (mostly) in
seawater, and the crocodiles live (mostly) in the fresh. Given a chance, one
would handily kill the other, not just literally by eating it, but by out-competing it in the econiche in question. To a hippopotamus, (and crocodiles
will readily eat the hippopotami, if given a chance), a bull shark is not very
different from a Nile crocodile, especially if it starts to harass the
hippopotamus first. …Why a bull
shark?
Because AFO did its’ best have the element of
authenticity/realism in its episodes. This is one of the reasons why it was a good show, actually. Until Escobar
brought hippos to South America, where the bull shark also lives, BTW, the
former lived only in African rivers, on one hand, and on the other, the bull
shark is the biggest shark that can live in fresh water. Most cartilaginous
fish – sharks, rays and their relatives – cannot. Moreover, because AFO went
for realism, it could not just throw any shark at the hippopotamus, (unlike the
saltwater crocodiles, hippos usually do not go out into the sea), it had to be
a bull shark, period.
The result? One of the most predictable and
straightforward fights in the AFO, period. Usually, whether it was ‘the African
elephant vs. the white rhinoceros’ or ‘the saltwater crocodile vs. the great
white shark’, let alone ‘the lion vs. the tiger’ episode, of course, (but we’ve
discussed that piece separately in
the past), the audience is left wondering until the CGI fight itself, as to who
will win. In this case? The hippopotamus overwhelmed the bull shark so much
that no fan was probably surprised when it won – as it was fair.
What else can be said? The ‘bull shark vs. the
hippopotamus’ episode showed some of the limitations of AFO’s sort of show layout:
dealing with any animal combatants from a purely technical P.O.V. can be simply
limiting and basic and not necessarily exciting to watch…yet it is still
better, from a scientific P.O.V, than such mockumentaries as ‘Megalodon: the
monster shark lives’, which was featured in a ‘Shark Week’ of 2014 or 2015 as a
real documentary instead.
AFO may be limited in scope, but it still did its’
best to be scientific, and not just entertaining. (Yes, it did have its various
amusing bloopers, but it also had some scientific revelations too.) Nowadays,
the shows shown on the Discovery channel, as well as on Animal Planet, do not
even do this – a sad deterioration of TV standards…and probably a discussion
for another time.
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