Animal Face-off: shark vs. hippo - July 17

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.

Animal Face-off: Croc vs. shark - July 15

Getting back to AFO, let us remember one of the first episodes of the show – crocodile vs. shark. Well, technically, it was the ‘saltwater crocodile vs. great white shark’ episode, but…the truth is that it was really just crocodile vs. shark, period. Shark and crocodile species do show different behaviors between each other (bull, great white, and tiger sharks live different lives, for example), but it isn’t as complex and well-defined (or well-studied) as that of the mammals. Humans scientists have studied the lives of tigers, lions, leopards a lot and they know how they act similarly, and how – differently, but crocodiles or sharks – not so much. And it shows.

Let us be honest – any fight (I am talking about CGI, on-screen, not real life) is controversial in terms of an outcome.  However, while the fight between a lion and a tiger caused many arguments, and there is an actual page on the Wikipedia dedicated to the matter of which of the two big cats is the better fighter and/or killer, the fight between a crocodile and a shark…did not.  No Wiki page, no nothing. And?

And nothing. Human beings are prejudiced – we are always prejudiced. Either we want one of the combatants to win ‘for real’, or we do not care either way. Our feelings influence our choices and our choices color our feelings. The AFO episodes of ‘lion vs. tiger’ and ‘saltwater crocodile vs. great white shark’ are not too different, yet audience’s reactions to each of them, were.

Anything else? Yes, unlike crocodiles and sharks, the great cats (and also bears, BTW), utilize not just teeth and jaws, but also paws and claws. Unlike, say, DW, AFO usually has fairly limited material to work with from the start, and the ‘saltwater crocodile vs. great white shark’ was an especially limited episode. Yes, it worked – to a point; it showed the audience that the crocodile was a ‘crusher’, while the shark was a ‘slicer’, but otherwise the two animals were equal, and if in case of the lion and the tiger most of the audience’s sympathies were on the lion’s side, here they didn’t really have any preference – so why did the shark win?

Because from a technical point of view it is a bigger and a heavier combatant, and in AFO this is the winning champion. Sometimes this is the proper P.O.V., (as it was in the brown bear and the Siberian tiger face-off), but other times it is not. A great white shark might be heavier than a crocodile, even the saltwater crocodile, but the crocodile actually has a very powerful bite, and its death roll is much more energetic than it how was depicted in this episode. On the other hand, the shark’s skeleton is made out of cartilage, (just feel your nose or your ears), meaning that it is even more vulnerable to a crocodile’s crushing bite than an antelope or a zebra is. In real life, the saltwater crocodile would have hurt the great white shark much more so than how it did on the show, to a point where it wouldn’t have continue the fight once the crocodile broke off and went to the surface to breathe, but just swam off to recover, (hopefully). But apparently this was not good enough for AFO, (unlike JFC, all of its episodes resulted in one opponent dead and the other – alive, while JFC was more flexible), and so the shark won – just because. Well, good luck to it.

For the rest of us, things are not so rosy, and no, I am not talking about the Marvel comics’ Civil War II for a change – that is actually shaping to be something interesting. I am talking about the recent terrorist attack in France – and even more recent attempt at a coup in Turkey. We are living in interesting times – and I can only hope that we can survive them.

River Monsters - Phantom Assassin

In the last episode of RM of Canada's version of S4, JW returns to Australia to tackle a rare and elusive Glyphis shark, and from the start, problems begin.

JW's problems appear to be technical: there is driftwood in the river that tangles up in the tackle and fishing line; there are other fish, and also freshwater crabs, that eat the bait; and there are the bull sharks and saltwater crocodiles that would eat the bait and the anglers, if they could. In fact, a sizable part of the episode is centered on the saltwater crocodiles and their interactions with people: this episode reconstructs a story where a saltwater crocodile has emerged from the river at night and attacked two tourists in their tent, almost killing one of them in the process. That's just scary.

The other main predator in this episode are the sharks. First, there are the bull sharks, which by now have become a rather established character of RM: JW has about one episode per RM season about those cartilaginous fish so far, including the first episode of this season, BTW. Thus, it is no surprise to the audience to see JW catch several of them in the process of the ep... but there are others.

More precisely, there are other cartilaginous fish - not just the sharks. An Australian sawfish and a whipray both make cameo appearances as river monsters, but it is still the sharks who steal the show.

Well... sort of. In this episode, JW actually goes out to sea to fish for them (for XP, I assume). There, as he first encounters the multitude of sharks that inhabit Australia's coast (and some of them are official man-eaters) and later - the rough and unpredictable coastal ties in King Sound in particular (9 m of water going up and down - that's a lot!), he realizes that the boundaries between the fresh water and the salt are less distinct than he had thought, and that even such sea-based sharks as the mako can come up the river for a while, not just the bull shark and the sawfishes.

But what about the Glyphis shark - the river monster that JW went to catch in this episode? Did he catch it? Yes! It is a rather small and gracile shark, much less intimidating than the bull, for example, but it is a shark that lives primarily in the fresh water, not in the sea, unlike the bull, and as such, this catch of JW deserves points for its rarity, if anything else. After all, size alone does not make a river monster, as the Mekong giant catfish can testify...

S4 of RM had its ups and downs, with some very unequal and different (in quality) episodes. But it has ended on a positive, upbeat note, and so I can safely admit that I have enjoyed watching it, period.