Last shoot of season 2!

Christine, Tim and I just came back from Grand Cayman, where we completed the final shoot of Season 2 of Jonathan Bird's Blue World! The segment is about Stingray City and the research that Guy Harvey (famous marine artist and PhD in marine biology) has conducted into the habits of these animals. Stingray City is the name of a place where they have been feeding Southern Stingrays for many years, making them friendly. On a day when a cruise ship is in port, more than a thousand people go out to feed the stingrays. What effect does this have on the animals? How does it change their natural behavior? Well, you'll find out when the show airs! One of the best parts of this segment was getting to know Guy and his daughter Jessica. We spent a couple days diving, fishing and even relaxing on the beach with Guy and his family. It was great fun!

Later, we shot a segment at the Cayman Turtle Farm which will probably appear in season 3. This new facility (rebuilt after Hurricane Ivan in 2004) is quite impressive, and the turtles are so cute!

-Jonathan

The Blue World Team Goes to British Columbia

Things have been busy around here in the Blue World! As we reach the end of our season 2 filming, we are getting a little nuts. Pierre, Kerry, Linda and I just returned from a week shooting in Port Hardy, British Columbia, at the end of Vancouver Island. We went out for a segment on Giant Pacific Octopus, some shots of giant sun stars, and also the Pacific Wolf-eel. We didn't get enough decent material for the octopus segment, so that will have to wait until season 3. However, we got some great footage of the wolf eels and sun stars, so look for those in the release of season 2!

-Jonathan

The Blue World Team Goes To Antarctica!

We have just landed back in Ushuaia, Argentina (southernmost city in the world) from our exciting Blue World shoot in Antarctica.  Our team took a ship over 600 nautical miles from Ushuaia over the Drake Passage (roughest water in the world) to Antarctica for a week of diving and exploring the most remote and hostile place on Earth.

We dove every day in water that ranged from 30 to 34 degrees, using extremely warm drysuits.  The highlights of the diving included a school of gigantic jellyfish almost 2 feet across, weird and rare cold water benthic invertebrates, a pair of curious Leopard seals (known to be the most aggressive animal in Antarctica) and even a dive on a shipwreck.  

We walked with thousands of penguins and Fur seals, dove under icebergs, and even visited a couple of remote research stations.  Fortunately, we enjoyed extremely good weather.  The sun was out most of the time and the daytime temperatures peaked above freezing.

All this exciting stuff will be part of the Antarctic segments in the second season of Jonathan Bird's Blue World coming to you in the summer of 2009!

The Blue World goes underground!

Hi Everyone, 

After being home for an entire week and a half, I packed my bags to head off on the next adventure of Jonathan Bird's Blue World.  Our Season 2 filming continued in the cenotes of Mexico!  Julia (line producer), Tim (cameraman and director) and I headed to Tulum, in the Riviera Maya of Mexico to spend 3 days diving in the cenotes and caverns of the Yucatan.  Although none of us are certified cave divers, we were lucky to have cave diving instructor Marco Wagner from H2O Pro Divers leading us through the cenotes, pointing out the exciting highlights.  We dove Grand Cenote, Car Wash, and Calavera several times and filmed some amazing things, from stalactites and stalagmites to haloclines (where fresh water and salt water meet, creating a psychedelic boundary layer).  As usual, we shot way more footage than we need for a segment.  Wait until you see this segment!  Wow, it's going to be amazing!  A big thanks goes out to the Riviera Maya Tourism Board for setting up the shoot and to Rick Allen/Nautilus Productions for the loan of a monstrous 200 watt underwater HID light.

We are planning a summer 2009 release of season 2, which will consist of at least 7 half-hour episodes.  Keep watching this Blog for more updates on the continuing adventures!

Season 2 shooting continues in Yap...

Julia, Pierre and I just returned from 2 weeks shooting in Yap, Micronesia. This is one difficult place to reach. I flew from Boston to Newark to Tokyo to Guam to Yap and it took 2 days. We shot a segment on Gray Reef sharks, a segment on manta rays (Yap is most famous for its manta rays), and parts of segments on mangroves, sea stars, venomous fish, mandarinfish, anemonefish and remoras. It was a busy shoot! We are building a huge backlog of material to be edited. Kerry, Art and I will be busy editing these segments all winter, in between additional shoots for season 2. It was a long trip and I’m glad to be home! I got a few dives with my still camera, so here are a few shots! -Jonathan

Diving and Filming in Eastport, Maine

Well, Pierre and I just returned from underwater filming in Eastport, Maine. We were working on parts of several Blue World segments which will feature creatures found in this incredibly rich cold-water environment. We spent some time filming Gene, a male Atlantic wolffish which I have been photographing now for 12 years. He currently is guarding a nest of eggs in his den and was hard to photograph, but we were able to position the lights and camera to get some shots of the eggs behind his head. We also filmed monster-sized Northern Lobsters which attacked the camera, sea stars, basket stars, scallops, soft corals, and a bunch of other stuff which will turn up here and there throughout the second season. It was cold water, drysuits and hot chocolate after the dives for a week. Great fun!

The images here are older images for example since we were only shooting video this week.

Rescuing Tropical Fish in Rhode Island

Because the Gulf Stream brings juvenile tropical fish from the Caribbean all the way to southern New England, divers sometimes find baby tropicals in the shallows while diving in Rhode Island and further south.  Unfortunately, when winter comes and the water temperatures drop, they die.  So, for many years, the New England Aquarium Dive Club has organized a fall tropical fish rescue day event in Rhode Island to collect the tiny fish.  Many of them go to home aquaria, and the rest go to the New England Aquarium.  Many of the enormous fish in the Giant Ocean Tank exhibit at the aquarium were actually caught during the tropical fish rescue, and would have died if they hadn't been saved.

I thought this would make a fun Blue World segment, so I joined seasoned pro fish rescuers Alicia Lenci and Michael Schruben for a lesson in fish hunting.  They have been a part of the fish rescue for many years, and assisted me on my film Secrets of the Reef in the Philippines as pro "fish wranglers."  The problem isn't so much catching the fish, but finding them.  They are small, and they hide in the rocks in very shallow water (really, not deep enough that you need scuba gear...some people hunt them with a snorkel).  Michael and I did a couple dives and he showed me how to find and catch the fish, while Tim Geers and Kerry Hurd shot the footage of it all happening.

We encountered somewhat limited visibility from recent storms, and some surge, which made the filming difficult, but I think it will still make a good segment.  We still have some more filming to do for the segment at the New England Aquarium, but it's going to be fun when complete, and should end up in the second season of Jonathan Bird's Blue World.

-Jonathan