Post Description

BBC HD - Nature's Great Events 06 - The Great Feast

The final episode features the summer plankton bloom along the coast of British Columbia and Alaska. In winter, the coastal fjords and inlets are relatively lifeless, and the resident Steller sea lions must dive deeper and further from the coast to catch the widely-dispersed herring. Humpback whales overwinter in the warm Pacific waters off Hawaii, where new mothers suckle their calves. They begin their 3,000 mile journey north in early spring, when the sea lions also give birth to their young. 

Spring storms are a hazard for the sea lion colonies and some pups are inevitably lost, but these same storms disturb nutrients in the water which, together with the strengthening power of the sun, act as the catalysts for the plankton bloom. Huge shoals of herring arrive to spawn, turning the shallows milky white. The herring sift plankton from the water. In their wake come larger predators, including Pacific white-sided dolphins and killer whales. The latter are filmed attacking a male sea lion. Common murres dive under the herring shoals and pick off the fish from below, pinning them to the surface. Their defence is to form a bait ball, but gulls gathering on the surface attack them from above. 

The finale to the programme features unique underwater footage of humpbacks engulfing whole bait balls, and reveals their co-operative hunting behaviour called bubble-netting. The diary segment, "Swallowed by a Whale", looks at the challenges of filming the humpbacks and sea lions underwater.

MEDIA INFO:

Video
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Format profile                   : Main@High
Format settings, Matrix          : Default
Duration                         : 49mn 3s
Bit rate mode                    : Variable
Bit rate                         : 16.7 Mbps
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Width                            : 1 920 pixels
Height                           : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio             : 16:9
Frame rate                       : 25.000 fps
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Stream size                      : 5.73 GiB (91%)

Audio
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Menu ID                          : 1650 (0x672)
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Format/Info                      : Audio Coding 3
Duration                         : 49mn 2s
Bit rate mode                    : Constant
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Channel(s)                       : 6 channels
Channel positions                : Front: L C R, Surround: L R, LFE
Sampling rate                    : 48.0 KHz
Video delay                      : -394ms
Stream size                      : 157 MiB (2%)
Language                         : English