FanFare

Jay Gardiner has given himself a fool’s errand—to find the remains of his deceased father in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Monastery Beach. [more inside]
posted by miss-lapin on Feb 19, 2024 - 1 comment

Rewatch! People find a hyperintelligent lifeform in the ocean, and it's turning people into blobs! The opinions from MeFites the last time this one came up ran the gamut. Some were happy that it was a genuinely bad movie instead of a knockoff like 1201 and 2; someone mention that is a knockoff, of The Abyss; some liked it; some found it DULL. There's a fun during-movie song in this one, with a psychedelic tone.Previously.
posted by JHarris on Apr 13, 2023 - 1 comment

Jake Sully lives with his newfound family formed on the planet of Pandora. Once a familiar threat returns to finish what was previously started, Jake must work with Neytiri and the army of the Na'vi race to protect their planet.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace on Dec 18, 2022 - 50 comments

When a young girl stows away on the ship of a legendary sea monster hunter, they launch an epic journey into uncharted waters - and make history to boot.
posted by garrett on Jul 26, 2022 - 11 comments

Jellyfish have been swimming in our oceans for well over half a billion years, longer than any other animal that lives on the planet. They make a venom so toxic it can kill a human in three minutes. Their sting—microscopic spears that pierce with five million times the acceleration of gravity—is the fastest known motion in the animal kingdom. Made of roughly 95 percent water, some jellies are barely perceptible virtuosos of disguise, while others glow with a luminescence that has revolutionized biotechnology. Yet until recently, jellyfish were largely ignored by science, and they remain among the most poorly understood of ocean dwellers. More than a decade ago, Juli Berwald left a career in ocean science to raise a family in landlocked Austin, Texas, but jellyfish drew her back to the sea. Recent, massive blooms of billions of jellyfish have clogged power plants, decimated fisheries, and caused millions of dollars of damage. Driven by questions about how overfishing, coastal development, and climate change were contributing to a jellyfish population explosion, Juli embarked on a scientific odyssey. She traveled the globe to meet the biologists who devote their careers to jellies, hitched rides on Japanese fishing boats to see giant jellyfish in the wild, raised jellyfish in her dining room, and throughout it all marveled at the complexity of these alluring and ominous biological wonders. Gracefully blending personal memoir with crystal-clear distillations of science, Spineless is the story of how Juli learned to navigate and ultimately embrace her ambition, her curiosity, and her passion for the natural world. She discovers that jellyfish science is more than just a quest for answers. It’s a call to realize our collective responsibility for the planet we share.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Jan 14, 2020 - 1 comment

Cod, Mark Kurlansky’s third work of nonfiction and winner of the 1999 James Beard Award, is the biography of a single species of fish, but it may as well be a world history with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded in the Icelandic sagas? Cod, frozen and dried in the frosty air, then broken into pieces and eaten like hardtack. What was the staple of the medieval diet? Cod again, sold salted by the Basques, an enigmatic people with a mysterious, unlimited supply of cod. As we make our way through the centuries of cod history, we also find a delicious legacy of recipes, and the tragic story of environmental failure, of depleted fishing stocks where once their numbers were legendary. In this lovely, thoughtful history, Mark Kurlansky ponders the question: Is the fish that changed the world forever changed by the world's folly?
posted by Homo neanderthalensis on Apr 1, 2019 - 2 comments

David Attenborough returns to the world's oceans in this sequel to the acclaimed documentary filming rare and unusual creatures of the deep, as well as documenting the problems our oceans face. [more inside]
posted by ellieBOA on Dec 2, 2017 - 1 comment