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Monday, December 07, 2009

Nature's Great Events - The Great Salmon Run (crtsy: Berto @ http://berto-meister.blogspot.com/)

I found this interesting snippet of one of my favorite NatGeo documentaries I saw when I was a kid, its about the Salmon Run which it a treat for the eyes and also for the North American Grizzly bear population. Read on... Berto picked this up.

The Pacific Ocean Salmon have it rough... when they reach adulthood, they embark on a journey thousands of miles long to the very same place in which they were spawned a few years earlier. It's still something of a great mystery how they manage to orient themselves so effectively, but this instinct drives them so powerfully that they will undergo great risks to complete their life cycle. My guess is that, compared to salmon, even Sysiphus had it easy...

The problem for the salmon, apart from the tremendous personal investment and the sheer difficulty of the suicidal one-way mission, is that plenty of other animals (whales, sharks, eagles, bears, foxes, sea lions, etc.) have come to learn of their great migration and systematically place themselves in strategic position for the hunt. What ultimately ensues for these poor fish is a massacre of gigantic proportions, as their last few seconds alive are spent being torn to shreds by hungry bears and other predators.

But that's just some of the amazing footage you'll be able to watch in this fascinating and very educational documentary narrated by David Attenborough. Watch out for some amazing footage of eagles hunting salmon... it's simply incredible.

Smoked Salmon for breakfast? or Sushi (Berto definitely voted for Sushi :) )