The octopus – an animal that itself is thought of as solitary – then reaches in and flushes them out. The unlikely cooperation between a reef octopus and a coral grouper – two predators working together to maximise their chances of capturing prey – had never been seen on film before the Blue Planet II team captured it: the grouper, spying fish hidden in crevices in the reef, signals to the octopus by tipping on to its head, flashing white and wiggling. Photograph: BBC NHU 2017 Fish like to work together (episode three, Coral Reefs) View image in fullscreen The Coral Reefs episode shows how an octopus and a grouper work together to catch prey. However, a paper published last year by researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Scientific Reports expressed scepticism, finding that “estimates of the ubiquity of suitable environments for the origin of life in and beyond our solar system may be somewhat overestimated”. A report assembling decades of research to make the case was published in the Astrobiology journal in 2014. That hydrocarbons – the molecules that are the building blocks of all living things – are being created spontaneously within the Lost City’s chimneys has led many to believe that the life on Earth began at such a vent four billion years ago. It is a hydrothermal field like no other seen on Earth: the vent fluids are alkaline, not acidic, and microbes live off methane and hydrogen instead of the carbon dioxide that is the key energy source for life at black smokers. The so-called Lost City of episode two was discovered about 2,300 miles east of Florida only in 2000 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) led a 10-day mission there in 2005. That life can exist at all within these highly acidic conditions has shaped thinking on early origins of life on Earth since the first “black smokers” (hydrothermal vents formed from deposits of iron sulfide) were discovered in 1979. I don’t know that anyone has ever seen that happen before.” “It started to tie itself up in knots – our eyes were on stalks,” said producer Orla Doherty. In one unnerving Blue Planet II scene shot from a manned submersible, a cut-throat eel, scavenging in a pool of brine formed from erupting methane gas, succumbs to toxic shock. Along it, primordial hydrothermal vents spew plumes of chemicals so hot they could melt lead. More than 75% of all volcanic activity on earth occurs in the deepest ocean, mostly along the mid-ocean ridge: an underwater mountain range spanning nearly 50,000 miles. More people have been to the moon than have been to the deepest ocean, nearly 11km down, where many scientists believe life on Earth began four billion years ago. Photograph: Luis Lamar 2017 Life on Earth may have begun in the deep (episode two, The Deep) View image in fullscreen The deepest ocean is nearly 11km down. One of the biggest leaps in the 16 years since the first Blue Planet was broadcast was in comprehension of the cognitive abilities of fish, she said: “Gone is the notion of the goldfish and the seconds-long memory.” Some scientists argue that it is a flawed metric by which to assess intelligence when many species are precluded from demonstrating their smarts by their lack of physical dexterity, or their environment.īutler pointed to the “referential gestures” – a rudimentary form of sign language – of coral grouper in episode three as indicative of an intelligence on a par with chimpanzees. and he was finding those anvil sites.”Īnecdotal reports of fish using tools date back decades, but what little evidence of it exists – a 2009 paper documenting captive stingrays using water jets to flush out trapped food, for instance – has been tempered by debate over what tool use actually is. “When he couldn’t crack open a clam on one anvil site, he’d go to another. Rachel Butler, an assistant producer on the first episode, told the series’s accompanying podcast that the behaviour could not be purely instinctual as the tuskfish seemed able to adapt to circumstances. That this clam-cracking behaviour has been demonstrated repeatedly, and by wild animals, may help shore up the case for more advanced cognitive abilities of fish than previously thought. The paper’s authors argued that it constituted tool use, considered a sign of intelligence in many species. The behaviour was first recorded in the Coral Reefs journal in 2011, with photographs showing a tuskfish grasping a cockle in its jaws and striking it repeatedly on a rock. The tenacious tuskfish filmed cracking open a clam on coral – “persistent Percy”, as he was named by those who shot the sequence on the Great Barrier Reef – could advance the case for the intelligence of fish. Photograph: Alex Vail/BBC Fish may be smarter than we once thought (episode one, One Ocean) View image in fullscreen An orange-dotted tuskfish holds a clam in its formidable jaws on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia.
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