Underwater footage shot whilst scuba diving in the Fiji islands and Tonga. Featuring colorful coral reefs, huge schools of tropical fish, sharks, humpback whales, underwater caves, scuba divers and much more marine life from the south Pacific.
Bonus: click the CC button for closed captions on this video from Bubble Vision, or enjoy the convenient list that they put together in the video description, (click Show More below the vid) for labeled names of the dive sites and marine life in each shot.
Thanks, @MollyWesterman.
If you happen to find yourself driving in Norway, be sure to drive along the Atlanterhavsveien or The Atlantic Ocean Road, located here. This 5.2 mile road was built in the 1980s to connect a series of islands and skerries (small rocky islands too small for anyone to live on). It has eight bridges, four resting places, and views that enjoy all kinds of weather conditions and (from the look of this viral video) lots of interaction with the ocean!
An 86-year-old Yorkshire man, Brendon Grimshaw may have lived alone for many years on the tiny island paradise of Moyenne in the Seychelles in the middle of the Indian Ocean since he bought it in 1962 for £8000, but he is rarely lonely.
For Brendon has spent the years reintroducing the indigenous giant tortoise to Moyenne and now shares the island with 120 of the magnificent creatures, on one of the world’s smallest national parks.
The BBC’s Simon Reeve went to visit him.
Once a hideaway for pirates, the island is now a paradise of accidental conservation! But it took a lot of work in the last 50 years to change it.
He hired his own Man Friday, a Seychellois called Rene Lafortune, who helped him transform Moyenne.
Together they planted palm trees, mango and paw-paw.
They saved rainwater and pumped it up the hillside by hand, or rowed back to the main island to collect a barrel of fresh water.
It was backbreaking, exhausting work. ‘My hands were covered in blisters,’ said Brendon…
Slowly the trees grew and fruited, and eventually water, electricity and a phone cable were piped across from Mahe.
Brendon also encouraged around 2,000 native birds back to the island by feeding them. Fifty years very well-spent.
via Kottke.
We love this video of the Chamarrita, a dance and music style in the Azores, nine volcanic islands in the North Atlantic Ocean. This one was shot on Pico Island by MPAGDP, which stands for a música portuguesa a gostar dela própria, a project created to celebrate and archive the variety of music made in Portugal. What a wonderful site! There are many videos, almost all shot outside to create an energy for the music and to show the world as a giant stage.
We watched these videos, too: Pauliteiros de Miranda, Marujinho da Palmela, and the kid’s favorite, É p’ra Amanhã (António Variações), to name just a few, but there are so so so many other excellent videos to check out…
via Rosa Pomar.
In a world first, zookeeper Rohan Cleave captured the amazing hatching process of a critically endangered Lord Howe Island Stick Insect at Melbourne Zoo. The eggs incubate for over 6 months and until now the hatching process has never been witnessed. If you didn’t see it you wouldn’t believe it could fit in that egg!
Krulwich Wonders has a great post with excellent photos of this six-legged black giant and the incredible story of how, with just 24 of them living under one bush on a remote island cliff in 2001, scientists spent two years determining if they could move a few, finally breeding two at the Melbourne Zoo in Australia. This passage gives some detail on the conservation group’s success:
When Jane Goodall visited in 2008, Patrick [Honan, of the zoo’s invertebrate conservation breeding group,] showed her rows and rows of incubating eggs: 11,376 at that time, with about 700 adults in the captive population. Lord Howe Island walking sticks seem to pair off — an unusual insect behavior — and Goodall says Patrick “showed me photos of how they sleep at night, in pairs, the male with three of his legs protectively over the female beside him.”
The co-curator was into the suspense of the video. The details of the story echo that…
via @990000.
