Why do bother watching nature documentaries? I know they’re rubbish and yet each time I’m like “maybe this one won’t suck”
Right off the bat it’s projecting vicious intent onto nature. Nature isn’t just shit that happens, oh no, it’s A BRUTAL WAR OF DYNASTIES!!!1!!! 
“Look at this centipede from the Devonian, but invertebrates wouldn’t be the ones to win the game of survival” WHAT DO YOU MEAN? WHAT GAME? INVERTS ARE STILL HERE, THEY’RE THE MOST COMMON AND THRIVING LIFEFORM ON THE PLANET.
And of course the whole thing chooses to fixate on competition and ignore how much of nature revolves around cooperation and symbiosis.
I am begging the media (especially media that sells itself as educational) to stop speaking about nature the same way a 1930s German pseudoscientist would.
Americans can’t make good docs. Most of the time they underestimate the audience and dumb down the content. And they always feel like they’re somehow competing with “real films”, so they play it up like there’s supposed to be ACTION and INTENSITY while… doing an interview or filming a bug or whatever.
I remember as a kid how excited I was that the history channel was starting, and I disappointed I was after less than a day of viewing.
The snake jump cut is drawn like a moth mosquito buzzing sound to a flame flame cut when it sees thermal vision effect its prey snare jump cut snare
I’m thinking of all those documentaries with celebrity narrators making “funny” commentary over the most mundane things
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The only good nature shows are produced by the BBC, which is generally good outside of news.
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Reminds me of a segment from Blue Planet II, where they show a fish that changes gender, but portray it as the most terrifying shit ever, horror music included
I tried watching Nature’s Greatest Events last week and it was horrifying. It showed a cuddly polar bear mum and cubs struggling with breaking ice sheets as summer approached in Antarctica. Attenborough remarks how climate change and shrinking ice is making it difficult for polar bears to hunt.
The documentary was shot a decade and a half ago. I hope things aren’t much worse them but I felt really really guilty watching that.
But how would we pretend that capitalism is human nature if peoples know that cooperation is just as natural if not more than competition!?!!I only watch Meerkat Manor
“Look at this centipede from the Devonian, but invertebrates wouldn’t be the ones win the game of survival” WHAT DO YOU MEAN? WHAT GAME? INVERTS ARE STILL HERE, THEY’RE THE MOST COMMON AND THRIVING LIFEFORM ON THE PLANET.
Bonies think they rule the world when the entire ecosystem would collapse if invertebrates disappear.
Yup
I love that graphic. I assume it’s by number of species? If it was by number of individuals I guess protists would be a lot bigger
Here’s a cool one that does it by biomass:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/all-the-biomass-of-earth-in-one-graphic/
shit that thumbnail is small, if you don’t want to open the article you can open the image in a new tab to see it full size
Yes it is by species. That biomass one is interesting too, awesome!
I’m actually amazed how high up the ladder humans are on that one.
Even using ‘mass’ as a metric of success isn’t fair to birds, who evolutionarily must keep a very low weight.
Do hollow bones make you a less successful species?!
Then again, we probably killed a large chunk of the ones below us. There’s still room to climb, just wait until ocean acidification really starts kicking in.
more biomass of viruses than of mammals
I think most of the viruses are bacteriophages
Bacteriophages are among the most common and diverse entities in the biosphere.[2] Bacteriophages are ubiquitous viruses, found wherever bacteria exist. It is estimated there are more than 1031 bacteriophages on the planet, more than every other organism on Earth, including bacteria, combined.[3] Viruses are the most abundant biological entity in the water column of the world’s oceans, and the second largest component of biomass after prokaryotes,[4] where up to 9x108 virions per millilitre have been found in microbial mats at the surface,[5] and up to 70% of marine bacteria may be infected by bacteriophages.[6]
Owls, a naturally contrarian avian, hoot loudly when they see something that displeases them
HOOT HOOT HOOT
I like documentaries in general but the quality has dipped a lot over time
There is a vast difference in american documentaries to those made in Europe, same could be said about tv in general.
Not that I watch much tv now, I haven’t watched in over a decade
Its always the neo-Malthusian competition and pseudo-morality nonsense rather than adaptation and survival. Anyway, conservationism in the US had its origins in racist huntsmen who blamed natives and the poor for species going extinct rather than their own bourgeois failson and industrial practice (greatest example is the buffalo), so not surprised.
Thinking about documentaries, all the in the future documentaries are really super lib, worst one that comes to mind is Earth 2100, its so US and bourgeois centric even when it came out it was breathtakingly bad. My favorite is the end where the narrator protagonist flips out her grandson won’t ever see an opera like we’re back in Balzac’s time and that’s the highpoint of the arts, society and culture.
Reminds me of a Sam Kriss quote (not linking the source because he’s a sex pest and I don’t want to give him clicks):
Every irrational social order has declared itself to be in some way isomorphic with reality itself. Once, the cosmos was etched into concentric spheres with God in the middle, a macrocosmic representation of feudalism. Now, geneticists like Dawkins argue that what we see as animal life is really just a capitalist free market in genetic code.
Claiming life is a capitalist market because genetics is staggeringly braindead when the most successful strategy is always cooperation
Nature documentaries at least entertain my cat, so there’s some value.
Best nature doc I’ve ever seen was this one by CGTN. China has some incredible wildlife, and CGTN doesn’t force in some weird ass perspective.
That said, I love to watch the goofy alien/UFO/conspiracy docs from history channel or worse. They’re just so stupid hahahaI found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Yeah life on our planet was really bad for a lot of different reasons.
I’d cleanse my palete with the mosasaur spa scene from Prehistoric Planet.
