Coming up, Jonathan joins famous IMAX filmmaking team Howard and Michele Hall for dinner with
sea turtles!
Welcome to Jonathan Bird’s Blue World.
Howard and Michele Hall are a world-renown underwater filmmaking team.
For more than 30 years, they have traveled the world, making animal behavior documentaries.
They are most famous for their incredible underwater 3D IMAX films, which are made using
an enormous camera system that weighs more than 1,000 pounds.
It uses two rolls of 70mm film and costs more than $2,000 per minute to run.
But the image quality is amazing on the giant screen of an IMAX theater.
Howard and Michele are my heroes—their films inspired me to become an underwater filmmaker.
So imagine how excited I am to be on a dive trip in the Philippines with my heroes!
Howard and Michele have come to Busuanga, Palawan to work on a segment about Dugongs
with me.
But we also are going to explore a dive site famous for sea turtles.
It’s a long trip from North America to the Philippines, but this is one of the best places
in the world to scuba dive.
Our captain sets a course for Dimakya Island.
Then its time to suit up.
Michele hits the water first.
Then Howard and I.
There is no reef here, just a sandy bottom.
At first it doesn’t look very promising.
But our divemaster has already found a sea turtle.
This green turtle is foraging for food.
She has a freeloader in the form of a huge remora sticking to her.
She really likes the sea grasses that grow here.
There isn’t a ton of nutritional value in the grass, so she spends a lot of her time
eating.
And she digs down to get to the more nutritional roots.
Divers come here fairly often, so she is not afraid of us at all.
Howard and I can get up really close to film.
I have to be honest, I never thought I would have Howard and Michele Hall as Blue World
cinematographers!
Like land turtles, sea turtles breathe air.
They hold their breath underwater and need to rise up to breathe every few minutes.
A quick breath, and its back to feeding.
Michele demonstrates just how close we can get.
Maybe the sea turtle could use a little help?
Michele notices that the sea turtle eats an awful lot of sand while feeding.
So maybe she can assist.
This sea turtle is no dummie.
She knows an easy meal when she sees it.
This looks like fun to me.
Nearby I find another turtle and see if she will accept a handout.
Pretty soon the sea turtles are following us around like puppies!
We can even get them to do tricks!
All this eating is making me hungry.
So I decide to give the seagrass a taste.
Salad isn’t my favorite food, but sea salad?
Disgusting.
Yech.
Michele likes healthy foods though, and she loves it!
If only we had a nice vinaigrette.
Meanwhile, the turtle has her eyes on a thick ring of grass around an anemone.
But as she inches closer, she finds out why nobody is eating that seagrass.
The anemonefish are protective of their home and drive away intruders.
They even attack Howard as he sets up for a shot!
Soon we notice that the anemonefish are working very hard to move a piece of waterlogged bamboo
closer to their anemone.
These fish are very persistent.
Once they get it in position, we look closer and realize what’s going on.
They have laid their eggs on the bamboo!
The largest male aerates the eggs constantly, by swishing water over them with his fins.
With anemonefish, it’s the males that care for the eggs.
Once we have been watching for a while, the little fish decide we are no longer a threat
and stop attacking.
Nearby, another anemone, this one harboring a different inhabitant.
Michele coaxes it out to play.
A tiny cleaner shrimp, looking for fish to clean.
Michele is an odd customer at this cleaning station.
I can’t believe how long she can hold her breath!
And I think the sea turtle is feeling a little left out.
So I go back to helping her harvest some sea grass.
But her meal ticket has a finite air supply, and its time for us to head back to the boat.
I’m so excited that I got to dive with Howard and Michele Hall.
And we were lucky to find such cooperative subjects.
Sometimes even a shallow sandy sea floor that looks boring, can turn out to be an amazing
wild animal encounter in the blue world.
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