Nature Documentaries This video has a good example of something that crops up in nature documentaries time and time again. It’s a quick short about fish hunting birds but here’s the statement that annoys me. Ugh! There’s nothing amazing about it! It’s unique behavior, yeah, but it’s not like it’s something an animal is incapable of. Fucking first of all, animals develop new behaviors out of the blue all the time and that’s a testament to the flexibility of animals’ brains to adapt to changing conditions, stimuli, whatever. We’re talking new food sources, new potential threats, whatever. Second of all, it’s not like the damn fish is sitting under the surface with a chalk board and an abacus doing advanced math. It’s all about physical awareness, coordination, and trial and error/practice. Shit, we humans do the exact same kind of stuff all the fucking time, whether we’re talking about baseball player catching a fly ball or a chef catching a jar of cooking ingredients falling off the shelf. It’s awesome and inspiring to see new and unique behaviors in animals, but seriously, sometimes I think the way documentaries talk about them actually make them sound less amazing because they don't give animals the credit they're due. Theology Texted my dad what I thought was a pretty straightforward question last night. He said he’s gonna need to take time to formulate an answer and will e-mail me a response. Which makes me wonder if I asked a question that is actually hard to answer and needs a lot of time or if it’s easy to answer but there’s a lot of depth that can go into the response. Either way, I’m looking forward to the e-mail now. . . . a fish here that amazingly has a brain capable of calculating the airspeed, altitude, and trajectory of a bird.