Jeni Clevers (producer), “The Big Blue” (2006)
There’s an area in the Southern Ocean just south of South Australia and south-eastern Australia near Tasmania where every summer there is a huge bounty of krill and fish feeding on a tremendous abundance of phytoplankton. Currents travelling along the sea floor carrying minerals and other nutrients meet the continental shelf and rush upwards, drawn by winds blowing parallel to the Australian coast; the nutrients meeting the waters’ surface allow algae to flourish and the zooplankton feeds on it. In turn, the zooplankton attract fish and the animals that feed on them, including blue whales. The upwelling currents form a huge upwelling system known as the Great South Australian Coastal Upwelling System and the major part of this system is the Bonney Upwelling near Tasmania.
The documentary follows whale researcher Peter Gill in his quest to record the behaviours and social lives of blue whales in one year. In particular he and another researcher are keen to record the feeding behaviour of the whales. Although the whales are the major stars here, the documentary focuses on other animals that are also attracted to the Bonney Upwelling area: gannets, Australian fur seals, Little Penguins and southern bluefin tuna and their life-styles. The life-cycles of the gannets and seals are followed to some extent: the fur seals have their babies during the summer, feed them for several days and then return to the water for days or even weeks to feed on fish while the pups stay in rookeries. Little Penguins hunt for fish while their chicks huddle in burrows with one parent baby-sitting them.
Actor Colin Friels does a fine job narrating the documentary which is as factual as can be for a film aimed at the general public. The scientists collect whale faeces and sloughed skin for further study and to identify any animals that might return to the Bonney Upwelling over successive years. Perhaps the only issue viewers might have with the documentary is that it was filmed over a mild summer when krill stocks were low and so not as many animals came to the Bonney Upwelling as expected. At the very least, the documentary should have been made over two or three years so as to stress the regularity and the cyclical nature of the blue whales’ visits.
The biggest surprise that some viewers may have is that the blue whales do not simply go about vacuuming up passive krill in the manner of cattle grazing grass: the huge beasts locate a krill population and lunge straight into it, their mouths gaping open. The krill, made up of tiny crustaceans, try to escape the huge maws coming for them and the blue whales eagerly follow every twist and turn the krill make. The whales are more predatory than they and their other baleen relatives have been given credit for. Another surprise is that they are more social than was once thought: they appear to travel alone or in pairs but keep in contact with others of their kind over very long distances (as in hundred of kilometres) with low booming noises that can reach 155 decibels, about the volume of jet aircraft.
The documentary was made with high definition film to enable viewing of the whales just beneath the surface of the ocean from an aerial point of view. There is some underwater filming as well. Although the film-makers do not come very close to the whales due to distance restrictions they must observe so as not to cause the animals distress, they are able to emphasise the huge size of the creatures and their mysterious quality as they emerge out of the blue oceanic expanses and disappear back into them smoothly and gracefully. Their immense size, their linear bullet shapes, their speed and the silence with which they move through the water, and their seemingly placid natures do not fail to impress viewers.
The message delivered is that to preserve this highly endangered species, we need to understand the blue whales’ way of life and to do so, we must learn about and understand the environment in which they live and the creatures they feed upon or live with. That is why knowing how the Bonney Upwelling operates and how it has formed is vital, as it is one of the few areas of the planet where blue whales congregate in huge numbers to feed on the krill. These days the greatest threats to the survival of blue whales in the Southern Ocean region do not just include whaling; they also include energy exploration and drilling which may affect the quality of the waters and the health of the krill populations and of the animals that feed on them. Should the marine ecosystem collapse due to human activities, the loss of blue whales would be but one tragedy that is part of an even greater catastrophe.