1994 VHS • Eyewitness Fish 60 FPS

About

Eyewitness Fish is a documentary program from the BBC Eyewitness series, using the salmon as its central narrative thread while surveying the breadth of fish biology and diversity.

The program begins with the salmon's lifecycle as a framing device, following its journey from stream to ocean and back, and uses that structure to explore the 500-million-year fossil record of fish, including jawless ancestors, the coelacanth's rediscovery off the East African coast in 1938, fin and skeleton evolution, body diversity from dwarf pygmy gobies to whale sharks, swim bladder function, the lateral line organ, scale structure, the freshwater-saltwater barrier and how salmon cross it, shoaling behavior, camouflage and deception strategies across dozens of species, deep-sea fish adaptations including bioluminescence, flatfish eye migration, extreme environment survivors including the ice fish and volcanic lake tilapia, fish senses including hearing, electricity generation by eels, and vocal communication. The program also covers fish in religion and mythology, the goby-shrimp partnership, cleaner wrasse behavior, seahorse male brooding, and salmon spawning.

The behind-the-scenes segment describes building a donut-shaped flow tank in the Eyewitness studio in Wales to photograph salmon swimming against a controlled current, with accounts of a plumbing failure during filling and the challenge of maintaining the fish's comfort at the correct water speed.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in The VHS Vault

Licence or status

The Internet Archive states none for this item.

Credit

The Vista Group®

Language

English

Subtitles

English

Who can watch

The archive gives no rating. Invisible Network shows it to Teens profiles and older, judged from its collection and subjects. How films are placed