“Hunger is good discipline,” Ernest Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, and like so much of Hemingway’s work, what he wrote in the privacy of his study would have a larger, wider reach once it escaped into the world.
The PBS Nature program The Ocean’s Greatest Feast tells a story about one such moveable feast, but it’s a story that’s rarely told and virtually unknown, at least to popular culture and mass-market natural history programming.
Alone, a single fish may seem insignificant. Together, though, they can shape the fate of an entire coastline, we learn in The Ocean’s Greatest Feast’s opening moments. In the calm, relatively untrammelled waters off South Africa, billions of sardines begin a mass migration each year, lured by the promise of food, shelter and a more comfortable life thousands of miles away. It’s the largest movement of living things on Earth, and yet little is known of this mass migration.
As with so many of nature’s mass migrations, the journey is long, hard and arduous — “nature’s greatest ambush,“ we’re told — where every predator along the African coastline lies in wait, from gannets and sea lions to sharks and dolphins. Even as the planet’s climate systems go through paroxysms of volatility, forcing us to pay more attention to the Earth’s carefully intertwined ecosystems, where the failure of one species can disrupt the entire food chain with far-reaching effects science is only now beginning to understand.
It sounds counterintuitive but where apex predators like sharks and orcas go, so go every other species goes. If the sardine migration fails, the entire food chain will collapse. The sardines sustain the vast congregations of Cape fur seals that gather on the remote African coastline to feed, belch, quarrel and raise their pups, which demand to be fed every four hours. The Cape fur seals in turn provide food for some of the biggest great white sharks on the planet — surfers in wet suits can look startlingly similar to a seal when viewed from below, which is why it’s never a good idea to surf wherever fur seals and great white sharks can be found together.
Cape gannets time their entire breeding cycle on the unpredictable arrival of the sardines, yet another example of how completely unrelated animal species depend on each other for survival. It’s not just birds, either, but bottlenose dolphins,
The Ocean’s Greatest Feast is disarming in its simplicity of storytelling. It’s understated in tone, gently paced with peaceful, unironic narration, and the visuals are unusual for how rarely underwater scenes of birds swimming after fish ever make it into nature programs. It’s not the kind of flashy program that will draw anxious TV viewers away from the commercial broadcast networks and streaming sites, but there’s something genuinely appealing about sitting back and appreciating nature in its calmer, gentler moments. PBS Nature has always managed to navigate the often blurred line between popular entertainment and fact-based science without pandering to the lowest common denominator or overwhelming the casual viewer with a dizzying parade of facts and figures — the spreadsheet approach to science programming. The Ocean’s Greatest Feast is worth a look. It’s not something you’ll discuss over a latte with friends at the local sidewalk café in the morning, but it will make you feel better for having seen it.
The Ocean’s Greatest Feast premieres Wednesday on PBS Nature at 8/7c.
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