"Mysterious Planet: Giants of the Carribean" is a spectacular but also somewhat confusing documentary about...essentially everything at the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, and its oceanic vicinity. Ostensibly, though, it´s about whale sharks! And yes, the sharks are in there somewhere.
The narrator moves back and forth between the jungle, the water-filled underground caves, and the open sea, just as freely as he crosses millions of years of deep time. It´s not always clear whether what we see is real footage, or the special effects department working overtime. But yes, "Giants of the Carribean" *is* fascinating.
As late as two years ago, marine biologists were stunned to discover a huge annual gathering of whale sharks off the Yucatan coast, in an area seemingly devoid of plankton (their staple food). What on earth were they doing there? Apparently, there *is* a lot of plankton in the area, after all, specifically the roe of bonito tunafish. Meanwhile, other scientists are exploring the underground "rivers" in the Yucatan jungles, which may even have inspired ancient Mayan mythology about a dangerous subterranean realm of demons and spirits. The flooded caves turn out to have a connection to the Caribbean Sea! Fortunately or otherwise, the only "monsters" in the caves are peculiar shrimps, fishes and (above water level) bats and snakes. There are also mysterious bacterial formations nicknamed "Hell´s Bells". Apparently, the bacteria need neither sun light nor oxygen to propagate. (Life on Mars discovered?)
The sink holes (known as cenotes) in the ex-Mayan jungle turn out to be the last remnants of the large crater that killed the dinosaurs (and a lot of other creatures) at the end of the Cretaceous. One of the organisms killed off in this spectacular Velikovskian manner was a fish even larger than the whale shark. At the time, the ancestors of the whale sharks were small fish living at the bottom of the ocean. And so it goes, around and around, in this crazy world (perhaps ruled by some demonic entity appeased by the Maya, but that´s literally another show!).
Hell´s Bells indeed.
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