Blogging on the Brain

Well, I finally did it. I may have been the last person in the world to do it, but I finally saw Avatar. My overall reaction: very pretty. Because I waited so long to see it, I was primed to think about several different things I’d heard about it over the past months – not the least of which was that it shares pretty much the exact same plot as Disney’s Pocahontas (which, as it turns out, seems pretty true).

The movie also left me with several questions, the first of which is who on the production team was responsible for sneaking so much marine life onto Pandora. I’ll explain – well, first I should mention that, in the pursuit to fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist, I took a marine biology course at Wheaton for part of my biology minor. The bulk of the course was covered in a Spring Break trip to Belize, where we stayed on a tiny island a few miles off the coast, and went on several snorkeling dives every day (including one night dive – still one of the most alien experiences I’ve ever had) but anyway, there were a lot of shout-outs to marine life on the planet Pandora that I began to notice pretty early in the film:

Obviously there was a lot of bioluminescence happening throughout the world, which has been well documented in marine life, especially algae, etc. (in Belize, it would sometimes look like patches of water were glowing because of that) but it was something in one of the very first scenes in the forest that tipped me off to the marine life influence – when Jake first takes his avatar into the forest, he encounters some strange, spiral-y looking plants. When I saw them, I leaned over to my husband and excitedly told him that those plants looked exactly like my favorite (gorgeous) little marine critter, the Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus), which often grows on brain coral (which, of course, I also have an affinity for). You can imagine my surprise, then, when Jake tries to touch the plant, and it sucks itself back down into its hole…exactly what a Christmas Tree Worm does when it feels something approaching in the water! Don’t believe me? Check out this video...and long live the Christmas Tree Worm!