Some 300 miles off Costa Rica is Cocos Island, a tiny Pacific outpost that was once a favorite haunt of pirates. Cocos, a designated World Heritage Site, lies directly in the path of powerful ocean currents that often collide with the island, churning the waters into an undersea storm.

These swirling currents carry rich nutrients to a reef teeming with brilliantly colored marine life. Residents include moray eels, hawksbill turtles, leatherbass, bigeye jacks, red-lipped batfish, yellow barberfish, hogfish, and sea urchins, to name only a few.

The currents bring more than algae to this island paradise. They also summon an extraordinary abundance of sharks, providing a golden opportunity to observe some of the most surprising and baffling shark behavior ever captured on film. The volume and variety of sharks that visit Cocos on a regular basis is staggering, and includes huge numbers of silkies, hammerheads, black-tip reef sharks, white-tip reef sharks, silver-tip reef sharks, whale sharks, and their distant cousins, the marbled rays.

A team of expert and intrepid divers, led by renowned underwater film specialists Howard and Michele Hall, leads viewers into this ultimate domain of sharks.

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Online content for Shark Mountain was originally posted November 2004.

Thousands of tons of war wreckage sank into the fabled lagoons of the South Pacific islands during the naval and air battles of World War II. But instead of devastating the region’s underwater ecology, the detritus of human conflict turned into artificial reefs, upon which fantastic mini-ecosystems took shape. NATURE gives viewers a new perspective on wildlife in the South Pacific when its cameras board the WAR WRECKS OF THE CORAL SEAS.

The Solomon Islands and the waters that surround them constitute an enormous battlefield, where 60 years ago U.S. Navy and Marine forces began a monumental assault that eventually would drive Japanese forces northward, back toward their homeland. In addition to its enormous human toll, the fighting left countless ships and aircraft, including fuel and noxious cargo, on the beds of the formerly pristine shallow waters. Surprisingly, however, this intrusion into paradise did not repel wildlife from those waters. Instead, it attracted it.

To order a copy of WAR WRECKS OF THE CORAL SEAS, please visit the NATURE Shop.
Online content for WAR WRECKS OF THE CORAL SEAS was originally posted May 2003.