Avatar Impresses With Stunning Displays...of Coral?
I saw the movie Avatar last night. Ok, I admit it, it was the second time. Both times I was struck by the unsurpassed special effects. The visual experience was enormous and unparalleled. You might ask what this has to do with the marine aquarium keeping hobby, but only if you have not yet seen the movie. If you have seen it, you no doubt noticed how much of the world of Pandora was based upon coral and other marine organisms. It is amazing that the exotic look of the fictitious jungle planet was strongly influenced by animals some of us keep in our very own living rooms.
The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me. The Pandoran forest was an amalgam of the two strangest and most diverse environments on Earth, tropical jungles and coral reefs. If the filmmakers were looking to find the most unusual combination of diversity to create their mysterious world, why not look to these two settings. For most people in the audience, jungles and reefs are likely to be every bit as foreign as a planet in deep space. While immersed in the viewing, the forest in the background seems familiar, and yet not. Most of the plants and trees are not that much different than jungle forests we know from this planet. But the real stunners are the pseudo-corals, which are like no terrestrial creature known to us.
At first, I was actually disappointed by what I perceived as a lack of imagination. As a reef-keeper, some of the plants were so obviously based on marine organisms that I had a tough time suspending my disbelief. I saw feather duster and christmas tree worms, button polyps, anemones, and jellyfish. Of course, most were portrayed as mega-sized terrestrial organisms, but they were no less recognizable. By the second time I saw the movie, I realized how extraordinary it is that corals are so exotic to most people that they might as well be from another planet! How amazing that reef-keepers care for miniature microcosms that most others could not distinguish from an alien world!
In truth, I was even more astonished by the films color palette than anything else. The rich fluorescent tones of green, blue, white, pink, red, and orange truly seem otherworldly. It was like being in a dark nightclub, covered in day glow paints, and lit by blacklights. Again, I was struck by the similarity to coral. Nowhere else have I seen naturally occurring colors that compare. Of course, to see those colors in corals, you have to shine the right color of light on them. However, that does nothing to change the fact that that sort of fluorescence does occur in nature. It is like the old adage about a story too crazy to be made up; the look of Pandora is so bizarre it could not be imagined, it has to be real.
With Avatar, director James Cameron has created a movie which surpasses all visual expectations. Without question, nothing comparable has ever before been seen on the big screen. How strange, then, that to the reef-keeper, these visuals are commonplace; they are endemic in what we do. Seeing Avatar has reminded me of what I sometimes take for grantedcoral husbandry provides a window to an alien world, one to which very few people are privy. What to others is an esoteric, alien environment, to us is an ecosystem we intimately understand. To me, that makes what we do a dearly cherished talent. All levels of marine aquarist, from the novice to the professional, get to share in this special guild.
