First Recorded Observation of Freshwater Fish Preying On Birds In Flight 93
ananyo writes "The waters of the African lake seem calm and peaceful. A few migrant swallows flit near the surface. Suddenly, leaping from the water, a fish grabs one of the famously speedy birds straight out of the air. 'The whole action of jumping and catching the swallow in flight happens so incredibly quickly that after we first saw it, it took all of us a while to really fully comprehend what we had just seen,' says Nico Smit, director of the Unit for Environmental Sciences and Management at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. After the images did sink in, he adds, 'the first reaction was one of pure joy, because we realized that we were spectators to something really incredible and unique.' Rumours of such behaviour by the African tigerfish (Hydrocynus vittatus), which has been reported as reaching one metre in length, have circulated since the 1940s. But this is the first confirmed record of a freshwater fish preying on birds in flight, the team reports in the Journal of Fish Biology (PDF)."
No actually, I didn't catch that. (Score:5, Informative)
Beware the CSI effect. (Score:5, Informative)
I take it you've never done nature photography in the wild of a unusual short duration event that's unpredictable in both occurrence and location? I have, and I'm impressed that they caught even one. (Doubly so since they weren't professional videographers.) Don't let what you see on TV lull you into a false sense of how easy it is.
Nature photography in the wild is, IMO, one of the hardest and most challenging of all photographic disciplines.