National Geographic ADVENTURE

A Deeper Connection: Facebook for Fish

Text by Ryan Bradley
Photograph by Joshua Scott

Threatened by drift nets and habitat destruction, fish need all the friends they can get. A consortium of marine biologists has decided that to know the fiercest and fastest creatures in the sea is to love them. à la MySpace and Facebook, TOPP.org (Tagging of Pacific Predators) is an interactive website that posts personal pages—with names, stats, even blogs—for radio-tagged animals being tracked by TOPP’s field researchers.

Omoo, for example, is a great white shark currently swimming off Honolulu. Dislikes: aquariums. Mood: unfairly judged by his looks. The site’s most compelling feature is a satellite display that lets visitors pinpoint their finned friends’ locations around the globe. Can personifying pelagics make us rethink our next sushi dinner? The scientists at TOPP hope so. And somewhere off the coast of Hawaii, a misunderstood, doe-eyed killing machine named Omoo does too.

Video in the News: Do We Really Need a Cougar AND a Jaguar? Alan Rabinowitz on The Colbert Report

Text by Mindy Zacharjasz

Zoologist Alan Rabinowitz did what many a congressman, senator, and presidential hopeful have failed to do before him: (almost) make Stephen Colbert cry.

On Tuesday’s Colbert Report, the now graying action hero who has dedicated his life to big-cat conservation spoke about his new book, Life in the Valley of Death. The book discusses one of his most recent projects: creating a tiger refuge in Myanmar (read about it in an ADVENTURE profile of Rabinowitz). On the show, Rabinowitz told the story about how to he first became inspired to save animals—and not even Colbert could make fun of that one (see it for yourself in the video).

Then on to Cobert's more pressing questions: Do dictators and communist countries have an advantage when it comes to conservation? Does this planet really need a cougar and a jaguar? And, when you die, do you want to be devoured by a big cat?

Looks like Colbert’s Wildcat loyalties (he’s an alum of Northwestern University) have stayed with him.

The Best New Surf Movie Not About Surfing

Text by Assistant Editor Ryan Bradley
Photograph courtesy Magnolia Pictures

Surfwise is not a documentary film about surfing. For this reason, it’s the best movie about surfing to come out in a good long while. Confused? Fair enough. Let me try to explain.

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The Adventure Life with Steve CasimiroSurf and Ye Shall Be Asked: The Curiously Interrogative World of Gabe Sullivan

Text by West Coast Editor Steve Casimiro. Photographs by Sierra Sullivan, Tom Servais (top, bottom)

Flipping through Surfer Magazine goes something like this: blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, shocking lime green, blue, blue, blue.

There in each issue, jumping out from Surfer’s sea of epic waves and countless board short ads, is a rusty but glowing, chartreuse 1972 VW camper van, the icon and motorized doppleganger of Curious Gabe, Gabe Sullivan, who, every month, poses to ten complete strangers the kind of existential questions you’d expect to be asked in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly or in a dorm room at 1 a.m. Questions like, Does surfing improve with age? Would you rather be an East- or West-Coast surfer? And, a real brain scrambler, What’s worse—being a hoser or a poser?

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Banff's Radical Reels Reigns on YouTube

With its 2008 incarnation now touring theaters around the globe, the Banff Mountain Film Festival is generating a web buzz as well.

Users on our favorite guilty pleasure video sharing site, YouTube, voted last year's trailer promoting the festival's Radical Reels category one of the best sports videos. With almost 26,000 views, 2007 Radical Reels video is a dramatic montage of outdoor action sports featuring athletes in some of the most extreme conditions imaginable--underground ice cave climbing and downhill mountain unicycling to name a few. But there's substance, too: The trailer also shows snippets from some of the festival’s longer, more thought-provoking films to counterbalance the archetypical footage of daredevils' antics that we love to watch.

Still undiscovered by the YouTube audience (for now, at least), the 2008 Radicals Reels trailer (which we embedded above) is definitely worth a watch. This year's films can be viewed in their entirety during the Radical Reels tour, hitting 13 states and four Canadian provinces this year.

--Lucas Pollock

Psyching Up: Adventure Therapy on Film

The mountain is high, the ocean is wide, and that which does not kill us makes us stronger—at least according to Nietzsche, and to a spate of newly released documentaries that put this premise to the test.

Everest: A Climb for Peace contrives to solve geopolitics through mountaineering as Israelis and Palestinians scale the peak together ($20). While bonding proves inevitable, the film’s most honest moment comes when Israeli alpinist Micha Yaniv admits: "I’m basically just here to climb."

Mountaintop enlightenment makes for compelling drama in Blindsight (in theaters in April). Erik Weihenmayer—the first sightless man to summit Everest—leads six blind Tibetan teenagers and their teacher up Everest’s neighbor, 23,114-foot Lhakpa Ri, to show the world what they’re made of. The teacher (also blind) frets for their safety, and Weihenmayer urges them onward, while the kids are caught in the middle, in the dark, and on high.

An equally tense ordeal plays out in Deep Water—one of the best documentaries of 2007 ($16). In 1968 Donald Crowhurst entered the first nonstop, solo around-the-world sailing race despite an utter lack of experience; the film traces his quixotic voyage and his descent into madness at sea.

Do you have an all-time favorite adventure therapy flick? Let us know.

Photograph courtesy Robson Entertainment