The environment in the news

ROWA Media Update

This is the second in a series sponsored by Jeep and produced by Ocean World Productions with producers hopeful it will be picked up by top TV channels such as Al Arabiya (in Arabic), the Discovery Channel and Showtime’s TV Land (in English).

The 26-minute documentary to be shot later this year will feature the ecological wonder of the world’s biggest nesting population of the Socotran cormorant and the rare sooty falcon. It will also show the waters around Hawar which are home and feeding grounds for dugongs, or sea-cows.

The film crew and the research team will continue their dugong study which began during the shooting of the first series of Arabia’s Cycle of Life and hope to also capture on film a rare, possibly endemic, freshwater terrapin. The first series of 12 26-minute programmes was the region’s first comprehensive natural history TV series, sponsored by Jeep.

The first series attracted the interest of international broadcasters and was picked up for airing on Discovery Channel’s ‘Animal Planet.’ This was the first time a regional production has been picked up by ‘Animal Planet’.

Jonathan Ali Khan, managing director of Ocean World Productions who is project leader, director and cameraman says, “I feel this is a step forward for all regional filmmakers. We have shown international broadcasters that the region is capable of making international-class productions featuring Arab world subjects. This kind of development helps us position Arabian story content on TV screens in other parts of the world with massive audiences, helping to create awareness about Arab world subjects.”

The second series, to be broadcast in next spring, will complete the focus on wildlife and ecological diversity found across the Arabian Peninsula with another set of 12 episodes. “This time, our expedition starts with a return visit to Oman to the remote Hallaniyat Islands (previously known as the Kuria Muria Islands) in the southern Dhofar region.

The 12 episodes will focus on the whale species that frequent these waters, new species of marine life that have never been filmed before and the Omani marine-cave system with freshwater fish and other cave-dwelling creatures. On the Oman-Yemen border, the team will film one of the last true strongholds of the Arabian leopard.

“We will place camera traps and try to film wild leopard with the help of mountain tribesmen. The leopard story will feature the captive breeding work at Sharjah Breeding Centre for Endangered Arabian Wildlife which is also supporting the establishment of protected areas in Yemen,” he said.

One of the highlights of the project will be the island that time forgot: the Island of Socotra. The remote island, belonging to Yemen, split off from Africa over 35 million years ago, carrying some unique plant species that have since evolved in isolation.

Over a third of the plants are endemic, and islanders have learnt to use many for amazing medicinal applications. Endemism extends to insects, reptiles, birds and marine life, and the intrepid film crew will liaise with the United Nations and Yemeni researchers based on the island to establish ways to safeguard this unique part of Arabia’s natural heritage. “Part of our focus is to find species that have never been filmed before such as a large bird-eating spider the size of a side plate (the male),” said Khan. “The female of the species has never been photographed, and, according to local island inhabitants, is said to be enormous. Given that in many arachnid species, the male is often dwarfed in comparison to the female, we do not know what to expect. Inside a newly discovered cave system on the island, we found giant, venomous centipedes that prey on bats, giant whip spiders and many new endemic creepy crawlies.”

In Yemen, they will continue the search for Arabia’s endemic species, especially freshwater fish, insects and some remarkable birds. The team will dive the waters of the Gulf of Aden to find unusual reefs formed in sunken volcanoes off the Belhaf coast.

The marine focus continues into the Red Sea where they will visit the remote Kamaran Island archipelago and Zubayr Island.

During the making of the second series, the Ocean World Productions team will join the World Wildlife Fund coral-reef monitoring project as scientists from Qatar, the UAE and the US work on the region’s first joint coral-reef monitoring project in the remote warm waters between Abu Dhabi and Qatar.

There, the team will look at issues affecting the survival of Arabian Gulf corals and ecosystems.

Finally, Khan and his team will move on to Kuwait. “There we will ascertain the true long-term damage to the first Gulf War’s oil spill through the eyes and research of Kuwait’s many researchers, environmentalists and scientists.

http://www.dailystar.com.lb

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