For Christmas, I received the complete season of BBC's Planet Earth. If you haven't gotten a chance to watch a British nature documentary, I highly recommend it. One of the episodes I watched was on Freshwater, and I was excited to discover that a large portion of it was on the Pantanal. I've seen pictures of the Pantanal, but I was completely awestruck viewing it from high resolution footage. While the film featured many of the interesting organisms in this region such as the capybara, jabiru, caiman, and hyacinth macaw, the stars of the show were the piranhas. They had one man actually go scuba diving in the Pantanal to try and film a piranha feeding frenzy!!! It is a common misconception that piranhas will attack anything in the water. In reality, they are scavengers that usually only eat something that is wounded or already dead. However, there ability to strip something to the bone in a matter of minutes was not exaggerated. The camera man was able to get within a few feet of the frenzy, and remained unharmed. Although hopefully, we won't be taking a dip with the piranhas, I'me excited to hopefully view the wildlife in person. I thought it was impossible to be any more excited about this trip, but I was wrong. But I bet that the wonder I experienced from this documentary will be dwarfed by the real thing! Although I was not able to find a clip of the piranha attack, here is a link for the documentary on a caiman kill!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0037b5p
-Catie
