Watch Swimming Dinosaurs

Sturgeons are the aquatic world's living dinosaurs. Well, not really dinosaurs--they're fish, after all, not reptiles. But they remain little changed since the time of dinosaurs. A new video now permits many of us to see these ancient creatures in the wild--an increasingly unusual event.

Known primarily as the source of true caviar, these boneless fishes are unusual for a number of reasons--many outlined in a cover story I recently did for Science News. Throughout most of their range, sturgeon species are poorly protected, and as such, are declining to the point of near extinction--in most cases, the result of overfishing.

One notable exception: Wisconsin's lake stugeon.

I started out my March 4 story, last year, describing how sturgeon-conservation managers milked eggs and sperm from fish that were congregating in Wisconsin's Wolf River to spawn. Then, the researchers stirred the newly collected reproductive cells together in buckets and waited for the eggs to fertilize. Later, these would be trucked to hatcheries and incubated through at least babyhood.

To write the story, I spoke with individuals who had taken part in the exercise and had asked them to walk me through the fish catch-and-release event, step-by-step. But I didn't get a chance to see it myself. And although I saw still shots of the fish, I never witnessed their congregating behaviors.

Now you can--and I just have--by watching a short, 4 minute video posted yesterday by Michael Sears, a staff photographer with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

One onlooker in the film describes these sturgeons as the ugliest of fish. I disagree. They've a primative beauty that I find arresting. And Sear's video gives us a chance to witness the primal drive to survive by the one North American sturgeon species (of seven) that's not fairly imminently facing the prospect of extinction.

Before long, we might all get to see the lake sturegon mating behaviors in even greater detail. According to the video, a crew of cinematographers was also present on the Wolf River while Sears was shooting his video. Those others? An IMAX crew getting shots for a film due out in 2008.

Rhino!

Rhinos have it tough. Not only do poachers kill these animals for their horns and hide, but people have increasingly been moving in and converting the shy animals' forested habitat to villages.

On the island of Borneo, an estimated 25 to 50 members of the local subspecies remain. Few had been seen for years--until a motion-sensitive video camera attached to a tree there snapped a small movie of one of these animals.

"This astonishing footage captures one of the world's most elusive creatures," Carter Roberts said Monday, upon the video's release. Roberts is president of the World Wildlife Fund, the group that set up the camera and is now hosting the video on its website.

It's not the first time that such camera traps have confirmed an endangered rhino still exists, even if in perilously small numbers. In 1999, WWF photos of Vietnam's even more endangered rhino--a subspecies thought to number perhaps eight animals, served as the trigger for a Science News cover story on this critter--and efforts to save it.

The story grew from a series of phone interviews--including one to a conservationist in Ho Chi Minh City. He was on a rest-&-recuperation break from his work in the leech-and-tiger-infested national park where photos of the diminutive animal had been snapped.

In any case, take a lot at the Borneo video. It affords a rare glimpse of a majestic creature whose population teeters on the brink of extinction.