Reproductive behaviours — the elaborate nesting rites of birds, cannibalistic courtships of praying mantis, lumbering love of elephants — are the centrepiece of television nature shows. The more remote the location, the more secretive the behaviour, the greater the hushed awe in the narrator's voice. By these measures, then, a narrator would be moved to virtual silence by video images of giant white clams spawning in the wild, more than 1,100 m below the surface of the sea. Such images have been documented by Fujiwara et al., as they describe in Deep-Sea Research; even more remarkably, part of the project involved experiments at these depths.
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