Sisbro Studios was founded by the sister-brother creative team of Laura and Rob Sams. Their films, books, music and educational presentations help children of all ages learn about nature (and laugh along the way). [Project Page]
I used an electron microscope for the first time recently to take a picture of shark skin. I’m not sure why this excited me so much, but I guess it felt a little like the first time I went scuba diving – like I had managed to sneak into a world where I didn’t really belong. As a kid I remember seeing photographs taken from an electron microscope and I always imagined some prestigious scientist, locked in the depths of a high-security laboratory, peering down into the eyepiece of a house-sized microscope and revealing the tiniest secrets that nature had tried so desperately to hide. Suddenly, I was that scientist – only, without the prestige or the high-security laboratory, and the microscope was only about the size of a computer. And the process was completely different from my schooldays’ experience when I’d throw a sample on a slide, wet it, cover with a cover slip and stick it under a light microscope. No, in fact, the pinky-nail sized sample of shark skin had to be completely dry so it could be glued to what almost looked like a metal thumbtack. Then, I put the skin into a vacuum-sealed machine that performed what I can only describe as a magic trick as it produced electrical current and purple light to cover the shark skin in a microscopic layer of gold dust. That’s right, I had to make gold-plated shark skin in order for this whole process to work! Apparently, anything put into an electron microscope needs to have a metallic surface to produce a proper image. The microscope fired a focused beam of electrons down onto the gold-coated shark skin, and the electrons then bounced back up into the imager and gave me a look at the bonnethead shark skin magnified large enough to see every detail of the tiny, tooth-like scales called dermal denticles. Amazing! You can’t see it with your naked eye, but these tiny scales are what make shark skin feel rough to the touch. Dermal denticles are one of the defining characteristics of sharks, and I’m using this photograph in my film The Shark Riddle, the newest episode of my half-hour children’s series The Riddle Solvers.
Well folks, what do toasters have to do with gardening? And what do toasters have to do with sharks? And where can you get a shark microphone? If you are wondering about any of these questions, I suggest you watch this short, shark-related piece. When I was visiting the Sanibel Sea School to film children at a shark camp for The Riddle Solvers shark episode, I conducted some behind-the-scenes interviews for fun, in the blazing hot Florida sun, and this is what happened. And I should mention that you’ll see some stunning HD footage of sharks, from the Save Our Seas Foundation’s amazing footage library.
“Are you a shark? Are you worried about constantly losing your teeth and having to see a dentist? Well don’t be. You don’t need a dentist. You’re a shark!”
That is the opening line to a short sketch we are filming called “Your Teeth and You,” featuring a 1950’s dentist (my brother Rob) and a dental assistant (me), who teach sharks about the different kinds of teeth they have. The sketch is for our new episode of The Riddle Solvers, and we just finished filming it in a lovely dental office in Oregon, where we were fortunate enough to find people who would let us take over their surgical room for a day. We were also lucky to work with a great makeup artist who could give Robert a dashing mustache, and who could give me very styled hair (and darker than usual eyebrows). (more…)
Robert Sams in his shark bed while hearing a shark lullaby
We are hard at work shooting our latest Riddle Solvers episode – The Shark Riddle – taking us on a quest to find a tooth from the greatest living fish, much bigger than the rest. As a backdrop for this story, we traveled to the beautiful and rugged Oregon coast and filmed in places with wicked names, like The Devil’s Punchbowl and Heceta Head, which I think translates to “even worse than The Devil’s Punchbowl.” As a general rule to filming along any coastline, the locations with the most terrifying names tend to be the most visually stunning.
In our new episode of The Riddle Solvers, we find the following riddle in an ancient journal.
Whale Shark Tooth
Teeth can tell you stories, they’re full of many clues,
Of how a creature lived and how its jaws are used.
Your riddle is to find a tooth, this shall be your test.
A tooth from the greatest living fish, much bigger than the rest.
The title of this blog may have given away the answer, but the biggest living fish in the ocean is the whale shark. Our movie takes us on a quest to figure out the riddle, and ultimately find a whale shark tooth. For those of you not familiar with whale sharks, they can reach lengths of over 50 feet (over 15 meters) and mostly feed on small plankton. They don’t need big teeth, and they don’t have big teeth. They have very, very tiny teeth. I just received two whale shark teeth in the mail . . . and I knew they would be small. But wow. I am absolutely blown away by how tiny they are, and how the biggest fish in the ocean has such tiny teeth. We are definitely going to need a good macro lens to film this part of the movie.
In fact, I made sure we have two whale shark teeth, because I know if we accidentally drop one in the sand while filming, we are going to have a very hard time finding it.
I propose that instead of saying “It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” people say, “It’s like finding a fossilized whale shark tooth in the sand.”– Laura Sams
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