What’s Worth Watching: Life With Flipper

Dolphins: Spy in the Pod (Saturday, March 7, 8/7c, Discovery)

Discovery Channel never lives up to its name more than when the channel’s nature unit takes us somewhere we’ve never been before. In a co-production with the BBC, the producers of the memorable Penguins: Waddle All the Way get up close and personal with pods of dolphins in their natural habitat in locales including the Florida Keys, Costa Rica, Mozambique, and Shark Bay, Australia. How did they do it? With the help of state-of-the-art spy cameras disguised as sea brethren, including a robotic dolphin, turtle, stingray, and tuna.

The special promises first-time, all-access looks at life inside a spinner dolphin pod and, quoting Discovery, “stunning, never-before-seen footage of a dolphin superpod filling the ocean with glistening sea bubbles.” Sounds pretty wow, right? Revealing dolphins’ rapport with other sea life, an underwater “Spy Nautilus” camera records dolphins swimming with rays and cobia fish—but, apparently, not sharks. There are limits, even in Mother Nature’s watery playground.