Across three oceans and more than two years, marine biologist and filmmaker Rick Rosenthal set out to capture on film the biggest, fastest, most dangerous gamefish in the sea - the ancient and amazing creatures known as billfish.  The group includes the graceful sailfish, the menacing swordfish and queen of them all, the marlin.  Marlin can top speeds of 60 miles an hour on migrations that can span 9,000 miles.  The largest, always female, weigh in at 1,000 pounds and more, and are known as granders.  Hemingway immortalized them in The Old Man and the Sea, but to his great disappointment never landed one of the prize fish.

Rick Rosenthal's pursuit of these coveted sea creatures in the name of conservation unfolds in NATURE's Superfish premiering nationally Sunday, May 4, 2008 at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings).  It is available in High Definition.  Academy Award-winning actor F. Murray Abraham narrates.
 
Billfish are almost impossible to find and film in open waters, making it very difficult for researchers to study them. Adding to the challenge is the over-fishing of billfish and their prey, causing a decline in their populations.
 
Rosenthal begins his journey off Mexico's Baja Peninsula, where striped marlin and sea lions compete for huge schools of fish riding the California current, then travels to Mexico's Contoy Island, to discover if rumors of large numbers of migrating sailfish there might be true.  The pay-off is huge.  Thousands of sailfish swirl through the water feeding on schools of sardines.  But as elated as he is with the discovery, Rosenthal fears that fishermen will once again exploit the event as they have elsewhere.
 
One tragic example takes place along the coast of Peru, near the village of Cabo Blanco. It was here that sportsfishermen and celebrities alike gathered in the 1950's for a chance to land one of the great granders.  Sixty years later, the sport fishing has dried up, but commercial fisheries have taken over.  In seaports up and down the coast, populations of marlin, tuna and swordfish have been decimated. "It's a relentless harvest driven by poverty and greed," says Rosenthal.  "We've lost more than 90 percent of billfish in just the last fifty years, and the marlin population won't recover if we keep taking the big, egg-laying females."

The future of the billfish population may lie in places like Costa Rica's Pacific coast.  Here, Rosenthal shoots footage of tiny, infant sailfish, a rare and wonderous find.  The  underwater nursery offers hope for their future.

Rosenthal's quest to film a grander in the wild leads him to the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's Cape York Peninsula.  With the aid of a local expert gamefish captain, the moment finally arrives, and he is able to swim with and film one of the superfish.  He expects no more than a few seconds in the water with her.  But for a remarkable twenty minutes, they are able to share a world as fellow creatures.

Now in its 26th season on PBS, NATURE has won more than 450 honors from the television industry, the international wildlife film community, parent groups, and environmental organizations - including 10 Emmys, two Peabodys and the first award given to a television program by the Sierra Club.  In 2007, the series won Emmy Awards for Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History and Christmas in Yellowstone. 

NATURE video podcasts, available on iTunes and at NATURE Online (www.pbs.org/nature), range from two to 10 minutes in length and feature behind-the-scenes interviews with filmmakers and producers, program excerpts and outtakes. 

Last year, to celebrate the series' silver anniversary, NATURE Online launched a redesigned and expanded Web site.  In addition to the weekly video podcasts, new features include a newsletter, streaming video clips, an RSS feed, user bulletin boards and polls, new teacher lesson plans, photo slideshows, and more.  Online social networkers can join the NATURE fan group at Facebook and keep up with the latest videos, photos, and more.

Superfish is a coproduction of Wild Logic Film and Thirteen/WNET New York in association with the BBC and NHK.  NATURE is produced by Thirteen/WNET New York for PBS.  Fred Kaufman is Executive Producer; William Grant is Executive-in-Charge.  Major corporate support for NATURE is provided by Canon U.S.A., Inc. and Toyota.  Additional support is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the nation's public television stations. 

The series is closed-captioned for the hearing-impaired and distributed with Descriptive Video Service (DVS) for the sight-impaired.