It is reckoned to be now happening at times the natural evolutionary rate - and is accelerating. Sir David is at pains to explain that this isn't just about losing the magnificent creatures he has featured in the hundreds of programmes he has made in his six decades as a natural history film-maker.
The loss of pollinating insects could threaten the food crops we depend on. Trees and other plants regulate water flow and produce the oxygen we breathe. Meanwhile, the seas are being emptied of fish. But the pandemic provides perhaps the most immediate example of the risks of our ever-increasing encroachment into the natural world, as we have all been learning in the most brutal fashion over the last six months. The programme tracks the suspected origins of coronavirus to populations of bats living in cave systems in Yunnan province in China.
We see the Chinese "wet market" in Wuhan which specialises in the sale of wild animals for human consumption and is thought to have been linked with many of the early infections. The programme is uncompromising in its depiction of the crisis in the natural world, admits Serena Davies, who directed the programme.
But the programme does not leave the audience feeling that all is lost. Sir David makes clear there is still cause for hope. We see one of the most celebrated moments in all the films Sir David has made in his long career, the moment he met a band of gorillas in the mountains on the border between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.
The human population needs to stabilise as soon as possible, he says, which he believes is achievable by raising people out of poverty, giving them access to healthcare and keeping girls in particular in school for longer. Next on his list is phasing out fossil fuels. We already have solar, wind and geothermal power, and they need to become our primary sources of energy, he says.
On land, he says we need to radically reduce the area we use for farming by half to make it available for wildlife. The quickest way to do that is by changing our diet, he says. Laid out like this, Attenborough makes the road to saving the planet and a long-term environmentally friendly future look straightforward.
We know what to do, it is just a case of having the will to do it, he says. This feels like a baton-passing moment. Trending Latest Video Free. Highlight: A carnivorous bladderwort goes hunting. It grows into the puddle of water collecting within a bromeliad, and creates tiny traps that suck water fleas to their doom. After showing how some dinosaurs evolved into flying birds, Attenborough spends the rest of the episode on those that have returned to the ground. He meets extinct terror birds, kiwis bumbling along a New Zealand beach in search of sandhoppers, and one of the 80 remaining takahes a kind of blue coot.
Attenborough count: 9, including watching red-tailed hawks going after bats; flipping through plates of fossilized rock until he sees a bird feather; shining a torch onto a foraging kiwi; and going in search for the endearing but endangered kakapo—a large, flightless, bumbling, green parrot. Highlights: The pathos of a male kakapo, booming away in the New Zealand hills to a vanishing number of females. Surprise, surprise: leafcutter ants! But also: mangrove ants evacuating their grubs from a flooded nest, harvester ants trolling neighboring colonies by sealing them in at night, and bumblebees being all but bumbling when they turn on their own queens.
Attenborough count: 8, including putting on a bee-suit and climbing up a tree to watch giant bees that, he says, can sting through a bee-suit; and antagonizing wood ants into spraying formic acid. First, giant bees that do Mexican waves to ward off intruders, including parasitic wasps and stick-wielding Attenboroughs. Second, Matabele ants brutally raid a termite nest. Boobies and kingfishers missile into the ocean, the shoebill lunges at lungfish with its murderous beak, and the black heron draws fish to within striking distance by encircling its head with its wings and creating an attractive patch of shade.
Attenborough count: 6, a long panning shot of a flying mallard that somehow lands next to Attenborough in a boat; swimming with little penguins in a masked booby T-shirt Attenborough-in-a-T-shirt klaxon! Highlight: On Queen Charlotte Island, the chicks of ancient murrelets hatch within inland tree hollows. Responding to the adults calling from the sea, they careen towards the water, past one elated David Attenborough.
Plants make for surprisingly challenging meals for mammals. Sloths cope with the lack of nutrients in leaves by living in the slow lane. Tapirs cope with poisons by licking detoxifying clay. African mammals deal with out-of-reach leaves by ignoring them and browsing low dik-diks , swiveling their hips to stand en pointe gerenuks , being really tall giraffes , and straight-up bulldozing the tree to the ground elephant.
Highlights: Attenborough offers flowers to a pika, a rabbit-relative that looks like a hamster. It stacks plants in a larder for the winter, and places the more poisonous ones at the bottom because their toxins preserve them for longer.
As it bounds over rocks, Attenborough turns to the camera and beams. Despite its wounds, it still struggles up a mountain towards its nest, but then flops onto its red-stained belly before the camera cuts away ambiguously. Still, the episode is spectacular, with shots of lichens growing in time-lapse, swarms of photosynthesizing jellyfish, and plants that recruit defensive ants by offering them mansions and snack stations.
Highlight: An unforgettable time-lapse shot shows parasitic dodder vines writhing over nettles like a swarm of serpents. These are the shots that make The Private Life of Plants one of his greatest and most underestimated series.
They show plants as organisms of motion, drama, and agency. Memorably, he watches a CG blue whale form around him, before seeing a real one surface next to him. He says its heart is the same size as a small car, but the CG model suggests that someone really needs to buy David Attenborough a bigger car. He says its main artery is so big a person could swim down it.
So this episode goes to the gentle manatees. Winter is coming. Adelie penguins lead their chicks over broken ice, a dead penguin is consumed by giant isopods and meter-long nemertean worms, and giant petrels advance menacingly at each other. They are terrifying —like airborne velociraptors.
Attenborough count : 4, including walking along among the now refrozen continent, where most of the animals are gone—except the emperor penguin, which Attenborough sidles up to. Highlight : A huge shadow bursts out of the water as a leopard seal tosses a penguin it into the air, before playing a game of cat-and-mouse with it for 20 minutes, and then thrashing it on the surface of the ocean to flay it. Barracudas, pelicans, and gulls pinion hapless fish between them. Frigatebirds pilfer fish from tropicbirds in mid-air.
And honey ants store their food inside their workers, whose abdomens expand into living, golden pots. Highlight: A heist episode! The tiny spider Argyrodes steals food right from the web of the comparably gigantic Nephila, by cutting the ensnaring silk and lowering the goods to safety. On his tour of the monkey world, Attenborough explains why the guenons of Africa have such colorful and diverse faces, watches a finger-sized pygmy marmoset as it gnaws at bark and eats the gum that oozes out, and reveals the intricate social lives of a troop of Sri Lankan macaques.
Attenborough count: 9, including watching capuchins crack nuts and self-medicate with the right leaves; demonstrating monkey alarm calls by dragging an amusing stuffed leopard on wheels; watching baboons take down flamingos; and using balls of plasticine to demonstrate the link between group size and brain size. Highlight: A huge troop of geladas grazes in the Ethiopian highlands.
They look like a cross between baboons and Animal from the Muppets, and they sound like a group of muttering old men. They shuffle around on their buttocks, eat grass, and communicate with eyebrow flashes and lip curls that turn their baboon-like faces into something that looks like a demon.
The gelada: because evolution gets drunk sometimes. Hermaphroditic barnacles impregnate each other with the longest penises in the animal world relative to body size , and a blue-ringed octopus delivers sperm with a modified tentacle.
A ploughshare tortoise upends its rival and mates with a female, with a frankly disturbing amount of grunting and thrusting. A male sea louse spends three months assembling a harem in his burrow before mating them whenever they molt. Meanwhile, a female chinchilla rejects a suitor by squirting urine in face, a female cockroach drags her mate around by his genitals, and a female jacana a long-toed bird that walks on lily pads coerces a male into sex and then destroys his clutch.
Attenborough count: 5, including looking at a male Heliconius butterfly waiting by the pupa of a female, mating with her as she emerges, and then rubbing her with an off-putting smell to put off later suitors; and walking down a beach at dusk to see the spawning of the palolo worms, millions of which are caught for food by local people. It was a risk: Plants are fascinating but not necessarily visually so. The solution—to use liberal amounts of time-lapse—was enormously effective.
Flowers unfurl with urgency, foxgloves yawn, and leaves pulse as they grow. Given that this episode is about how plants disperse their seeds, animals make many appearances, but even charismatic ones like elephants, orangutans, and rhinos are re-cast as seed delivery vehicles. The squirting cucumber and Himalayan balsam have explosive seed launchers, the grapple plant latches onto ostrich feet with wince-inducing spikes, and the ivy-leafed toadflax plants its own seeds in nearby cracks.
I remember how mind-blowing it was to learn how mountains grow—heck, to learn that they grow at all. Highlight: The Krakatoa monologue. In a modern series, the explosion of Krakatoa would be accompanied by CG animations. No visuals. No effects. Just his voice, and his words:. Ships that were sailing nearby had their decks covered in ash and in pumice, and at night electric flames played over the rigging. Day after day, this continued. And that was the cause of the greatest catastrophe of all.
Millions of tons of seawater poured onto the red hot lava. So did millions of tons of rocks. And this produced a titanic explosion. The noise was almost certainly the loudest noise that has ever echoed round the earth in recorded history. Giant salamanders wrestle each other, an African bullfrog digs a canal to save his trapped tadpoles, and a marsupial frog houses its tadpoles in pouches until they wriggle out as fully-formed froglets.
By the time the episode aired in , a doomsday fungus had wiped out all the golden frogs. Today, they only exist in captivity. Their fate awaits all the amphibians, one of the most endangered groups of animals around. Highlight: Infrared cameras show that baby caecilians—legless amphibians that look like earthworms—feed by flaying their mothers.
They tear nutritious strips of skin from her flanks, which she then re-grows. Until the filmmakers saw it, no one knew this happened. Winter in the Antarctic. And those celebrities of the poles, the emperor penguins, huddle against the cold while auroras play overhead. Highlight: Attenborough walks along a ridge overlooking the Dry Valleys, an huge area of unexpectedly bare rock in Antarctica.
Solid granite boulders have been carved into ethereal shapes by wind alone. A mummified crabeater seal has been lying there for about 3, years. This episode is about how animals navigate. Spiny lobsters go on long marches, honey bees waggle to communicate the location of plants, eels swim from the Sargasso sea to the rivers of their birth, rufous hummingbirds fly over mountain ranges, and Arctic terns fly from pole to pole and back again. One great sequence after the another, except for some amusingly bad back-projection in shots of flying birds and insects.
Attenborough count: 7, including using electrodes to signal to electric eels; watching European eels return to their natal rivers; and getting pecked in the head by an Arctic tern. Highlight: The desert ant Cataglyphis walks this way and that in search of food, but by keeping an eye on the position of the sun, it can somehow calculate the straightest path back to the nest.
The sequence where a spitting cobra launches venom at a visor-wearing Attenborough used a captive cobra taken from a local zoo.
Both are in jars, and in an outtake, just as Attenborough talks about how venomous the coral snake is, it pushes the lid off, prompting handlers to rush in. Highlight: with infrared cameras, the filming team capture the first ever shot of a wild rattlesnake killing a mouse.
Those include the Gila monster, a venomous lizard; the Dorcas gazelle, which can survive without ever drinking; and the sidewinder viper, throwing its coils forward, so that only two parts of its body ever touch the sand at any one time. Attenborough count: 10, including kneeling next to a rock that reveals itself as a poorwill bird when the camera zooms in; marveling at water condensing on the curtain-like leaves of a year-old Welwitschia plant; trudging ineffectually up a sand dune; and following the tracks of a golden mole before rapidly digging it up.
Highlight: Another tie. Second, Attenborough meets King Clone, a ring-shaped creosote bush that started growing between 10, and 12, years old, soon after the Mojave desert first appeared. Islands are places where evolution goes to town, producing giants and dwarves, large dynasties of unique species, and unpredictable behavior. These patterns, so beloved of explorers like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, are exemplified here by giant tortoises, the extremely diverse honeycreepers and Drosophila flies of Hawaii, and formidable Komodo dragons tearing apart a carcass.
They look exactly like protruding twigs, until they spring forward and snag insects with their front legs, devouring them in a most un-caterpillar-like way. A mother shrew leads her young in a mouth-to-tail caravan. Two hedgehogs mate very carefully, so goes the joke. A pangolin—a cross between an anteater and an artichoke—trundles along on two legs.
Attenborough dons chest waders to enter an African swamp, where a troop of chimpanzees are also walking, holding their arms aloft to avoid getting them wet.
Exploiting the innate curiosity of a male bird that thinks a rival has invaded his territory, Attenborough bangs loudly on the trunk of a tree on Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. As Attenborough enters its territory in the Caledonian pine forest of the Scottish Highlands, this normally shy bird goes straight for his knees, knocking him right over. While demonstrating the colour of the snow, Attenborough slips, sliding several yards down a mountainside.
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