Challenges of Life

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there’s a follow-up to BBC’s Blue Planet and Planet Earth, and it’s simply called Life. Oh, boy, oh, boy, am I thrilled about this new series!!! The theme is survival, in honor of the hundredth anniversary of Charles Darwin’s death. This introductory installment focuses on the challenges of life, the spectacular strategies in the struggle to survive. (Note, incidentally, that the phrase “Survival of the Fittest” is not from Darwin’s Origin of Species.) There are so many magnificent moments in this episode: Venus flytraps feasting on flies trapped in her sweet leaves; male stalk-eyed flies fighting over who has the largest, well, stalk; a tiny strawberry poison frog carrying her tadpoles one by one high up a bromeliad tree into the waterpool between its leaves; an ever color-changing chameleon catching praying mantis with its tongue; two grebe birds performing a magnificent dance of courtship; a gruesome scene of a flailed chinstrap penguin sinking to the ocean floor after a leopard seal catches it skittering across broken ice; a school of flying fish escaping an attack by a group of sailfish; bottlenose dolphins stirring up silt in circles to trap a shoal of fish; some two dozen killer whales outwitted by a remarkably agile crabeater seal; a 14-ft. Pacific giant octopus laying a hundred thousand eggs and then starving herself to death while tending to her brood until they hatch; hippopotami fighting for overlordship and the right to mate; three cheetahs felling an ostrich together; and tufted capuchin monkeys cracking large nuts, that they had first peeled and let dry, with a large stone on a rocky surface. Truly awe-inspiring!