Life: Plants

In the struggle for survival plants are perhaps even more inventive than animals devising solutions to the challenges of life. Unlike all other living creatures, plants require light to thrive – due to photosynthesis. While the rainforest would seem the most prosperous place for plants to live, they need to grow from the shades of the forest floor toward the light beyond the canopy. And if you cannot grow, you must climb, using adhesive pads or sharp claws or swirling coils. While bamboo can grow some 90 feet in just as many days, bristlecone pines grow over centuries at altitudes of several thousand feet – some being as old as five thousand years, the oldest living things on earth. To feed, the sundew uses sticky droplets on its tentacles to ensnare mosquitoes emerging from boggy waters, while the venus flytrap locks insects within their clambshell leaves. In the Antarctic cold of Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain, the richea produces nectar in the sun’s warmth to lure birds into pollinating the flowers. Even cleverer is the sandhill milkweed in the spring meadows of Florida, which defends itself from the onslaught of monarch caterpillars by spilling latex drops from its veins; yet once they pupate into butterflies, they, too, cannot resist the flowers’ nectar. But the most manipulative of plants enslave their pollinators, like the heliconia in Dominica, which forces the purple-throated Carib hummingbird, with its long curved beak to return time and again, by carefully rationing the amount of nectar.

They say the apple never falls far from the tree, but plants have contrived ingenious strategies for dispersing their seeds – so as to avoid competing with their offspring for space (think of helicopter seeds). The brunsvigia is carried along by the wind, stem and all, cartwheeling across the South African desert and casting about seeds. In Borneo, the alsomitra produces a ball-sized pod with seeds that glide hundreds of feet through the air on wafer-thin wings. The saguro cactus can survive the extreme conditions of Arizona’s Sorona desert by flowering in the cool of the night to attract bats, while its sweet fruits attract doves, tortoise and ants that will disperse its seeds miles away. On Socotra Island in the Arabian Sea, dragon blood trees survive with their bizarre shape (a thick trunk with branches that wave out in an upside down parasol) as their leaves catch drops of the occasional morning mist; while the desert rose has a hardy bulbous trunk that stores water. Mangroves can even stand the saltwater tides because their warty pores filter most of the salt and breathe in air when they are exposed. And grasses have created such a bond with one particular animal, that human civilization would have been impossible without wheat and rice. The entire episode is a feast of variegated hues, sunflowers, foxgloves, bromeliads and orchids. To capture the life of plants, the program uses extraordinary time-lapse photography, sometimes inventing new techniques in the process. And as a bonus, the backdrop features stunning footage of starry desert nights and aurora borealis. Truly, this is a must watch!

Life: Creatures of the Deep

Life on Earth began in the Ocean Deep – and some of the most ancient life forms on our planet are marine invertebrates, the topic of this installment of the most astonishing nature documentary so far produced. We return to the hydrothermal vents (seen in Planet Earth) around which it all began. It is there that Pompeii worms survive the scalding, volcanic heat, together with white crabs and enormous tube worms. When krill rise up at night from the abysmal depth to the surface in the Sea of Cortez off Mexico to feed on plankton, they attract shoals of predatory sardines that in turn attract hundreds of Humboldt squid that herd the fish as a pack and grab their meal with dangerous tentacles. Underneath the Antarctic sea ice in springtime life flourishes in a colorful garden of starfish, sea urchins, and nemertean worms. A sight so incredible, it’s almost unearthly! Then there’s the huge fried-egg jellyfish hunting among a swarm of 100,000 Aurelia jellyfish, using its tentacles like harpoons to catch prey. Another amazing scene shows hundreds of thousands of armor-plated spider crabs marching to the shallows off South Australia to molt their old shells and to mate enthusiastically while they’re together in such vast numbers. But then they are under threat from a stingray that is so choosy it only catches the softest shelled crabs.

The highly intelligent cuttlefish (who have the largest brain size relative to its body among invertebrates), the chameleons of the sea, can quickly change the color of their skin, flashing different colors, not just as warning or camouflage, but also deception – for instance to mimic the color of a female, confusing a larger male, and allowing the smaller one to mate on the sly. We also revisit the 14-ft. Pacific giant octopus off the coast of British Columbia that sacrifices her life caressing her only hatch of a hundred thousand eggs to protect them from algae and fish. The struggle for survival proves itself, again, when a large sun-starfish feeds on her deceased body, gets trapped by spiny sea urchins, and comes under attack from a king crab that amputates one of its arms. In sheer awe, we witness a coral reef forming around the rusty hulk of a shipwreck, feeding and fighting, and spawning after the November full moon. The program ends with the most wondrous splendor of the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living structure on earth. I can only repeat myself: watch the series!

Life: Hunters & Hunted

With the next episode of BBC Life we return to the world of mammals, focusing this time on the struggle for survival, the never-ending fight between predator and prey. David Attenborough informs us that because most hunts actually fail, what makes mammals so remarkable is their adaptability, their ability to continually devise and revise new strategies. We revisit some favorite scenes, such as the three cheetah brothers hunting together for zebras and ostrich at the foot of Mt. Kenya; the bottlenose dolphins corralling a shoal of leaping fish by stirring up rings of mud in Florida Bay; chital deer and gray langur monkeys warning each other in Bandhavgarh, India, of an imminent attack by a Bengal tiger. It’s a great pleasure to see these beautiful scenes again.

Nevertheless, the new footage in this episode isn’t any less impressive: young stoats playing wild games to practice stalking, chasing, ambushing in the English countryside; unbelievable slow-motion capture of greater bulldog bats fishing in a stream in the rain forest of Belize; the cutest ibex kids learning to bound along the precipitous cliffs above the Dead Sea to outwit cunning foxes; a dozen Ethiopian wolves, high up in the mountains, hunting separately (rather than in packs), while the dominant female guards her litter; bears feasting on the spawning salmon run along the Alaskan coast; orcas snatching stray elephant seals off the Falklands, but only a single female knows how to catch a seal pup inside the pool along the shore. Truly a must see!

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!