Plants survive and thrive by using different skills than humans. Take a look at how they adapt to their environments, co-opt insects to help them out and manage to survive in extreme climates and terrain.
Plants survive and thrive by using different skills than humans. Take a look at how they adapt to their environments, co-opt insects to help them out and manage to survive in extreme climates and terrain.
2017 • Nature
Plants are able to communicate with each other in ways we are only now beginning to understand. Some plants can differentiate between roots of their "family" and roots of other kinds of plants when they touch underground. See how plants "talk" to each other and find out what they talk about!
2017 • Nature
The next programme explores the various sea-living invertebrates. In Morocco, the limestones are 600 million years old, and contain many invertebrate fossils. They fall broadly into three categories: shells, crinoids and segmented shells. The evolution of shelled creatures is demonstrated with the flatworm, which eventually changed its body shape when burrowing became a necessity for either food or safety. It then evolved shielded tentacles and the casings eventually enveloped the entire body: these creatures are the brachiopods. The most successful shelled animals are the molluscs, of which there are some 80,000 different species.
2/13 • Life on Earth • 1979 • Nature
A filmmaker forges an unusual friendship with an octopus living in a South African kelp forest, learning as the animal shares the mysteries of her world.
2020 • Nature
A look at what animals are breaking into thousands of cars every year, how ants form a ten-foot bridge using only their bodies, and why did the fish cross the road.
S1E9 • Nature's Strangest Mysteries: Solved • 2019 • Nature
This programme surveys mammal herbivores and their predators. The herbivores began to populate the forests when the dinosaurs disappeared, and many took to gathering food at night. To prepare for winter, some store it in vast quantities, some hibernate and others make do as best they can. However, the carnivores joined them, and when a drying climate triggered the spread of grass, they followed their prey out on to the plains. Grass is not easily digestible and most animals that eat it have to regurgitate it and chew the cud. Out in the open, the leaf-eaters had to develop means of protection.
11/13 • Life on Earth • 1979 • Nature
Humans are changing our planet so rapidly, it’s affecting earth’s life support systems: our weather, our oceans and the living world.
S1E5 • A Perfect Planet • 2021 • Nature
While most of the series has focused on conflict, this episode is all about co-operation. The suitably named social spiders spin one enormous, 30m web for the whole colony, a queen bee rules her hive with a strict hierarchy and some green ants show great team spirit to help build a nest together. There are no broken societies here. David Attenborough shifts the focus to bugs that prefer cooperation rather than conflict. They include burrowing cockroaches, the suitably named social spiders - which share a 30-metre web.
5 • Micro Monsters with David Attenborough • 2013 • Nature