Life in the Furnace • 2017 • episode "2/3" • The Big Dry

58:16

Liz Bonnin meets the animals using outlandish means to find a mate and raise a family. From feisty mongooses who start wars to pick the perfect partner, to swaggering peacocks faking a mating call and thieving macaques who kidnap babies to get ahead, the natural world appears to be rife with animal rogues.

1/3 • Animals Behaving Badly • 2018 • Nature

44:56

With technological advances allowing scientists to go deeper and deeper beneath the waves, catch a glimpse of the deep-sea beasts lurking below.

3/4 • Life of Oceans • 2010 • Nature

46:23

From mountain zebras to shy and secretive caracals, Karoo National Park showcases a diversity of creatures who have adapted to demanding environmental conditions. Scale the varying altitudes of this nature reserve's vast landscape.

4/9 • Great Parks of Africa • 2017 • Nature

58:53

Even after thousands of years of ice crushing the northern hemisphere and temperatures of 20 degrees lower than those of today, many of the great giants of the ice age still walked the earth. It was only when the world had warmed up again that mammoths, woolly rhinos, sabre-toothed cats, giant ground sloths and glyptodonts finally became extinct. Professor Alice Roberts sets off on her last voyage back to the Ice Age to discover why.

3/3 • Ice Age Giants • 2013 • Nature

53:21

This instalment examines the earliest land vegetation and insects. The first plants, being devoid of stems, mainly comprised mosses and liverworts. Using both sexual and asexual methods of reproduction, they proliferated. Descended from segmented sea creatures, millipedes were among the first to take advantage of such a habitat and were quickly followed by other species. Without water to carry eggs, bodily contact between the sexes was now necessary. This was problematical for some hunters, such as spiders and scorpions, who developed courtship rituals to ensure that the female didn't eat the male.

3/13 • Life on Earth • 1979 • Nature

58:59

In this episode, Chris reveals how the world's most spectacular grasslands flourish, despite being short of one essential nutrient - nitrogen. As it turns out, the secret lies with the animals. There are the white rhinos of Kenya that create nitrogen hotspots by trimming and fertilising the grass. They are drawn to these particular points by communal toilets or 'fecal facebooks', where they meet and greet each other. In the whistling acacia grasslands of Kenya, Chris reveals the amazing relationships between termites, geckos, ants, monkeys and giraffes that make these places so rich in wildlife

2/4 • Secrets of Our Living Planet • 2012 • Nature