Seven Worlds, One Planet
The flora, fauna and geology of our planet is explored across its seven continents in BBC One’s new landmark series.
We take a look at the BBC’s COVER STORY latest landmark series
Searching for amazing creatures in remote places is fraught with danger and discomfort.
The theme of BBC One’s forthcoming landmark series Seven Worlds, One Planet is not hard to explain. It explores the wildlife on the world’s seven continents… but there’s more. It also reveals how each continent has evolved its unique flora and fauna, for at the heart of each film is geology and how the formation of the continents has profoundly influenced biological diversity across the entire planet. It’s a first.
“You’re so familiar with the conventional image of the Earth,” says executive producer Jonny Keeling, “that you might think this is how it has always been, but actually the continents were mashed together in one great supercontinent – Pangaea – that broke apart about 200 million years ago. It dawned on me that if this supercontinent had not fragmented, we would not have the diversity of life that we see today.
“South America’s current location, for example, with the northern part of the continent straddling the Equator, has created a hothouse for life, making it the most biodiverse of all the continents. It has 40 per cent of the world’s known species living on 12 per cent of the Earth’s land surface. In a single tropical rainforest tree there might be 1,000 species of beetles, compared to 50 in an entire British oak wood.
“At the other end of the scale is Antarctica, a continent dominated by ice. It’s almost uninhabitable. Any residents there are tiny, no bigger than springtails and mites. Sub-Antarctic islands, on the other hand, are heaving with life. There are vast colonies of king penguins, elephant seals and albatrosses that ply the nutrientrich Southern Ocean.” Searching for these amazing creatures in remote and hard-to-get-at places is often fraught with danger and discomfort, as any wildlife film-maker will attest, so simply getting to the location can be a story in itself. Seven Worlds shoots were no exception. On his first visit to the Antarctic, Jonny’s team was beset with problems even before he left the office.
Travel troubles
“We had been planning for several months to film leopard seals,” Jonny recalls. “But two weeks before we were due to leave, the airline announced that it couldn’t take all our baggage, and we couldn’t fly with the lithium batteries that power the cameras. Frantically ringing around for alternative transport with cruise ships and research vessels came to nothing. Finally a French company could take us – but not bring us back. The last people we contacted, owners of a Russian ship, could.
“However, we were stuck in customs in Argentina on the way out, so nearly missed
“A stand-out moment was watching a young chimpanzee practise her nut-cracking skills.”
the only ship, and the journey across the notorious Drake Passage was horrendous – 8m-high waves all the way! And, when we got there… no seals. It was a classic film-maker’s tale. After 10 days of frustration, however, it all started to happen and we were able to film the seals from a drone, underwater and at the surface from the land.”
For director Claire Thompson and her film crew, the journey to the filming location was just the start. The big challenge was to follow a troop of West African chimpanzees in the dense undergrowth of the Taï Forest in Côte d’Ivoire.
“We were trekking after them with heavy backpacks full of cameras, batteries, water and tripods in 100 per cent humidity and, as chimpanzees are close to us genetically, we had to wear hospital-type face masks to limit the spread of human diseases, which made breathing even more difficult,” says Claire. “As we stumbled at speed behind the group, razor-sharp vines would snag us, slicing through clothes and skin, and causing us to trip. The chimps, meanwhile, would saunter elegantly ahead of us, navigating their home with such ease and confidence.”
The main reason for putting up with such discomfort in order to film these characters was because they possess a special skill: they’re toolmakers and users. They select large rocks and logs to crack open nuts, with favourite rocks passed from one generation to the next.
“Certainly, a stand-out moment for me was watching a young chimpanzee named Pegatta diligently practise her nut-cracking skills under the watchful eye of her mother Perla, one of the finest nutcrackers in the group,” says Claire. “The youngster was five years old, but it would take many years before she mastered the skill. She showed such enthusiasm and tenacity that it was impossible not to admire her dedication.”
Unmissable moments
Highlights like these are peppered throughout the series. In the Europe episode, there’s the heart-wrenching story of a downtrodden mother Barbary macaque and her son, and there are strange Slovenian animals living deep within the bowels of the Earth that are so mysterious that local folk thought they were baby
dragons. Africa features a unique alliance of five male cheetahs that hunt together, and a story of subterfuge on the floor of Lake Tanganyika has all the hallmarks of a cuckoo. North America finds polar bears hijacking beluga whales in the most extraordinary way, and South America reveals a New World monkey that is not only one of the smallest known primates but also one of the rarest. Antarctica features the world’s southernmost mammal and a life-and-death tug-of-war beneath the ice. Asia offers an explanation for the mystery of the yeti and encounters the world’s largest fish; and Australasia has a tiny spider that plays peek-a-boo to attract a mate, and a creature that some observers have described as a living velociraptor.
One of Jonny’s favourite sequences involves dingos hunting kangaroos, something that has rarely been filmed. The team spent two years finding the right spot.
“A park ranger said ‘This is something I see regularly’, but we were thinking ‘Is this true or a tall tale?’ We took a punt on it and found it really was true. We filmed in stages, as the dingos were extremely sensitive to intruders: first a film crew, joined later by a second, then we flew drones and finally a helicopter with a stabilised camera system,” Jonny reveals. “We witnessed several successful hunts, always with the same female. She was incredible, not a big dog – the size of a small Alsatian – but she had to hunt the biggest and fastest animal in Australia because she had her pups to feed.”
Worth the pain
Finding a Canada lynx hunting snowshoe hares was a milestone for North America producer Chadden Hunter: “It was one of the toughest shoots I’ve ever been on. Winter in the Yukon delivered the most brutal conditions. Apart from the abiding -30°C temperatures and howling blizzards, the 2m of powdered snow was so soft underfoot that a tangled mass of hidden logs, fallen branches and undergrowth snagged us at every step. We all ended up with twisted knees and bruised sides. At first, we just had a few hints that a lynx was around. Instead of watching the lynx, it was watching us, but when we did gain its trust, we realised we had habituated a wild lynx. To see those piercing yellow eyes staring back at you from only a few metres away was simply breathtaking.”
Antarctica producer Fredi Devas was entranced by the king penguins on South Georgia: “When I was rifling through the camera gear for a piece of kit, a whole group of them gathered around me. They were incredibly inquisitive, poking around in the pile of equipment, pecking at the camera lenses. They seemed to be trying to work out what we were. It really was a wonderful moment.”
“There are few places in the world where you can find that the wildlife is doing better than before.”
Getting to South Georgia, though, was not so wonderful. Like most of the Seven Worlds production team, Fredi also had an onerous journey, crossing from the Falkland Islands on a relatively small sailing yacht in an extremely rough sea with a seasick film crew. Wildlife cameraman Mark MacEwen described the experience as “being in a washing machine with a food-recycling bin”. Yet, when they arrived, Fredi had a very pleasant surprise.
Mixed picture
“St Andrew’s Bay is such an extraordinary place to be because you step onto a beach filled with enormous southern elephant seals, the largest seals in the world, and you look beyond them to a colony of nearly half a million king penguins that are sitting at the bottom of mountains the size of the Alps. I had been there about nine years previously and there are few places in the world that you can return to and find that the wildlife is doing better than before. To me, it felt as if there were more seals and penguins, and we saw many more whales on the journey down.”
Welcome though this observation was, it was not the whole picture. Fredi noticed something else: “The glacier in the bay has retreated significantly. Though some of South Georgia’s species are looking better right now, it’s clear that climate change is starting to have an impact.”
In Seven Worlds it’s a recurring theme. “One of the revelations from across the series is that, on the one hand we had the continents and the plants and animals that live on them evolving over millions of years, yet on the other we were seeing how humans have rewritten the rules of the natural world in little more than someone’s lifetime,” says Jonny. “Animals have not been able to evolve and change as quickly as we have been changing
things during the past 50–60 years. It seems obvious now, and it is a theme that comes through in every single episode.”
This was brought home vividly to Asia producer Emma Napper, visiting Sumatra to film a female Sumatran rhinoceros.
“Sumatran rhinos are unbelievably rare. Fewer than 80 individuals are thought to survive in the wild, and the female we came to film was in a fenced-off area of a national park, which is kept secret and off-limits to all but a few people. I wanted to hear her call – a sound very similar to the eerie songs of humpback whales – and as we approached the compound, we heard the spine-tingling sounds. It was something very special, and I felt privileged to see and hear such a rare animal.
“She’s quite small, shorter than me, and it was hard to imagine that there are fewer Sumatran rhinos in the world than there are people living in my street. There’s a real chance that these animals will be gone during my lifetime.”
It was a sentiment echoed by Jonny:
“At the end of the series, we were in Kenya and it was a very poignant moment for me. We were there with Sir David Attenborough, filming the last two northern white rhinos, a subspecies heading for extinction. The last male died recently, so there were just two females left. They were so noble and gentle, but in 10 years or so they’ll be gone, the last of their kind. It brought it home to me that this is what a loss of biodiversity means – when they’re gone, they’re gone forever.”
MICHAEL BRIGHT is an author and a former senior producer with the BBC’s Natural History Unit.