´óÏó´«Ã½

Life pushes the boundaries of natural history film-making to show the extraordinary survival strategies of the animal and plant kingdoms.

Among the TV firsts and highlights in the series are:

Challenges Of Life

• Three cheetahs hunting co-operatively, bringing down ostriches
• Stalk-eyed flies "growing" their eyes out on long stalks
• Dolphins mudringing – dolphins create circles of mud to entrap fish, filmed from the air
• Killer whales working as a team to hunt seals in Antarctica, filmed from the air and sea

Reptiles And Amphibians

• Komodo dragon hunting buffalo and eventually killing them with their poisonous bite
• Pygmy gecko walking on water
• Pebble toad rolling down the mountain to escape from a hunting tarantula
• Horned lizard attacking the egg-eating patch-nosed snake and flipping on to its back to confuse a predatory coachwhip snake

Mammals

• First complete sequence of humpback whale mating contest – the "heat run" – the largest animal battle on Earth
• Ten milllion fruit bats migrate to one giant mega-roost in Zambia – this massive colony has only been recently discovered by scientists
• More than a dozen polar bears feeding on a huge whale carcass and confronting one another – probably the largest gathering ever filmed
• First use of new camera tracking system – "yogi cam" – developed especially for Life, which allows the camera to track smoothly with migrating reindeer and elephants

Fish

• Flying fish laying eggs in the open sea, and "flying" out of the water, filmed in super-high speed
• Tiny waterfall-climbing gobies in Hawaii – they climb waterfalls 400 feet high to lay their eggs in safe pools
• Male mudskippers caring for eggs in specially constructed chambers under the mud
• Sailfish feeding techniques on a baitball, filmed at super high-speed

Birds

• The marvellous spatule-tail hummingbird courtship display, filmed in super high-speed
• Great white pelicans in raiding parties stealing gannet chicks from their nests
• Male Vogelkop bowerbird mating and mimicking other bird songs

Insects

• Male Darwin's stag beetles fighting in the tree tops
• Japanese red bug displaying diligent maternal instincts
• Males in Dawson's bee colonies killing each other for access to females
• Filming monarch butterflies using aerial camera system to create a "butterfly-eye" perspective

Hunters And Hunted

• Star-nosed mole hunting underwater and using bubbles to smell its prey, filmed in super high-speed
• A killer whale stealing elephant seal calves from a nursery pool
• Greater bulldog bats hunting fish, filmed at 2,000 frames per second
• Cheetahs hunting co-operatively to bring down ostriches
• Foxes hunting baby ibex

Creatures Of The Deep

• A huge number of Humboldt squid co-operative hunting sardines at night
• Thousands of pink starfish, urchins and monster bootlace worms feeding on a dead seal under permanent ice in Antarctica , filmed over a month in tracking timelapse
• Mass spider crab moult where thousands of crabs come together to shed their shells and mate
• Giant sun star feeding on dead giant Pacific octopus, filmed in timelapse
• The sinking of an old tug and subsequent colonisation by marine life

Plants

• The entire growing season in a woodland filmed in one shot, with a combination of tracking, long-term timelapse photography and graphics
• Brunsvigia's complete lifecycle, including bizarre seed dispersal
• Dragon's blood tree with its funnel-shaped canopy, adapted to collecting water from mist
• Desert rose with its bottle-like trunk to store water
• Richea honey bush protecting itself from the cold by fusing its petals into an insulated capsule, and needing the help of a bird to rip it open

Primates

• 400-strong Hamadryas baboon troops fighting
• Phayres leaf monkey females babysitting newborns
• Guinean chimpanzees drumming on buttress roots