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Life Story Season 1 Episodes
Season 1 Episode Guide
8 Episodes 2014 - 2015
Episode 1
First Steps
59 mins
David selects very different species cases of how new-born or fledgling animals start life. It's often perilous, with the safety of numbers to ensure the surviving percentage suffices for reproduction as with sea turtles, or even due to the site of nest/birth, such as Greenland gosling who risk life and limbs despite remarkable fluffy bounce potential to descend form the high cliff to feed o the beach before they can fly. Threats come from predators, elements or jealous males eager to eliminate rivals' offspring, as with lions and bears. Some learn to hunt and feed on the dangerous job, like juvenile meerkats are coached to battle the favorite scorpion 'prey'.
Episode 2
Growing Up
58 mins
Having left the safe nest, the survival rate of juveniles in many species is pitiful. Sometimes the greatest danger comes from males determined to exterminate a rival's offspring, as a tiger does after taking over a territory. Predators take a high toll, even from future ferocious hunters like crocodilians. Often harsh conditions simply mean excessive huger and cold, as for polar foxes. Some gang up in bands once expelled by the adults to collectively seize hunting rights, as keas do on the Falklands. Some perish during the exhausting annual migration, or have to be abandoned.
Episode 3
Home
58 mins
Most animal species rely on a relatively safe home for themselves or their family, if not a while colony. Some build it, like nesting birds, others 'find' caves or crevasses, or steal someone else's. Some homes are permanent, other rather seasonal, due to hibernation and/or migration, or short-term. each location carries advantages, like proximity for foraging or safety, and cons, such as exposure to predators and rivals. Sometimes the essence is food storage for the hungry season, sometimes contending with thievery. Home may essentially be a territory, with exclusive rights to food and/or procreation.
Episode 4
Power
59 mins
Social or not, juvenile and adult animals often must rival for dominance, power in a territory and/or group, which generally allows access to food and mating. Child play may already prepare for adult dueling, as with boxing kangaroo males. In a harem system, as with some seals, only the dominant male is allowed to mate, yet often a significant percentage of 'illegitimate' offspring is protected by them unwittingly. Complex groups, like chimpanzees, may have a whole hierarchy and subtle promotion methods. Fights can be safe, like birdsong, or brutal, even incur fatal wounds, as with many horned species. teaming may help weaker individuals to break a dominant's monopoly. Some colonies, like honey ants, comprise workers and soldiers focused on a single queen, yet may raise several young queens and battle to devour all except the winner as assisted fights for the throne with breeding monopoly.
Episode 5
Courtship
59 mins
In nature, the ultimate measure of success in life is producing offspring. For sexual species, that means mating, and often some period of raising together. Some form couples for life like the albatross, although the average fertility of infidelity is about 10%. Many go to great lengths to produce/protect offspring, some even die routinely in the process, like salmons swimming up stream to their native river or seals fighting to death for mating rights. Small spiders risk being eaten by (potential) partners, many birds put on elaborate courtship show, preparing a stage and impressive plumage, song and dance.
Episode 6
Parenthood
59 mins
Success in nature is measured in procreation, to sustain the species' population(s), hence parenthood is the key goal in life. Often social life, like a herd, helps protecting the vulnerable young, yet its own parents (mainly mothers) go the extra mile, like shielding a buffalo calf from a pack of wolves. Seniors help is often vital to survive on migration, especially the first year, as zebra foals needing to cross crocodile-infested rivers on the African savannah. Learning social skills can also be vital, as with bonobo apes. Fathers may fight off rivals for mating rites and to prevent a triumphant rival killing off their offspring.
Episode 7
The Full Circle
58 mins
In this highlights programme compiled from the recent Life Story series, David Attenborough brings us the universal story that unites each of us with every animal on the planet, the story of the greatest of all adventures - the journey through life. For each stage of life we see the most spectacular, beautiful or dramatic stories from the Life Story series. The journey begins with one of the most talked-about sequences - flightless barnacle goose chicks making an extraordinary leap down a cliff face from the ledge where they hatched. Newly independent arctic foxes travel great distances across the frozen, northern landscape, learning how to catch prey. They leap high into the air and plunge nose-first into the snow to catch the lemmings living underneath. In pursuit of a home, tropical hermit crabs do something seen nowhere else in nature. They form an orderly queue, largest at the front, smallest at the back. It's a housing chain. When the chain is complete there is a mass swap as each crab moves into the newly vacated shell ahead of it in the line. In meerkat society, a youngster must quickly learn how to defend home and family from snakes. In a spectacular showdown between the meerkat clan and a venomous cobra, the youngsters learn a vital life lesson. In a sequence that has since gone viral across the globe, a tiny, drab male puffer fish creates the most complex and beautiful structure made by any animal on earth. He builds a spectacular submarine 'crop circle' in the sand to attract a female's attention. Parenthood for a mother zebra involves a life-and-death choice on where to cross the river during migration. In a touching final scene, elephants delicately stroke the bones of an ancestor.
Episode 8
Life Story Diaries
60 mins
Life Story Diaries includes the Greenland shoot and the difficult scenes witnessed by the film crew (First Steps), the team's two-and-a-half-year quest to capture footage of young Arctic foxes snow diving for lemmings (Growing Up), how the Zambia crew obtained rare footage of a complete wild dog hunt (Home) and the Senegal chimpanzee shoot, where the crew spent 700 hours with the troop to film the spear-hunting behaviour (Power).