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6 Episodes 2012 - 2012
Episode 1
Steve's team films the Galapagos islands, a unique volcanic islands chain way off Chili's Pacific coast. This constantly changing, incredibly varied environment hosts an equally diverse and fast-evolving wildlife, terrestrial and marine. No wonder it inspired Darwin's theory of evolution, which can be observed here in a fascinating natural laboratory.
Episode 2
The Serengeti in East Africa is the textbook example of a vast grassland, site of annual migrations, with wildebeest, lion, elephant and crocodile as iconic species. Howver its geological situation is rather unique, a hard layer of petrified voltaic ash largely restricting growth to favor grasses, as do fires, but half of those are men-made by tribal herdsmen.
Episode 3
Steve's team visits the world's largest and most diverse ecosystem, the Amazon rain forest, whose eponymous stream and countless tributaries contain a fifth of the world's river water, enough to largely drive its own weather cycle. Its unequaled 3 million known plants and animal species lives in a multi-stores environment, in extremely complex interaction. Only a shallow soil layer contains mineral nutrients, so the huge trees need extra support roots and various symbiosis, especially with mycorrhiza, a type of fungus.
Episode 4
Monterey Bay, off the south Californoan coast, has a complex ecosystem. Its waters support an exceptionally rich kelp forest, which feeds and houses many fish etcetera and gets extra nutrients because land winds causes rich sediment from the deep ocean channel to be lifted by currents. Sea urchins are the only species voracious enough, eating stems too, to destroy kelp long-term. Sea otters control urchins, except when human hunting eliminated them and thus the whole ecosystem, which returned when they did.
Episode 5
The Okavango Delta is the world's richest river delta, covering a vast, unusually flat plain in the Namibian desert. Most dries up until the rain from the Angolan mountains flow again. Its pattern changes constantly, due to vegetation functioning as natural dams and hippopotamus plowing numerous tiny canals.
Episode 6
Survival on Svalbard, alias Spitzbergen, inside the Artic circle, requires dealing with extreme cold. Top predator is the polar bear, his favorite prey the masterly fishing seal, while polar foxes control the bird population. The island is exceptionally rich in wildlife for the North, on account of the unique bounty of food, enough for hibernation reserves, in its two months non-stop summer, combined with colliding Caribbean and Artic sea currents providing ample nutrients as they also sweep up the nitrates and phosphates that elsewhere usually remain sunk on the ocean floor.