Life

2009 • Discovery Channel
4.8
12 reviews
Eligible
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Season 1 episodes (10)

1 Challenges of Life
10/12/09
In nature, living long enough to breed is a monumental struggle. Many animals and plants go to extremes to give themselves a chance. The miniature strawberry poison arrow frog carries a tadpole high into a tree and drops it in a water-filled bromeliad, while fledgling chinstrap penguins undertake a heroic and tragic journey through the broken ice to get out to sea. See hippos launching from the water into the air and chameleons stealing prey from a spider's web. Sprint with cheetahs as they band together to tackle ostriches and watch dolphins form perfect rings of silt to trap fish.
2 Reptiles and Amphibians
10/19/09
Reptiles and amphibians may look like hangovers from the past, but they are amazing innovators. The pebble toad turns into a rubber ball to roll and bounce away from its enemies. Extreme slow-motion shows how a Jesus Christ lizard runs on water, and how a chameleon fires an extendible tongue at its prey with unfailing accuracy. In a television first, komodo dragons hunt a huge water-buffalo, biting it to inject venom, then waiting for weeks until it dies.
3 Mammals
10/26/09
Mammals dominate the planet thanks to their warm blood and the exceptional care they provide for their young. Weeks of filming in the bitter Antarctic winter reveal how a mother Weddell seal wears her teeth down keeping open a hole in the ice so she can catch fish for her pup. A powered hot air balloon produces stunning images of millions of migrating bats as they converge on fruiting trees in Zambia. A gyroscopically stabilised camera moves alongside migrating caribou, and a diving team swim among the planet's biggest fight as male humpback whales battle for a female.
4 Fish
11/2/09
Fish dominate the planet's waters through their astonishing variety of shapes and behaviour. The beautiful weedy sea dragon looks like a creature from a fairytale, while the sarcastic fringehead appears to turn its head inside out when it fights. Slow-motion cameras show flying fish gliding through the air and capture the world's fastest swimmer, the sailfish, plucking sardines from a shoal at 70 miles per hour. And the tiny Hawaiian goby undertakes one of nature's most daunting journeys, climbing a massive waterfall to find safe pools for breeding.
5 Birds
11/9/09
Birds owe their global success to their feathers - something no other animal has that allows them to do truly remarkable things. For the first time, a slow-motion camera captures the unique flight of the Marvellous Spatuletail Hummingbird as he flashes long, iridescent tail feathers in the gloomy undergrowth. Aerial photography takes us into the sky with an Ethiopian Lammergeier, dropping bones to smash them into edible-sized portions, while thousands of pink flamingos promenade in one of nature's greatest spectacles.
6 Insects
11/16/09
There are 200 million insects for each one of us. They are the most successful animal group ever - their key is an armoured covering that takes on almost any shape. Darwin's stag beetle fights in the tree tops with huge curved jaws. The camera flies with millions of monarch butterflies which migrate 2000 miles, navigating by the sun. Super-slow motion shows a bombardier beetle firing boiling liquid at enemies through a rotating nozzle and a honey bee army stings a raiding bear into submission, while grass cutter ants march like a Roman army, harvesting grass they cannot actually eat.
7 Hunters and Hunted
11/23/09
Mammals' ability to learn new tricks is the key to survival in the knife-edge world of hunters and hunted. In a television first, a killer whale off the Falkland Islands does something unique: it sneaks into a pool where elephant seal pups learn to swim and snatches them, saving itself the trouble of hunting in the open sea. Slow-motion cameras reveal the star-nosed mole's newly-discovered technique for smelling prey underwater, young ibex soon learn the only way to escape a fox - run up an almost vertical cliff face - and young stoats fight mock battles, learning the skills that make them one of the world's most efficient predators.
8 Creatures of the Deep
11/30/09
Marine invertebrates are some of the most bizarre and beautiful animals on the planet, thriving in the toughest parts of the oceans. Divers swim into a shoal of predatory Humboldt squid as they emerge from the ocean depths to hunt in packs. When cuttlefish gather to mate, their bodies flash in stroboscopic colours. Time-lapse photography reveals thousands of starfish gathering under the Arctic ice to devour a seal carcass, and a giant octopus commits suicide for her young.
9 Plants
12/7/09
Plants' solutions to life's challenges are as ingenious and manipulative as any animal's. Innovative time-lapse photography opens up a parallel world where plants act like fly-paper, or spring-loaded traps, to catch insects. Vines develop suckers and claws to haul themselves into the rainforest canopy. The dragon's blood tree is like an upturned umbrella to capture mist and shade its roots. The seed of a Bornean tree has wings so aerodynamic they inspired the design of early gliders, and the heliconia plant enslaves a humming bird and turns it into an addict for its nectar.
10 Primates
12/14/09
Primates are just like us - intelligent, quarrelsome, family-centred. Huge armies of Hamadryas baboons, 400 strong, battle on the plains of Ethiopia to steal females and settle old scores. Japanese macaques beat the cold by lounging in thermal springs - but only if they come from the right family. An orang-utan baby fails in its struggle to make an umbrella out of leaves to keep off the rain and young capuchins can't quite get the hang of smashing nuts with a large rock, while chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have created an entire tool kit to get their food.

About this show

David Attenborough narrates a breathtaking ten-part blockbuster that brings you 130 incredible stories from the frontiers of the natural world. Discover the glorious variety of life on Earth and the spectacular and extraordinary tactics animals and plants have developed to stay alive. Cutting edge cinematic techniques capture unprecedented, astonishingly beautiful sequences, including birds running and dancing on the water's surface in dazzlingly intricate displays of courtship and fidelity, fish outwitting predators by using their fins to take flight, flies competing in a mesmerising eyeball inflation contest. More than four years in the making, filmed over 3000 days, across every continent and in every habitat, this is Life as you've never seen it before.

Ratings and reviews

4.8
12 reviews
Brianna “meme” Brown
June 19, 2020
Me to like this one and it was my first time with the development and the idea that it would have been more important for us than him
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Barry Ramey
May 8, 2020
Looks really interesting!!!
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big me
January 16, 2021
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