Original air date: 5 April 1984
Selected material:
There are various kinds of deserts (32’05)
Not all deserts are sandy like the Sahara, this one is wet
Humpbacks using bubble netting (48’40)
By, at least some scientist, this is regarded as tool use – blowing bubbles that together work like a fishing net made by humans.
Coming up: “… During this century, man has fished so skillfully, so intensively, so unrelentingly, that he has begun to change the pattern of life in the sea. Some kinds of fish have been forced to change their habits, others have been driven close to the edge of extinction. This little port in Newfoundland, close to what was once the richest of all seas, now brings in fewer catches, and modern fish-processing plants like that one are mostly standing idle. So man has changed the sea, just as he’s changed almost every environment in the world. But he’s done something else, too. He’s created new environments, environments of brick and concrete, and chromium and plastic. It’s the latest of the world’s environments, and the ways in which plants and animals have adapted to live in them, that we’re going to look at in the last of these programmes.”