Original air date: 7 November 1990
Selected material:
The prairie dog‘s air conditioning
Attenborough explains how prairie dogs have managed to build a home with air conditioning – stale air flows out of the elevated tunnel end
Indian tailor bird (13’50)
An Indian tailor bird stitching together two leaves to form a single cup, using silk threads that it picks up in the neighbourhood. It is strong enough to hold fibre and hair in addition to mother and chicks.
Final words (talking about the ingenuity of building a termite mound): “… So these spires and turrets are key elements in an air-conditioning system of a near-perfect mansion that has stout walls to protect its inhabitants from the elements and from their enemies, deep dungeons where they can gather moisture, space inside for barns to store their food, and gardens where they grow their crops. And yet all this was built by tiny insects with minute brains, working in total cooperation in the complete darkness. We might like to think that we are the most accomplished architects in the world, but if this was built in human terms with every worker termite the size of me, then it would stand a mile high. And we haven’t done that yet!“