Original air date: 29 March 1984
Selected material:
Adaptations to island life?
Sedges bear flowers closer to the stem where tortoises can’t reach them
Dual purpose mandibles (30′-30’20)
The bird ʻAkiapolaʻau has very strange mandibles. The lower mandible fits to remove bark and the upper to get to the insect and winkle it out.
Coming up: “… Of course, not all the creatures that you find on islands necessarily spend all their time there. Some like those tough international travellers over there, the gannets, just come here for lodging. They, like the frigates and the boobies of Aldabra, the noddies and the terns of a thousand tropical atolls, find their food, not on the islands where they come to nest, but in the surrounding seas, and that is the vast and complex community that we’ll be looking at next time.”