Every animal face-off in the BBC’s new nature documentary, rated

We continue our extremely important mission to conduct a scene-by-scene review of the BBC’s new nature documentary, Seven Worlds, One Planet, in order to see how sports it is. We determined that Episode 1, which focused on Antarctica, was reasonably sports. Asia was very sports, as was South America. Time for ...

Australia is indisputably the weirdest continent. Approximately 99 percent of the planet’s strangest creatures call it home, including SB Nation’s James Dator. Venomous spiders are eaten by venomous snakes are eaten by the world’s biggest crocodiles are surfed on by wombats are cheered on by (venomous) duck-billed platypuses, etc., etc. Given Australia’s bounty of weirdness, it’s only natural that we begin with what is probably the oddest bird of all.

Any bird with an “Attacks on Humans” subhead of its Wikipedia page is worth paying attention to, if only so you know to stay the hell away. Cassowaries don’t kill people that often, but when they do, they like kick us to death, using their wicked claws to tear through flesh, innards and bone. Think a very large kiwi with a bright head crest, a velociraptor’s talons and murderous intent. Then make it 50 times larger and 50 times as murderous. Now you have a cassowary.

Given that scene-setting, the BBC have opted to give us a segment about parenting. Cassowary fathers raise their chicks alone for nine months, and this one is leading his two chicks through the jungle to find fruit. The trio encounter a little stream, which they must cross in search of food. One chick jumps in ...

... but the other does not, deciding to try to find its own way through the jungle. What finds him first? Snakes? Monitor lizards? Dad? Dad! DAD. The cassowary family is united once more.

This scene was surprisingly uplifting, mostly because I excepted the chicks to be devoured by crocodiles as soon as they got anywhere near water. This is northern Australia, after all, and I’m conditioned to expect crocodiles in every creek.

Cassowaries are extremely unusual looking birds, but they’re not good looking birds.

Fording a stream less than a foot deep doesn’t seem very hard at all, although I’m going to give some bonus points for that stream being in an Australian jungle that would certainly kill me within two hours if I found myself lost there.

There’s a lot of tension here but no true climax, and therefore no competition.

Last week we determined that misplacing your children isn’t sports, and it still isn’t.

Until today, I had never really considered how bats drink. But a large bat is extremely ungainly, and so finds it difficult to get off the ground, hence all the hanging upside down from trees and in caves and whatnot. Flying foxes — with a five-foot wingspan, they’re a very large kind of fruit bat — get all the food they need in the trees. Their water, though? That takes a special trick.

As it turns out, they drink by skimming the surface of a river for exactly long enough to soak the long fur on their chests, then return to their roosts to lap it up. It’s a skillful, impressive maneuver, and also — AHHHHH-

Right. Here’s where all the crocodiles missing from the cassowary scene have ended up, a sort of drinks gauntlet for these poor fruit bats. “Every two metres of river, there is a crocodile,” says our friend Mr. Attenborough. Australia!

There’s a beauty in contrasts. Take a bat, full of darting grace, have it skim across the water just so, skillful and serene and then BLAM! a crocodile. Ambush and speed and shock. It is an unpleasant mix for a flying fox, of course, but makes for a fun scene.

Collecting water on the wing, having to dip into the river just so without making what would be a fatal splash landing, is difficult enough. Now add crocodiles. Eesh.

Catching a bat as it’s flying over you is quite hard, but it’s still not much of a fair fight, if you’re a crocodile.

I’m a professional journalist. Of course I think drinking is a sport.

Kangaroos have a top speed of something like 40 mph, which they can sustain for more than a mile. Catching one on open ground is more or less impossible, even for dingos. Although they’re fast in their own right, dingos can’t get close to kangaroos on the plains. So how do they hunt them at all?

The answer is that they turn the kangaroo’s great weapon — their hop — against them. Having failed to take them on level ground, these dingos learn their lesson. They find a new herd of kangaroos on uneven ground, and guide them up a hill, then chase them down it. While a kangaroo’s hopping motion gives it plenty of speed, it’s also less stable than the dingo’s running gait, and it’s especially hard to control going downhill:

You can guess what happens once they crash.

Neither of these animals is particularly pretty, but they move beautifully, especially the kangaroos, whose long hops are wonderfully alien to most nature shows.

Hunting down one of the faster land animals in the world using only your legs? Don’t even try.

A close match which required clever tactics for the dingos to earn a win.

Very sports.

I suspect that even the most committed arachnophobe would have no problem with jumping spiders. They’re tiny, don’t sneak up on you, have relatively cute little faces and extremely cute little bounces. Unlike most spiders, jumping spiders are active hunters, which means they need acute vision and big eyes. (That might explain the cuteness.) Also they have some very amusing courtship routines.

Female jumping spiders frequently eat the male spiders if they’re unimpressed by their dance moves. They also frequently eat the male spiders even if they are impressed by their dance moves, but let them mate first. This was presumably evolved as a metaphor for capitalism.

I like jumping spiders a lot. Unfortunately, these particular spiders are not among the most impressive specimens. Let’s survey some of their competitors:

Seducing a spider with your dance moves seems like quite the challenge. The only thing I have ever successfully achieved while dancing is concussing myself.

Think of all the generations of spiders who’ve had to out-dance each other to get here. Think of all the male spiders who are falling at life’s last hurdle. Nature, red in tooth and dance.

Sex is one of the original sports.

Spiky and dry. The thorny devil is a pretty apt ambassador for the Australian Outback, one of the world’s more hostile deserts. Finding food is a problem for its inhabitants, but perhaps less of a problem than finding water. Perentie lizards, the continent’s largest monitor, slake their thirst by eating other lizards (to be honest, this is not my recommended course of action), so when the rains do come, it’s probably unwise for any other lizard to go head-down in a puddle. A thorny devil’s spikes might look impressive, but they’re no use against the 40-pound perentie.

What’s the solution? Sponge impersonation. When a thorny devil finds a puddle, it simply wades into it with its head up. The fine groves between its scales act as capillaries, funneling the water over its body and towards its mouth, and allowing the little lizard to remain vigilant for predators even while drinking.

I’m not sure that spikes are really my thing, but even if a lizard isn’t quite in one’s preferred style, one has to appreciate a lizard done well. Even if you don’t like Gothic architecture, for instance, you’re going to be impressed by the Cologne Cathedral. Yes, I am calling the thorny devil the Cologne Cathedral of spikes.

I think the human equivalent of this would be, something like standing in your drink and trying to spoon it into your mouth somehow. This is biomechanically feasible, but I’m not going to attempt it.

Would be zero, sponges not being known competitors. But then there’s a perentie on the prowl, and that rather spices things up.

I’m a professional journalist. Of course I think drinking is a sport.

Most of inner Australia is a desert, which is my way of saying that yes, this is another scene about drinking. It’s also a scene about budgerigars, which turn out to be expert desert-dwellers. Outside pet shops, their native habitat, budgies have adapted superbly well to the heart of Australia, where they gather in immense flocks and drift from billabong to billabong, where they can get a drink.

But this is Australia, where drinking is exceptionally dangerous. Whenever the flock stops, they’re hunted by birds of prey. The predators also need to drink, so the budgies can get a few sips in while they’re grounded, but there’s not enough time for all of them to quench their thirst.

In the air, budgies are difficult to catch. They fly in close enough formation that hawks have trouble singling them out as individuals, which they need to do if they’re going to grab one on the wing. But eventually the flock has to go back to the water to drink. They do so under the gaze of some very hungry eyes.

When the hawk moves to strike, the budgies take off as fast as they can. Too slow, and they’ll become ex-parakeets.

I’m a sucker for bird flocks of basically any stripe. A murmuration of starlings? Yes, please. Canada geese flying in a V as they migrate? Fantastic. Budgies add that nice flash of yellowy-green too. Lovely stuff.

From the hawks’ perspective, quite difficult. From the budgies’, this amounts to ‘drink fast’, and I can do that.

Bonus points, however, for this bird deliberately making it harder from themself. He’d never leave a budgie behind.

Overwhelming numbers are the only reason that hawk vs. budgerigar is a contest.

I’m a professional journalist. Of course I think drinking is a sport.

We can’t have an Australia episode without the Great Barrier Reef, damaged by anthropogenic climate change though it may be. But we’re not focusing on the corals or their inhabitants here. Instead, we’re treated to a shark hunt, and on a titanic scale.

When you think of a shark hunt, what comes to mind? For me, it’s something like a great white blowing right out of the water to end some unfortunate sea critter:

But shark attacks are not always so dramatic, or so individualistic. Sharks have spent hundreds of millions of years hunting whatever critters come their way, and they’ve evolved all sort of techniques to catch as many of them as possible. And along Australia’s north coast, they sometimes turn shepherd.

When conditions are right, once every decade or so, they do so in absurd numbers. Millions of fish are driven by hundreds of sharks right up against the coast, penned in while they wait to attack. So many fish are jammed into such a tight space that the overall effect is like an oil slick:

Have I mentioned that there are a lot of sharks? There are a lot of sharks. The whole thing looks slightly unreal.

The sharks wait until just the right moment, when they have as many fish as possible trapped, and then they feast. Yum yum.

The sheer scale here is mind-blowing and the cinematography captures it perfectly. There are so many sharks involved that it’s hard to even process from the top-down view.

Herding fish takes patience and extreme coordination, and I have neither.

This isn’t much of a contest once the sharks take the handbrake off.

Fishing is a sport, so this is probably a sport.

Tasmanian devils have had a rough go of things. The entire devil population on the Australian mainland wiped out thousands of years ago, more or less coincidental with the introduction of the dingo from Asia. Their last stronghold is — or more accurately, was — Tasmania, Australia’s biggest island. There they are cut off from dingos by the Bass Strait.

Unfortunately, in the last 30 years a non-dingo population has arisen in the form of a transmissible cancer. Devil facial tumor disease can spread by biting, and since devils love to bite each other, it has spread like wildfire through almost the whole population. The tumors caused by DFTD eventually prevent devils from eating, starving them to death.

Given that it should come as no surprise that the Tasmanian devil is now endangered. This quiet scene shows one of the last wild devil families, isolated from DFTD by living on an islet off the Tasmanian coast. While their mother scavenges a wallaby corpse from a beach, the pups explore the area outside their den, doing the sorts of things all babies do: trying to eat rocks, annoying some ants, and dragging a stick into the house for absolutely no reason.

They’re very cute.

Baby animals goofing around is high marks every time.

The mother’s meal is already dead and the pups’ idea of a good time is harassing a rock.

Nothing happens.

Definitely not a sport.