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. How fares Asia?

The Pacific walrus is not one of nature’s most appealing creations. They resemble nothing so much as socks left to rot in a garden and then stuffed full of blubber a few years later. And while on land, tusked animals are majestic — the eyes of an elephant convey a deep, thoughtful, almost platonic serenity — the walrus betrays its toothy compatriots, lurching about horribly on land and bringing to bear what is perhaps the animal kingdom’s beadiest stare. The sabre-tusks themselves (I seem to remember being taught that they are of use in rooting out clams, although exactly how was a mystery to me then and remains one now) are a perverse addition to the ensemble. “Well-armed” is hardly a sensible adjective for evolution to bestow upon what is essentially an enormous sausage.

The sausage-ness attracts exactly what you’d expect in the Arctic: polar bears. Both walrus and polar bear are creatures of the ice, and, as I expect you’ve seen from increasingly breathless news reports, there’s less of that around these days. Walruses need a flat surface upon which to rest, while polar bears need it as a platform from which to hunt. With no ice, walruses have to congregate on a few thin, rocky beaches, and that sort of gathering attracts hungry polar bears.

Packing maybe 100,000 tonnes of walrus on one beach sounds like a recipe for severe puncture wounds and indeed several dozen walruses attempt to escape the packed crowds by scaling the cliffs behind the beach. And here is where this scene turns from ominous to outright macabre.

Are walruses good at climbing? No, but they’re persistent enough to scale the cliffs, given enough time. If you’ve ever gone on a serious hike, however, you might have noticed that the descent is just as grueling as the ascent. Now imagine if you weighed as much as a small car, had flippers for limb and were trying to get down a large cliff in a hurry.

The ‘hurry’ is where the polar bears come in. Where a walrus can climb, so too can a bear, and when they reach the top of the cliffs, the walruses instinctively try to escape towards the sea, where they’re more mobile and thus better equipped to fend off attacks. So they race towards the sea, the fastest way possible: by hurling themselves off the cliff. A walrus might be ill-equipped to climb, but it’s even less capable of handling a 100-yard drop.

This rain of soon-to-be-former-walruses rather naturally spooks their fellows, creating a stampede in which many other walruses are crushed or slashed to death by flailing tusks. The Odobenid Vespers — more than 200 walruses die — conclude with a delighted polar bear surveying a pile of corpses, clearly stunned by its good fortune.

NB: This scene is shocking. I’m not trying to celebrate it by writing so much about; it’s just been weighing on my mind since I saw it. The knowledge that anthropogenic climate change is at least partially responsible for these events (Attenborough assures us that they’re still relatively rare) brings the horror home even further.

As I’ve mentioned, walruses are hideous animals. But this category necessarily includes atmosphere, and the oppressive grimness of this awful scene carries too much weight to ignore. A bouncing walrus might not have any conventional aesthetic value, but there’s no way we can give this tragic, moving scene any less than high marks here.

I think that the difficulty of this one is adequately illustrated by the body count.

Apart from the early scuffle between a walrus and a bear (in the water, the walrus has the advantage), this is all about walrus versus ground, at speed, and is therefore not competitive.

Walrus-diving is sports. Not the sort of sports I want to actually watch, but definitely sports.

Bears are incredible animals. Sometimes they’re ferocious, brutal predators, able to rip you basically in half with a swipe of the paw. Sometimes they’re fisherbears. Sometimes they’re honey thieves. And sometimes they perch daintily on top of a volcano, eating grass.

Go find the Kamchatka Peninsula on Google Maps. It’s the thing attached like a stubby tail to the east coast of Siberia. A winter there, you might imagine, is a cold, unpleasant thing. However, Kamchatka is also blessed by a surprising abundance of volcanos, which create unusually dangerous oases in the barren desert of snow.

And so we meet our volcano bears. These bears, who emerge from hibernation hungry, converge on the only snow-free spots around. To find greenery, they must conduct some precarious scrambles above volcanic vents, and some bears have been known to get too close or to slip and fall. Those bears do not have a good lunch.

The true beauty of a bear comes mostly in comparison to other animals, and unfortunately we don’t get that here. Instead we have some scruffy-looking critters doing an ungainly shuffling to eat some grass. But ...

... it’s metal as fuck because they’re shuffling around eating grass that’s growing over volcanic springs which would kill them if they fell in. It’s so metal, in fact, that I’m giving some bonus points in aesthetics.

Bear vs. grass? Enh. Bear vs. volcano? Also one sided (and, fortunately, we don’t see that).

All sports would be improved, at least hypothetically, if conducted over a volcano. In this case, the aggressive geology upgrades ‘skinny bears eat some grass’ from ‘definitely not a sport’ to ‘possibly sports’.

The forest of Shennongjia, in Hubei Province, China, is home to some very strange creatures. Himalayan lore is rife with rumours of man-sized, furry apes, averse to human contact. And, well, here they are. Maybe. These are blue-faced, golden-coated, snub-nosed snow monkeys. They’re rare, mountain-dwelling, mostly-bipedal and overly-hyphenated primates whom you could quite happily build that sort of myth off if you were snowblind and suffering from the altitude. Granted, they’re not that much over 2’ tall, but let’s have some artistic license here. Where’s your sense of mystery?

Monkeys are not usually associated with snowy conditions. These ones have a hard time of it in the winter, surviving by huddling together for warmth (given their beautiful, plush coats, this doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world) and feeding on what looks like a miserable diet of bark, moss and associated grime.

So desperate are they for food that when families collide at the edge of their territories we get what this hitherto serene scene desperately needed: a huge monkey fight. We begin with the dominant males baring their teeth and punching the shit out of each other and then descend into a general melee of kicking, scratching and biting.

Fight over, the scattered band must regroup for warmth, so we get another heart-rending monkey hug. Awwww.

The snub nose is ugly and the blue skin is very Game of Thrones, but fortunately those considerations are overwhelmed by a) the really lovely golden fur and b) the flying hugs and c) MONKEY BABIES. These snowmen are extremely bominable.

I assume nobody reading this has ever tried to punch a monkey in the face. Readers, please do not try punching a monkey in the face, even if you have a monkey to hand. It would be cruel, for one, but also I imagine it would be extremely bad news for you, because monkeys are agile, strong, and mean, and seem more than capable of biting off that hand.

Now make this a small army of very hungry, oversized monkeys punching each other in the face. And it’s also freezing. They would kick your ass.

The male monkeys looked well matched, and when you add the general chaos of the melee to that you get an intense, hard-fought battle.

MMMA is 100 percent sports and I will have these monkeys fight you if you don’t agree.

Many people are terrified of spiders. Many people are terrified of snakes. What this scene asks is: what if we COMBINED THE TWO? Here is a special guest review of the above GIFs, by my good friend Harry Lyles:

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But let’s back up.

The Dasht-e Lut, in Iran, is not a fun place to hang out. It’s one of the driest places in the world. It’s also one of the hottest. There is no earthly reason to live here, except by accident.

When mishap or sheer bloody-mindedness places critters in these sorts of environments, evolution gets to work. And given long enough, evolution can come up with some absolutely wild shit. The Dasht-e Lut is on the flight path of migratory birds, which provide a rare food source — if they can be got.

Perhaps the best way of catching birds is to get them to come to you, which is the trick used by the spider-tailed horned viper. The scales on the tip of its tail have been formed perfectly to look like a plump, juicy spider with wriggling legs, and when the viper flicks back and forth it really does look like a tasty morsel (if you’re a bird) is sitting there just waiting to be plucked.

But no! It’s a snake, and now it’s going to try to bite you in the head. Have fun!

Another relatively ugly scene — the shot of the shrike hovering in astonishment is a particularly cool exception — redeemed by the sheer insanity of what we’re seeing. SPIDER-SNAKE!

You try catching a bird with your teeth. You can draw a spider on your hand (or hold a spider model, or a real spider). I don’t care. Not happening.

Some birds get away, which suggests that this is not as one-sided a match as it might appear.

Imitating a spider so that you can catch birds with your face is sports.

Lizards will go to great lengths for love. In the breeding season, male sarada lizards strut their stuff on the open plains of northern India. They’re brightly coloured and beautiful, and have a dazzling blue and red fan on their throat they unfurl to catch the attention of those lovely lizard ladies. But there’s a problem: saradas are not very big lizards.

Standing (and their gait is quite something when they do) at all of three inches tall, male saradas need some environmental help to be seen. And so battles commence over the small rocks which dot the landscape. Throat-fans are waved with menace, and then the fight begins. Jaws snap, legs flex, and these little lizards go flying through the air, a blaze of shrieking colour.

They lose a point for their ridiculous bipedal waddle, but these lizards know how to put on a show. Beautiful colours and a surprisingly acrobatic fight scene.

You might get a nasty bite or two but I’m pretty confident anyone reading this would clean up against a three-inch lizard if they had to.

A well-matched fight between two lizards at the top of their game. It’s a shame one had to lose: he left everything on the rock out there.

Miniature sports are still sports.

Here we get to watch a baby orang-utan try to eat termites (not tasty!), struggle to climb a tree, give up after nearly getting all the way up to the top, and then take a nap on his mother. Then he eats some mangos.

Nothing else happens. It rules.

Look at the little floof! I can’t stand how cute the little guy is. The nap absolutely kills me.

That tree looks like a very annoying but definitely possible climb.

A) mother is always there to help out if he needs it and b) nothing actually happens, which is totally fine.

It’s adorable, but it’s not sports.

I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t know these critters existed until I watched this episode. Sumatran rhinoceros are the smallest rhinos in the world, standing around 4’ tall and covered in red hair. They also sing little songs to one another. Or they would, if there was still a ‘one another’ to sing to: Sumatran rhinos are critically endangered, with less than 100 individuals left. So that’s depressing.

Attenborough uses the plight of the rhinos to segue into an illustration of the annihilation of the Southeast Asian rainforest. They contain valuable timber, and that land can also be used to grow oil palm plantations, which produce additives to be used in processed food and biofuels. That last note is particularly depressing: even supposedly eco-friendly technologies and techniques can lead to habitat destruction.

Asian land is increasingly valuable as the population expands, but the growth of its cities, while substantial, cannot possibly account for the scale of habitat loss. In the battered forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, we have monuments to one of the oldest of human foibles: near-sighted greed.

The rhino is ugly enough before we pivot into scenes of forests being bulldozed.

It’s easy to feel smug about one’s environmental footprint when the damage being done on your behalf is conducted out of sight. But we should never forget that while cheap goods come at a cost we might not feel now, the real price will be revealed soon enough.

I’m not trying to guilt trip anyone here: I live in England, and so simply by existing I am personally responsible for titanic levels of carbon generation and general destruction. But the first step in fixing the problem is recognising that there’s a problem.

Pretty much beating a dead horse at this point.

Just because it’s depressing doesn’t mean it’s sports.

Whale sharks are the largest fish in the sea. They are slow-moving, friendly filter feeders, and are absolutely enormous — the largest recorded are nearly 60-feet long. As one might imagine, they are easy to catch, and as they have so much meat that they’re extremely valuable. Unsurprisingly, there are not many whale sharks left. In this scene, a whale shark cruises near the surface, edging up to a waiting fishing boat ...

... but this scene is not so depressing as the last. Fishing for whale sharks has been banned in Indonesian waters, and instead of hunting the giants, they throw them their bycatch, causing the gentlest shark feeding frenzy ever captured on film.

Just slurping those little fish right in. Yum!

Whale sharks are undeniably cool fish. But they are in fact so cool they barely do anything apart from sucking smaller fish into their hungry maws.

I appreciate the choice of the fishermen have made not to defy laws and go for the easy, hefty catch.

Whale sharks against little fish isn’t even fair when the little fish are alive to begin with.

Not sports. Cool whale sharks, though.

Four definitely-sports, one probably-sports, and three nos. BBC did a nice job stepping up the sportsiness this episode.