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. Australia was more drinking than sports, and Europe was extremely sports. Now it’s time for ...

Unless you’re either exceptionally lucky or exceptionally cynical in your choice of teams, following sports can be a thoroughly miserable experience. Every year, most teams fail, and they fail in heartbreaking ways. A sports obsession is a form of emotional gambling, and the house tends to win. Why do we do this to ourselves? I think it’s because we have to. Humans are fascinated by games, and, once captivated, it’s difficult to escape.

Sports might be a bad bet, but for many people they’re nourishing in a way that — the efforts of political punditry aside — cannot be found anywhere else. Also, while there’s not much joy in watching your team fail, it’s a lot of fun to watch everyone else’s also fail. Sports are schadenfreude.

Anyway in this scene a lynx repeatedly fails to catch a hare.

I think, if we were somehow turned into wild animals, most of us would choose to be apex predators. Being a prey creature, constantly at risk and having to stay on high alert all the time ... well, that sounds really too stressful. But most hunts end in failure, and barring freakish luck, predators seem hungry all the time, which can’t be any less stressful.

I think the lesson here is not to be a wild animal.

This particular lynx is stalking snowshoe hares in the depth of the Yukon winter. It looks cold, hungry, and miserable, and has to walk hundreds of miles in search for food, and when it finds one the hare just hides in a bush. A second hare also runs away and hides in a bush. Being a hare and getting chased by a lynx can’t be fun, but being a very peevish and hungry lynx would hardly be a good time either.

Cats must be nature’s most stylish terrestrial predator. Even the smaller ones, like lynx, move with an instantly-recognisable grace. They’re beautiful creatures, made even lovelier by the pristine snow of the Canadian north.

Good lynx.

It’s obviously quite hard to catch a snowshoe hare.

Frankly the hares seem to have the lynx overmatched, although the continued existence of any lynx at all implies that the contest is closer than it looks from these scenes.

I hope we’ve established that failure is, perhaps, the essence of sport.

In Tennessee, a fish is building a fortress. And honestly, it’s pretty impressive:

This contraption is the responsibility of a male river chub. In early spring, these foot-long fish embark on a quest to breed. The males seek out a quiet section of river in which to build a nest. These structures can get rather elaborate — they’re significantly larger than the fish themselves and can contain up to 7,000 pebbles, all placed by mouth. The males, for some reason, also decide to get much uglier:

Sorry boys, but bloated-foreheads-with-weird-growths is very much not my aesthetic. But my opinion doesn’t much matter to a river chub. What matters is the nest. These rocky piles provide shelter from both current and predators, should a female chub choose to lay her eggs there, and so building the best nest becomes fiercely competitive. Pebble theft is common.

Eventually the lady chubs make their choices, the eggs are laid and fertilised, and a new generation of fish is reared as the Mississippi slowly washes away those hard-build nests.

These are some ugly fish and I really don’t like them.

Granted, it would be more difficult and time consuming without arms, but I imagine I could make a pile of several thousand rocks without too much trouble.

Fighting over building materials and doing your best to build a very good nest? It’s a cut-throat chub world.

This is architecture. Architecture, while cool, is not sports.

Thanks to various quirks of geography, sections of the eastern coast of North America are subject to some of the planet’s highest tides. Tide present opportunities for land animals to harvest the rich bounty of the seas, and there’s no more opportunistic land animal than the bear.

Tidal zones might be rich in food but they’re also disgusting, rank places, with the stench of half-rotten seaweed everywhere. You can almost smell it coming through the screens. But we’ve dealt with the turd penguins, so we’ll forgive this bear family their rancid crab snacks. This is, or so we’re told, the cubs’ first visit to the seaside. They seem to be enjoying it:

However! Much like last week in Europe, the baby bears encounter a male whole isn’t their father, and are forced to flee up a tree to avoid his wrath. Fortunately, just like during the Finnish forest scene, nothing too bad happens. The grumpy male bear leaves a scent mark on the tree — how anyone might smell with so much seaweed around is beyond me, but bears have noses many thousands of times more powerful than ours, poor things — and the family skedaddles back to safety.

These are some adorable, bears but while I love the seaside I have a visceral reaction to seeing much exposed seaweed. Gross.

The various climbs the little bears undertake seem sort of difficult, as evidenced by:

Did I add this just because it’s cute? Yes, obviously.

Despite things threatening to happen, nothing actually happens.

A stroll down the beach to munch on some crabs is not sports unless someone actually tries to fight the big bear at the end.

If you’re lucky enough to live in a part of the world inhabited by fireflies, make sure you take advantage of those lazy summer evenings when the temperature is just right to draw them out. The little beetles twinkle in the air like borrowed stars, adding magic wherever they go.

Since this is nature, of course, the flashing of their lights is basically morse code for “S E X M E P L S”, the sort of neon signs one might imagine populating a red-light district, but the lurid nature of the show hardly takes away from the beauty.

And since, again, this is nature, sometimes the lights are a trap. There are some species of fireflies which have evolved the ability to mimic others species mating signals, using their lights to attract an innocent bug looking for a mate and eating it.

This sequence doesn’t show that degree of aggressive mimicry, but we get an accidental one instead, with fireflies finding themselves glowing postmortem in a spider’s web, which summons more fireflies which etc. It’s a very pretty dinner.

Yeah this is an easy call.

This isn’t talked about at all during the scene, but I really wonder how on Earth individual fireflies manage to cut through the noise of tens of thousands of other fireflies to hone in on potential mates. Is their vision short-ranged enough that most of the lights gets diffused into the background? If you tried to get me to pick a specific firefly out of that video I would not do a very good job.

Following on from the last part, I’m slightly baffled as to how fireflies differentiate themselves from their firefly competitors. Many mating rituals have an obvious ‘fitness’ component to them, but I can’t tell here. Is it because the world of coleoptera sex is just too alien for me to comprehend? I hope so. (The spider part gives this zero bonus points because that shit is really just too easy.)

If humans could glow, synchronised people-glowing would be an Olympic sport.

Once upon a time, there were six little prairie dogs living in a hole in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains. They were good little prairie dogs, or so they thought. They played nicely with each other (sometimes), kept the burrow clean (sometimes) and even listened to their mother (sometimes). They liked their burrow, and had lots of good grass and seats to eat. The six little prairie dogs had a good life.

They were neighbours with a burrowing owl family, and were good friends with their chicks. They didn’t see them very much, because the owls preferred to come out later, but the chicks liked to play almost as much as the prairie dogs and the mother owl wasn’t nearly as strict as the prairie dogs’.

The prairie dogs thought that their mother worried at little bit too much. She insisted that they not go too far from their burrow — the world was “big and dangerous,” she said, and they were small and many creatures might find them tasty. Their mother also forced them to return to the burrow at a moment’s notice, even if they were having fun playing or had found a particularly tasty patch of grass!

Their mother, the prairie dogs decided, was clearly overthinking things. Surely the world couldn’t be as dangerous as she thought. Nothing scared the cubs.

So slowly, as they got older, they started sneaking further away from the burrow. Whenever they could, they’d also wait a little longer to respond to their mother’s recall shout. Nothing bad ever happened. The world didn’t seem so big and dangerous after all.

One day, as they were playing, the little prairie dogs noticed the burrowing owl mother driving off a badger. “I wish she was our mother,” the eldest and most rebellious of the little prairie dogs. “Look how safe she keeps her family! Our mother just tells us never do to anything.”

The prairie dogs kept playing, glad that the badger had gone away. They’d never seen a predator before, but something told them them the badger was bad news. But with it gone, they could eat and play all day.

The eldest of the little prairie dogs was wrestling with his youngest sister when they heard their mother shouting for them to come home. “Let’s go back,” said his sister.

“Don’t be such a scaredy-dog,” said the eldest. “There’s nothing here that can hurt us. That badger went away ages ago. Mother’s just being ridiculous again. Stay and play.”

“Are you sure?” said his sister.

“Of course I’m sure.”

So the two little prairie dogs kept on wrestling.

For the rest of his short existence, the eldest of the now-five little prairie dogs had to live with the guilt of his sister’s death.

The prairies are not the continent’s finest scenery, but the little prairie dogs are very cute. And quite tasty-looking.

The ending wasn’t very difficult, but the badger did a lot of hard work to sneak up on the prairie dogs. The burrowing owl attack was pretty good too.

Badger against baby prairie dogs? Not a contest. But a little burrowing owl (8 ounces) taking on a whole-ass badger (20 pounds) to defend her young? That’s the stuff right there.

Bonus point for the, uh, ill-judged prairie dog wrestling.

Depressing sports. Also, listen to your mom, kids.

Like many others, I was devastated to discover that roadrunners were neither blue nor locked in an elaborate, contraption-fueled feud with technically adept but curiously stubborn coyotes. Roadrunners are, in fact, little brown birds that like to eat lizards. Here is one on the hunt.

I was also devastated to find out that they don’t actually say “meep, meep”. It’s as though Looney Tunes was lying to me all along.

The roadrunner hunt is really quite odd. It doesn’t go after a gila monster (fair enough), and fails to chase down a couple of spindly-legged speedsters (fair enough), but it totally ignores a half-buried horny toad, and then at one point investigates a tasty-looking lizard of unknown description and instead of catching it lets it run away. And then chases after it.

I’m starting to suspect that roadrunners aren’t that smart. And with the lizard hunt not going very well, this one settles on a centipede. Job mediocrely done — my kind of bird.

There’s a pure component to aesthetics, certainly. A goldeneye duck, for instance, is a beautiful bird in any context. But there’s also an aesthetic of time and place, and a roadrunner in the American West just feels right. It’s dusty and dirty chasing, after other dusty and dirty things, and while I might have preferred something blue and meepy, this’ll do.

Catching lizards in the heat can’t be easy, but there are so many unforced errors here it’s hard to give this a high difficulty score even when the hunt ends up mostly failing.

Idiot bird vs. lizard seems like a pretty good fight.

Running aimlessly and mostly failing to get the job done? That’s a sport. I mean, I’ve just watched an Arsenal game.

Somehow this is not a hair metal tribute band’s tribute band. I’m sorry if this disappoints you. Instead, we have grey mullet, a medium-sized coastal fish moving south with the currents off Florida. They’re moving south in vast numbers, too, with millions of fish heading towards their spawning grounds.

The mullet stay close to the shore in order to avoid the worst of the predators, yet somehow manage to go more or less undetected by the human sea-goers. But running in-shore only works for so long. Eventually the mullet draw the attention of a group of tarpon, large fish with a very large appetite. And so the hunt begins:

The tarpon gorge on the mullet, and are soon joined by sharks and pelicans. But no matter how many predators converge upon the giant school, they can’t make much of a dent in its numbers, and the mullet keep moving south sans a few thousand fish.

I very much enjoy the overhead shots of bait fish, and it’s especially fun to see them having to move around predators (the tarpon are magnificent) as well as human interlopers.

The tarpon, sharks and pelicans have it pretty easy. The mullet are jammed so tight to the shore that there’s nowhere to escape, so they mostly don’t. For the mullet there’s safety in numbers, but only for reasons of sheer probability.

Not much of a fight, but I think sheer weight of numbers plays a factor here. The tarpon are trying to reduce a population 10,000 times their size. Granted, they probably think that sounds more ‘delicious’ than ‘intimidating’, but it’s a relatively tall order.

Sure. Fishing is a sport.

America’s swamps aren’t always hot and humid. The shape of the continent allows arctic weather systems to penetrate right down to the south coast, dropping the temperature below freezing. Alligators can go into a sort of cold fugue state, dropping their heart rate to a beat per minute and sticking their snouts above the ice to make sure they can still breathe. But manatees cannot, and so they need to migrate somewhere warmer.

The waters off Florida should still be too cold for them during the winter, but Florida is an unusual place, and that strangeness manifests itself here through some surprisingly benevolent hydrology. The peninsula’s underground river systems are significantly warmer than the sea, and that’s where manatees see out the cold.

Some manatee babies get bored of all the waiting and play an unusual game:

In the depths of winter it’s not sleepy alligators which threaten the manatees. Instead, it’s boats. Florida’s water-ways are obnoxiously packed with motorboats, and dozens of manatees are killed by propellor strikes every year. Many of those that don’t die bear the scars of collisions, which are common even on young manatees.

Maybe learn to sail, Florida?

Manatees aren’t cute, but the overhead shots have a sort of dreamy quality, like we’re watching a surrealist film about ambulant gnocchi. Also, the frozen alligator is very cool.

The baby manatee annoys an alligator. ANNOYS. AN. ALLIGATOR.

Ok, let’s be fair: it’s a pretty sleepy alligator.

Most of this sequence is not a sport. Annoying alligators? That’s definitely a sport, albeit one I must legally recommend you not partake in.

I knew I shouldn’t have used so many Herman Melville references in the first episode, because we now have a genuine white whale hunt on our hands. Canada is warming faster than any other country on the planet, which has led to some difficult times for polar bears. Used to hunting on sea ice, which gives them a platform and a means to ambush the marine mammals they eat, the bears have had to adapt to a warming climate in which ice is much rarer.

Fortunately, bears are adaptable. Along Hudson Bay, a group of bears has developed a new hunting technique: they go whaling.

Bears, as it turns out, are not very good at chasing down belugas by swimming at them. But the older, smarter bears have a better technique: standing on a small rock, conveniently placed some distance into the water, and dive-bombing the whales as they swing by. This technique proves more fruitful, and one bloody encounter later, the bear is dragging a very dead whale to shore to share with his friends.

Polar bears are fucking terrifying.

We’re used to seeing polar bears in icy conditions, so it’s quite nice to see them frolicking somewhere else.

As ever, the drone shots are magical.

An adult beluga can weigh up to 4,000 pounds. Imagine having to kill one in an ambush fast enough that it couldn’t escape.

It takes a lot of brains and patience for the bears to overcome the fact the whales are far superior swimmers.

Diving is a sport, and it’s even more of a sport if you have to try to kill a whale with your teeth as you dive. From hell’s heart I bite at thee etc., etc., etc.