All language subtitles for The Living Planet 05of12 Seas of Grass 720p_Subtitles01.ENG

These beautiful flowers belong
to one of the most successful,

the most widespread
and the commonest of plants.

There are about 10,000 species
in this one family,

and they claim over a quarter
of all the vegetated land on earth.

They are pollinated by the wind,
they need far less water than most trees,

and they can survive both burning and freezing.
They are the grasses.

These tough, persistent plants continue to grow
even when they're trimmed

day after day by grazing teeth.

They are able to withstand
all this rough treatment

because the point from which
a grass leaf grows is at its base

close to the ground and is permanently active.

So grass provides a continuous banquet
for creatures big and small.

Down among the tangled grass stems
live not only creatures that eat grass

but others that feed on the grass-eaters.

Lizards snap up small insects
and mantis munch grasshoppers.

Spiders tackle almost
any creature that moves

and dung beetles clear up
the droppings from above.

Among the most industrious
of these tiny labourers are the termites.

On many tropical grasslands, they flourish
in such numbers that, one way or another,

they consume more of the grass than big
creatures like antelope, cows or kangaroo.

In Brazil's savannahs, there are more termite
mounds per acre than anywhere in the world.

And termites are highly nutritious -

so much so that the giant anteater can exist
by feeding on them and nothing else whatever.

This creature has very poor eyesight
and very poor hearing,

and finds its way around mostly by smell,
so, as long as I keep downwind of it,

there's no reason why it should be
particularly disturbed by my presence.

You might think that that would make it
very vulnerable to enemies.

The fact is, out on the savannahs here,
it's got very few enemies.

The only things that might attack it are a jaguar
or a puma, or if it was a baby, a savannah fox.

And it has a very good defence
against such creatures.

Those huge forelegs, with enormous muscles
on them and gigantic claws,

are quite powerful enough to rip the stomach
from a puma or a jaguar.

It was always thought that those legs
are actually for ripping open termite hills,

and they may be used to some extent
for that purpose.

But it seems more likely now
that they are primarily defensive weapons,

because when they actually come to feed,

this creature doesn't do so much
of a sweep with its front claws

as to use them very, very carefully
to open the exit tunnels in the termite hills.

Once it has done that, it pokes its nose
into the tunnel entrance

and flicks out its 20-inch-long tongue,
coated with sticky mucus,

and picks off the worker termites
clinging to the tunnel walls.

After about half a minute, before the soldier
termites - which have powerful bites -

can rally to the defence of the opened tunnel,
the anteater moves on.

It is a wanderer, always on the move,
sleeping at night out in the open,

blanketed against the cold by its huge hairy tail.

Having no permanent den, the female carries
her youngster with her, piggyback.

Other termite hunters live on the surface
of the mounds themselves.

Beetle larvae lurk in burrows and lure flying ants
and other insects to them

by the luminous glow of their heads.

Sometimes the termite mounds are attacked
at their very foundations.

This is the biggest insect-eater on earth,
the giant armadillo,

a massive animal that weighs
over a hundredweight.

There are few more powerful diggers.

It's no finicky eater like the giant anteater,

but rips its way through the ground
into the heart of the termite hill.

With its defences breached,
the termite colony is very vulnerable.

This mouse, oxymicterus,
has a particular fondness for termites

and regularly follows in the wake
of the giant armadillo.

But the termites' biggest enemies
are even smaller.

Carnivorous ants regularly raid the colonies,
carrying off the helpless, pallid termite larvae.

The defenders of the colony, the soldier termites,
engage the enemy ants.

These termite warriors have jaws
so specialised for fighting

that they can't feed for themselves
and have to be tended by the workers.

Each species is armed in its own way.

Some have short nippers, some sharp shears.

Others have blades that strike outwards
and others nozzles on their forehead

through which they squirt a sticky poison spray.

Other ants are vegetarians, like the termites,

and use their jaws to demolish
the living grass plants, scissoring up the leaves,

sawing through the stems
and carrying off the plant piecemeal.

Grass consists largely of cellulose
and that is a very difficult substance to digest.

Termites do it with the help
of bacteria in their gut.

The grass-cutting ants have another
and quite extraordinary method

of making its nutriment digestible.

Laboriously, they haul the pieces of grass
back to their nest,

which may be as much as 100 yards away
and have several hundred small entrances.

Inside an entrance, a tunnel leads down
into a vast labyrinth of corridors

that may extend for 80 or 90 feet
in a horizontal direction

and lead to as many
as 2,000 interlinked chambers.

Such a nest may contain
as many as 20 million ants.

The workers carry their cuttings
deeper and deeper into the nest.

And here, 15 feet below the surface
of the ground, in special chambers,

they feed the grass to a fungus.

This fungus forms crumbly white lumps
and grows nowhere else but in these nests.

Carefully, the ant gardeners
clean every fragment of grass.

Meticulously, they remove every spore
of any other fungus

that might grow down here if it got the chance.
Weeds, as you might say.

The waxy skin that covers the leaf surface
is stripped away

and then the pieces are cut up
into even smaller fragments.

The gardeners push the prepared morsels
of grass into the mass of the fungus.

The fungus digests it,
cellulose and all, and grows,

and the ants then feed on the fungus,
which, unlike grass, they can digest.

The ants tend their gardens with great care.

Dead pieces of fungus and coarse,
unsuitable fragments of leaves

are carefully removed and carried away.

With unflagging energy, porter lines of ants
carry the waste down the long corridors

to the lowest chambers of all, 20 feet below
ground, that serve as the colony's refuse tips.

These are not only rubbish dumps,
but cemeteries,

for here they also bring
the bodies of dead workers.

Dawn on the grasslands of Brazil, the campo.

It's still chilly and the dew lies heavily.

But the rising sun will soon dry out the pasturage
and rouse the daytime inhabitants.

The grassland birds have no trees from which
to sing. Some make do with grass stems.

Others, like the scissor-tailed flycatcher,
proclaim their territorial rights by visual display

flying incessantly and conspicuously
above their chosen plots.

The seriama, a catcher of snakes and insects,
surveys the prospects from a termite hill.

The tapir has browsed throughout the night,
but now, as the sun rises,

it makes its way back to the forest that grows
in the moist ground beside the river,

for it prefers that shady obscurity to the hot
conspicuousness of the daytime plains.

On the other hand, the savannah deer
has slept all night and only grazes when it is light.

It prefers to be able to see its enemies.

The armadillo is no grass-eater.
It's looking for insects, roots and birds' eggs,

and even a lizard or a small snake.

As the day warms up, reptiles become active.

The tegu lizard is sufficiently powerful
to be able to take on all-comers.

Just what it likes, and no small bird, no matter
how aggressive, is able to repel a hungry tegu.

Eggs on the ground are very much at risk
from creatures like this.

But where else can you put them?
There are few trees on the grassland.

But there are termite hills.

The flicker is a kind of woodpecker
and drills into termite hills

just as efficiently as its cousins do
into tree trunks.

And when the flicker has finished with its hole,
kestrels often take it over.

The male has a lizard.

Softly, he summons the female,
who is incubating her eggs in the hole beneath.

The burrowing owls nest in holes in the ground,

taking over ones that have been
abandoned by armadillos

or even digging them for themselves.

The male perches on a termite hill on guard,
for the chicks are about to emerge.

Danger - a harrier.

Now it's safe once more.

As long as the chicks can't fly, they're in danger
from armadillos, tegus and other predators.

So it is very important that they get
their flight feathers as quickly as possible,

and already, only a couple of weeks after
hatching, they are showing through the down.

Out in the fresh air, there is space to preen
and a chance to sunbathe.

Once more there is an alarm...
It's the spur-winged plovers.

The plovers are quarrelsome birds.

Even though each pair has established
its claims over a patch of grassland,

the birds continually dispute
with their neighbours.

Rivals display aggressively, running along
the frontier between their territories

and dive-bombing one another.

Their nest is probably as safe as it would be
even if they remained sitting on it,

for their eggs are marvellously camouflaged
and very difficult to see.

The adult tinamou, on the other hand,
is just as well-disguised as the plover's eggs.

Its strategy is to stay put and freeze.

Just as well, for its eggs are very conspicuous,
a brilliant shiny purple.

One ground-nester on the open plains,
however, fears nothing.

It's big enough and strong enough
to take on even an armadillo or a tegu.

The rhea, the South American ostrich.

It's the male that makes the nest
and incubates the eggs.

And he is polygamous, with half a dozen
or so females, all of whom will lay in his nest.

But with so many contributors, the compiling
of a clutch can be a tricky business.

Sometimes several females, each with an egg
ready to be laid, will turn up at the same time

and there's some confusion
as to who's going to have the first turn.

He doesn't seem to want them
to lay in the main clutch.

Perhaps he's worried about them treading
on his eggs, so they'll have to sit outside.

The first female goes down.

Once laid, the egg has to be brought in
to join the rest of the clutch

if he is to incubate it properly.

Another female settles down to lay.

And another egg joins his collection.

His final clutch may be huge, up to 50 or so.

They've come from many different females
and been laid over a period of eight days,

but all hatch together.

The young pipe to one another
while they're still inside their shells,

stimulating the eggs that are a bit behind
to speed up their development.

The advantage of hatching simultaneously
is that the young, soon after they emerge,

can go off and feed together
under Father's watchful eye.

The open grassland is full of dangers
and there are very few places to hide

from the many enemies
that lie in wait for the chicks.

The maned wolf will certainly take one
if it gets the chance.

It hunts alone, never forming packs,
seldom even seen with its mate.

It maintains contact with others of its kind
by an occasional bark

and by leaving its scent on bushes
and termite mounds, spraying its urine high up

so that the wind will pick up the smell
and broadcast it.

This wolf's tastes are, oddly, strongly
vegetarian. Fruit forms a large part of its diet.

But it certainly takes birds if it can,
and the tinamou is particularly vulnerable,

for it's almost flightless.

Trees don't grow on the open plains of Argentina
and Brazil because, for much of the year,

there is too little rain.

During the dry season, the shallow lakes
are reduced to stretches of baked mud.

Capybara, giant semi-aquatic guinea pigs,
crowd into the few shrinking pools that remain.

Cayman are compelled to spend
much of their time out of water,

and turtles jostle for places along the contracting
margins with the capybara.

But during April, the clouds begin to gather
and in June they burst.

It's a testing time
for many of the grassland creatures.

2,000 miles north of the Brazilian campo,
the grasslands of Venezuela, the llanos,

flood over great areas, for the ground
is full of clay and holds the water.

For some, this is exactly what they want.

The llanos are flooded like this
for almost half the year.

That's all right for those capybara.

They are almost as much at home
in the water as they are on land.

Some creatures, even such an unlikely-looking
swimmer as the giant anteater,

manage to struggle to dry ground.

The armadillo, too,
is very competent in the water.

Many others, such as burrowing rodents that
might otherwise crop the grass of the plains,

can't do so because they can't survive
being flooded like this every year.

The grass, however, grows tall
and lives through even this hardship.

2,000 miles farther north still, water lies
on the plains for many months on end,

as snow on the prairies of North America.

Here the temperature can drop
to 46 degrees below zero centigrade.

The resistant grass survives it
but few animals can.

The ground squirrels retreat to their burrows
and go into a state of suspended animation.

Their temperature falls
and their breathing rate slows - they hibernate,

using the absolute minimum of their body
reserves accumulated during the summer.

A cousin of the ground squirrel,
another rodent called the prairie dog,

does remain active, and during milder spells
it ventures out onto the snow

to nibble what leaves it can find.

The prairie chicken, actually a grouse, is one
of the few birds to stay on the winter prairies,

for although there are no insects to be had now,
it can survive on nothing but seeds and leaves.

Things are happening, however, below ground.

The pocket gopher is still hard at work.

Its winter food is roots,
and very nourishing they are,

for many plants in autumn withdraw
much of their substance from withering leaves

and store it in their roots.

The bison manages to survive
even the coldest weather out on the prairie.

Big animals are not as easily chilled
as small ones,

and the bison is the most massive animal
in North America.

A bull can weigh a ton.

The extreme temperatures have,
in effect, put the grass into deep freeze,

so that, although it's frozen solid,
such nutriment as it contained is preserved.

The bison, being so big, have no difficulty
in sweeping away the snow

and reaching the frozen tufts.

Bison share the prairies
with pronghorn antelope which, in winter,

often visit areas that the bison
have just cleared of snow.

They are the swiftest animals in North America,
capable of speeds of 50 mph at full stretch.

Coyotes, a small relation of the wolf, have little
chance of catching a young healthy pronghorn.

But that doesn't mean they won't try,
and by chasing, they can discover

if there are any antelope in the group that
are less than healthy and therefore catchable.

Another joins the chase.

The bitter cold and the shortage of food
kills many animals at this time.

For the coyotes, a carcass is precious,
a mass of meat in an otherwise barren land.

A pair has already taken possession
of this dead elk.

A third arrives. There will be trouble.

They signal their threats with bristling fur,
snarling lips but surprisingly little sound.

As spring approaches, the temperature rises,
even below ground,

and the winter sleepers begin to awake.

Rattlesnakes, forced to take shelter from the cold
frequently take over the deeper burrows

made by prairie dogs
and there, ten feet below ground,

sit out the winter
beyond the reach of the lethal frost.

Sometimes as many as two or three hundred
will share the same hole.

As the spring sun warms the air,
so they too slowly come to life.

The prairie chickens leave the tall grass
country where they spent the winter

and assemble on shorter turf,
for they are about to start their spring dances.

Each male stays on a small patch of ground
that is his dancing stage,

and there erects his feathery horns, inflates
his wattles and starts his stamping dance.

The prairie dogs live
in such concentrations and such numbers

that their patch of the prairie
is called a town.

They mated below ground back in February.

The youngsters were born a month later and now,
in the sunshine of early summer,

they get their first view of the world.

The bison, too, have their young.

The thick woollen coat that protected them
through the winter is now far too hot,

and the animals begin to shed it
in sheets and tatters.

The bison, being such a big animal,
has a long gestation period, nine months.

So, soon after the young are born,
courting starts again,

and for the bulls
that involves battling with rivals.

These jousts, which can be very punishing
and even end in death,

establish a ranking among the bulls.

The victors can then seek access to the cows,
which is another problem.

The bison herds have a particular liking
for the grazing around the prairie dogs' towns,

for the prairie dogs are good farmers.

They deliberately cut down unpalatable plants
and remove dead material,

and their constant cropping means
that the grass leaves around their burrows

are all young and succulent,
and the bison like that

just as much as the prairie dogs do.

The rattlesnakes also haunt the town,
on the lookout for young prairie dogs.

The shortness of the cropped turf makes it easy
for the town sentinels to see approaching danger.

What to do about it is another question.

Bolting down a burrow
is no defence against a rattlesnake.

It will simply follow. The only thing to do is ret
and whistle a warning to the neighbours.

Bison are cattle.
Like antelope and sheep, they are ruminants,

dealing with the problem of digesting cellulose
by regurgitating pellets of grass they graze

and giving it all a second chew.

They also maintain a digestive broth
of bacteria in their huge stomachs.

Only 150 years ago,
they lived in such numbers on the prairies

that a herd could stretch
from one horizon to another.

How many there were altogether is uncertain.
Thirty million is one of the lower estimates.

That was a measure of the great fertility
of these natural grasslands.

Today, most of the prairie has been turned over
to the raising of domesticated cattle for beef,

or ploughed up to grow
domesticated grass, wheat.

By the beginning of this century,
less than a thousand wild bison were left.

But today, thanks to careful conservation,
there are some 35,000 living in reserves.

The prairies receive comparatively little rain
because they lie in the centre of a huge continent

and the Rocky Mountains screen off the rain.

Across the northern Pacific,
the biggest continental mass of all, Eurasia,

also contains a heartland
where relatively little rain falls -

the grass-covered steppes
of Russia and Eastern Europe.

And here another grass feeder survives
that once formed vast herds,

an extraordinary antelope, the saiga.

Its huge nose contains, internally,
a convoluted arrangement of passages

lined with mucous glands
that apparently serve to warm and moisten

the dry air of the steppes and filter out the dust

The steppes are not as fertile as the prairie

and are ravaged
by regular and disastrous droughts.

But the saiga seem to have adapted to this and
have a quite extraordinary rate of reproduction

that enables them to recover their numbers
after such a catastrophe with great speed.

The females, when they are a mere
four months old and only half-grown,

mate and produce their first calf.

After it is weaned, they grow rapidly, so that
by the beginning of the next breeding season,

they are full-size, and then they quickly
breed again - and this time

three quarters of them will produce twins.

These animals, too,
were hunted close to extinction,

but when people realised that
these natural inhabitants of the steppes

could turn their grass into meat much more
efficiently than any domesticated animal,

indiscriminate hunting was stopped and now
there are over two million in the Soviet Union.

Travel south west from the steppes of central
Eurasia, the greatest of all temperate grasslands,

across territory where there is so little rain
that not even grass can grow,

and you come to the greatest
of all tropical grasslands - in Africa.

Here there is enough rain
to create rivers and waterholes,

so in the moist soils around them and on rocky
outcrops, a few trees manage to grow.

In the more regularly watered parts,
thorn trees stand, distanced from one another,

their widespread root-systems managing
to collect just enough water to sustain them.

Elsewhere, there is only enough rainfall for grass

But young trees are threatened
not only by drought but by fire.

It sweeps rapidly over the plains,
killing the tree seedlings

but leaving the growing buds of the grasses,
close to the ground, quite unharmed,

and green shoots of grass appear within days.

So the fire, which starts so easily
in withered grass stems,

is one of the factors that keeps
the country open, for grass.

The grasslands of Africa stretch
in an immense and almost continuous arc

from the Sahara in the north
down through East Africa

and on to the great game plains
of Southern Africa and the Cape.

During the eight million years or so of recent
history, they've varied quite a lot in their extent

and at the moment, they are not as big
as they have been in the past.

But during this period of time, the grasslands
have developed, and as they have done so,

the animals that lived on them have evolved,

the nature of one
reacting on the nature of the other.

Today, there's a greater variety and a bigger
concentration of grass-living creatures

on these African plains
than anywhere else in the world.

Different lengths of neck, different
sets of teeth, different appetites,

such variety means that almost
every growing leaf, short or long,

of every kind of plains plant,
is eaten by something.

This vast tonnage of meat
on the hoof has led, inevitably,

to the appearance
of an abundance of meat-eaters.

And they too are varied,
to exploit the variety of meat available.

The serval seeks mice.

The lions, hunting in teams,
butcher wildebeest and zebra.

Hunting dogs do the same.

The cheetah goes
for animals its own size, gazelle.

Before grass spread over the plains,
the ancestors of grazing antelopes

must have lived in bush country,
rather as dik-dik do today.

The bushes don't produce many leaves,
but they are highly nutritious

and there are enough in an acre or so
to sustain a pair of these tiny antelope.

So the dik-dik mate for life
and are permanent residents of their territory.

They know it intimately
and have their own trails and hiding places,

and they mark out its frontiers
with special notices.

The ritual is nearly always the same.
The female visits the midden first.

The buck is stimulated to follow and habitually
goes through exactly the same sequence

of smelling, urinating, scratching and dunging.

When the ceremony is over, the buck marks
the nearby bushes with a sticky perfumed wax

from a gland just below his eyes.

Impala, however, live in more open country
and feed not only on bushes but on grass.

Here they can't hide
and they find their safety in numbers.

With so many sharp eyes and acute ears,
it's very difficult for a hunter

to approach them undetected.

But such a lifestyle obviously makes it
impossible for the animals to live

in permanent pairs on their own territory
as the dik-dik do.

Instead, the males and females
form separate herds.

The bucks then battle among themselves.

Those that win will leave the bachelor herds
and set up individual territories.

When the victors have established themselves,
the does visit them, one after the other.

It is a very exhausting business for the bucks,
repeatedly mating and fighting off challengers.

After about three months of this,
the once dominant bucks are worn out.

They yield to other, fresher males
and return to the bachelor herd to recover.

Wildebeest live on grass alone.

But the patchy distribution of rain
over the African plains

means that they can't stay
permanently in the same place.

They quickly exhaust pasture on one patch
of the plains and must move to an area

where rain has recently fallen
and the grass is springing again.

So the wildebeest are constantly on the move
and their social arrangements

have to be different
from the dik-dik and impala.

During the short breeding season, the males set
up small territories along the migration routes.

They advertise their pretensions
by prancing around and snorting,

seeking showy contests with rivals
to demonstrate their virility to passing females.

The problem then is to keep
the females in their territory

and prevent them
from moving on to a rival's patch.

The young calves,
born only a few months before,

adopt very early the jaunty, slightly crazy way
of carrying on affected by their fathers.

Within two weeks,
the majority of the females are mated.

And then, suddenly, almost overnight, the whole
herd, hundreds of thousands strong, vanishes.

They've gone in search of fresh pastures.

The varying growth of the grass over the year
affects the lives of people as well as animals.

In the eastern part of the grasslands,
in the Sudan,

the people keep herds
of semi-domesticated cattle.

These are their pride and their wealth
and their livelihood.

At night they pen them in enclosures made
from uprooted thorn bush, to keep out lion.

The people can't settle in permanent villages,
for their cattle exhaust the meagre pasture,

just as wildebeest do,
so periodically they too have to move.

It is a nice question as to whether the animals
are being driven by the people

or whether the people are, willy-nilly,
following the herds.

Many people in the Sudan regard not only their
semi-wild cattle as their own personal property,

but also the fully wild game
that regularly passes through their territory.

The white-eared kob, the males black
and white, the females a delicate tan,

live in the southern Sudan.

Here, during the rainy season,
the does give birth to their young.

As the rains end and the plains begin to dry out,
the herds begin to move north,

following the new flush of grass
that springs from the receding waters.

As they go, the herds are funnelled together

by two rivers that flow closer and closer
to one another until eventually they join

and the kob have no alternative
but to attempt to cross -

and here the Merle people await them.

For the Merle, this is an annual bonanza
and a great celebration.

Families have travelled from all over
the tribal territory to take part

and to claim their share in their harvest of meat.

If all goes well, there will be great feasting.
But that's by no means a certainty.

If the herds don't appear,
there will be real hunger in the tribe.

In the early morning, the hunters
cross the river to set up their ambush.

There's no guarantee
that the kob will come this way.

If the rivers are low, they may well try to cross
on a much broader front upstream.

For the kob now, there is no going back.
They have to cross.

Day after day, the kob that have arrived
at this crossing attempt to run the gauntlet.

It takes several weeks for the whole
migration to pass through.

A million kob will make the journey.
5,000 of them will be killed.

The Merle not only feast well now,

they sun-dry the meat so that the families will
have full stomachs for many months to come.

In spite of the Merle's ambush, the vast majority
of the kob reach the northern grasslands.

There they will find enough food to sustain them
throughout the critical months of the dry season.

And there, too, they mate, so that next year
herds will reappear to make the river crossing

and provide the Merle, once more, with meat.

And the grass, too, will spring again,

this remarkable plant that can survive
intense grazing and burning and flooding.

The one thing it can't tolerate is drought.

If there is just a little less rain,
then its leaves wither, its roots shrivel

and can no longer hold the soil together,
so that the wind can catch it

and blow away the small nutritious particles.

And then it's reduced to little more than sand
and the land becomes a desert.