An electric flash! No – the display of a file clam. ibid.
Western Australia – these vast aquatic grasslands stretch for fifteen hundred miles. ibid.
The Great White – the largest predatory fish on the planet. ibid.
Trees – surely among the most magnificent of all living things. Some are the largest organisms on earth dwarfing all others, and these are the tallest of them all. The deciduous and coniferous woodlands that grow in the seasonal parts of our planet are the most extensive forests on earth. David Attenborough, Planet Earth e10: Seasonal Forests
Giant Redwood ... These conifers grow at ten times the rate of those near the Arctic, and they live for thousands of years. ibid.
Away from all land: the ocean. It covers more than half the surface of our planet. And yet for the most part it is beyond our reach. Much of it is virtually empty. A watery desert. All life that is here is locked in a constant search to find food. David Attenborough, Planet Earth s11: Ocean Deep
Below five hundred metres new mysterious animals appear. ibid.
The weirdest in this world of the strange: Vampyroteuthis – the vampire squid from hell. ibid.
The floor of the Atlantic Ocean is split in two by an immense volcanic mountain chain that winds unbroken for 45,000 miles around the globe. ibid.
Home to the biggest animals that exist or has ever existed: the blue whale. Some weigh nearly two hundred tons, twice the size of the largest dinosaur ... The largest animal on Earth feeds almost exclusively on one of the smallest: krill. ibid.
The biggest of all fish, Thirty tons in weight, twelve metres long. A whale shark. Its huge bulk is sustained by mere microscopic creatures of the sea: plankton. ibid.
These manta rays are giants: eight metres across, weighing over two tons. ibid.
We can now destroy or we can cherish: the choice is ours. ibid.
The natural world is the greatest of all treasures. And yet in my lifetime we have damaged it more severely than in the whole of the rest of the human history. Attenborough: 60 Years in the Wild III: Our Fragile Planet, BBC 2012
Peter [Scott] had his own natural history series on television: it was called Look. ibid.
Life in Cold Blood 2008: The Giant Galapagos Tortoise – they live longer than any other animal on Earth, well over a hundred and fifty years. ibid.
Diane Fossey had been studying the Mountain Gorilla. ibid.
I actually witnessed the extinction in the wild of the Panamanian Golden Frog which fell victim to the same insidious killer. ibid.
I have been enthralled by coral reefs ever since. ibid.
The change is already beginning to be seen at the Poles. ibid.
Our planet boasts an extraordinary variety of habitats ... But now there is one particular phenomenon that affects them all: our world is changing. In the last one hundred years the average temperature of our planet has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. And it’s set to rise further. There is no doubt that our planet is warming at a rate unprecedented in our history. Attenborough Explores ... Our ... Fragile World, BBC 2000
Rising sea temperatures are forcing cool-water dolphins away from our shores. ibid.
Only when you look back from space can you really see it: our atmosphere. ibid.
70,891. It’s only recently that we’ve come to accept that our species – humans – are capable of dramatically altering the composition of the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. We are doing so because we’ve come to rely on one particular type of fuel for all our energy needs – fossil fuels. ibid.
The British Isles: this rare habitat is under threat. ibid.
The polar bear’s world is literally melting away. ibid.
The Arctic winter is becoming tougher for the caribou. ibid.
Krill stocks have declined massively in the last thirty years. By as much as 30%. ibid.
Coral reefs are some of the most complex eco-systems on the planet. Richer even than tropical rain forests, they are home to a quarter of all marine fish species. Corals may look like plants, but they are in fact two species: an animal – the coral, and tiny algal guests that live within the corals’ bodies. ibid.
Corals are highly sensitive to changes in the water temperature. Even a rise of one to two degrees Celsius will stress the coral polyps, and they will expel ... their microscopic algal partners. The algi give the corals their colour, so once expelled the corals will turn white. This event is called Coral Bleaching. But if the changes are short-lived the corals will recover. ibid.
Corals face another side-effect of global warming ... storms. And strong storms produce rough seas. ibid.
The latest research suggests that global sea levels are rising by more than three centimetres a year. ibid.
Looking down from two miles above the surface of the Earth, it’s impossible not to be impressed by the sheer grandeur and splendour and power of the natural world. David Attenborough, Planet Earth s2e1, BBC 2016
Never have those wildernesses been so fragile and so precious as they are today. ibid.
There are hundreds of thousands of islands, each one a world in miniature, a microcosm of our living planet. ibid.
The world’s entire population of pygmy sloths is isolated on a speck of land no bigger than New York’s Central Park. ibid.
The island of Komono in Indonesia: home to dragons. Ten feet long and weighing an impressive one hundred and fifty pounds, these are the largest living lizards on the planet. ibid.
Christmas Island in the Indian ocean … ruled by crabs. Their ancestors came from the sea but most have now adopted a land-based existence. ibid.
There are only a dozen peaks in the world that rise five miles high. All of them are here in the Himalayas. David Attenborough, Planet Earth s2e2
The Alps: Europe’s highest peaks. It’s winter and food is desperately short. ibid.
For animals that have the endurance, mountains can be sanctuaries. ibid.
In the Rockies rising temperatures are shortening winter hibernation and stifling the growth of valuable food plants. ibid.
Earth is the only planet we know of where life exists. And here it does so in abundance. The Jungle is Eden. It covers less than 6% of the Earth’s surface but it’s home to half of all the plants and animals on land. David Attenborough, Planet Earth s2e3: Jungles
Paradise is crowded. Life fills every niche. And at any one time a staggering variety of species and countless individuals. ibid.
Jungles are complex places. Tangled three-dimensional worlds created by lush tropical vegetation. ibid.
They make their own weather. ibid.
Brazil: a thousand miles from the sea are dolphins, a newly identified species of river dolphin found nowhere else on Earth. In these black tangled waters they have become almost totally blind so they move slowly. ibid.
He’s become a killer of killers. Jaguars have the most powerful bite … and he knows the caiman’s most vulnerable point, the back of its skull. ibid.
Imagine a world where temperatures rise to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Where’s there’s no escape from the sun, wind and dust. Imagine a world with almost no food or water. These are the conditions in one third of the lands of our planet. To live here demands the most extraordinary survival strategies. David Attenborough, Planet Earth s2e4
It does sometimes rain in the desert. Here in the American West, storms can strike with devastating force. After ten months of drought, millions of tonnes of water are dumped on the land in under an hour. ibid.
Locusts: an unstoppable force that devours everything in its path. But this devastation is about to get a lot worse. The locusts now transform into winged adults … They can take to the skies … A super-swarm of this scale may only appear once in a decade: this one one extends over 200 miles and contains several billion individuals. ibid
One quarter of all the land on Earth is covered by a single remarkable type of plant: almost indestructible it can grow two feet in a day. And be tall enough to hide a giant. The plant is grass and the world it creates is truly unique. The grass in northern India is the tallest on the planet, home to some of the most impressive creatures to walk the Earth. David Attenborough, Planet Earth s2e5, BBC 2016
One of the most remarkable grasslands on Earth: the Okavango: every year five thousand square miles of grassland are flooded. For one pride of lions this poses a major problem. ibid.
Grasses become the millinery equivalent of fruit and trees. ibid.
Soon, every ostrich has its own passenger. ibid.
Nothing cuts a swathe through grass like an African bull elephant. ibid.