David Attenborough - Life in The Undergrowth

Over the holidays I got David Attenborough's new DVD "Life in the Undergrowth".  I've been a big fan of David Attenborough ever since I saw "Life on Earth" more than 20 years ago.  That series made me love biology.  Every time I watch one of his DVD's he manages to show us something new, something never done before.  This one is no different.  In an interview, he said that he left doing this last so that the technology of microscopic cameras would develop. 

There is one scene in the series that I found especially moving that I want to mention here.  One thing that I am always curious to see in nature documentaries is a primitive animal hunting a much more sophisticated animal, one far more advanced in terms of evolution.  I am talking of an invertebrate like a spider catching a fish, or a spider catching a bird.  So I wonder what the most primitive predator and the most sophisticated prey are.  Why do I find this fascinating?  Well, clearly birds evolved much later than spiders, so the spider that hunts a bird must have learned that well after the birds.  If they can learn to hunt birds, can they one day learn to hunt bigger animals like us humans?

Well, what I saw in Attenborough latest films is a big centipede, "as long as my forearm" according to Sir David, hunt a bat.  That's right, a bat eating centipede.  Centipedes are very primitive, one of the first hunters to get on land, and descendants of worms in the ocean.  Predators don't get more primitive than that (of course, the case of even more primitive bacteria killing a human doesn't count, not as dramatic).  Bats on the other hand are placental mammals.  They came way later than centipedes.  They are very similar to humans in that sense.  Well in this video, you see an arms length centipede climb up on a cave, hang down from the ceiling and grab a bat in flight, sting and kill it.  That's something you don't see a lot.

Of course, probably this centipede did this for millions of years to moths and other big insects, but the sight of a centipede catching a mammal is chilling indeed.

I recommend everything David Attenborough has ever done to everybody.  He is a brilliant storyteller.  "Life in the Undergrowth" is one of his best.    You can buy the DVD from amazon.com.uk (not in the US yet) but below is the link to the book and his other DVDs.

Other invaluable works by David Attenborough

Others are, "Life on Earth" (his first and best), "The Private Life of Plants".  Those can't be found on amazon.com

Comments

[Dan Grossman]

I agree... David Attenborough is amazing. Life of Mammals is great. Good work with the blog.