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Super Small Animals

   2022    Nature
From a primate that’s no bigger than a mouse, to a chameleon that can fit on your fingertip, the natural world is full of fantastically small animals. Biologist Patrick Aryee explores the fascinating secrets behind these miniature marvels and shows that they’re not the underdogs you might think they are. Super Small Animals follows him as he meets the leading experts on these pint sized superstars, and finds out what makes them some of the most successful on the planet.
First up, he reveals the huge benefits that being small can bring. There’s the little lemur whose diminutive frame helps it to exploit a unique gap in the eco-system, the tiny hummingbird that uses its size to out-maneuver the competition, and the world’s smallest seahorse that never has to leave home. He also explores why small animals are proportionally the strongest in the world, and introduces a peanut-sized beetle that can pull over a thousand times its own weight.
Next he explores the challenges that animals face when they shrink in size, and the ingenious ways they overcome them. We find out how the smallest armadillo in the world manages to control its temperature in the searing desert sun, and the how the world’s smallest fish can survive in nothing more than a puddle, because it never really grows up. Patrick meets a secretive hippo that lives in the dense jungle, and looks like it’s been shrunk in the wash, and some of the world’s smallest snakes that give birth to enormous babies. He also meets a scientist that studies how really tiny spiders have a surprising trick that enables them to travel an incredible 40 miles per day, using almost no energy.
Then there are the animals that refuse to be pigeon holed as small, and manage to punch way above their weight. He puts some astonishing invertebrates to the test, to see how they work together to become much bigger than the sum of their parts and meets a pint-sized predator that takes on some of the largest and most dangerous creatures on the planet, getting hands on to discover how its build helps it to be brave. Finally he uncovers the incredible lengths that deep sea anglerfish go to in order to be big and small at the same time, and has an endearing encounter with a tiny carnivore that manages to be small in just one direction.
Whether their size helps them to hunt, hide or survive, all these remarkable animals prove that good things really do come in small packages.

Bird Brain

       Nature
In the past few decades, scientists have learned that the basis of everything they thought they knew about bird brains—that they were largely comprised of the most primitive and instinctual of brain structures—was wrong. Fully 75 percent of the brains of parrots and thousands of other species of birds is actually made up of a sophisticated information processing system that works much the same way as the locus of human higher-mindedness, the cerebral cortex.
The film shows scientists putting birds to the test. Can they solve problems? Can they cooperate? Do they feel emotion? New research demonstrates just how clever they can be.

Human Worlds

   2022    Nature
A guide to plants that thrive in human-dominated environments, including trees that grow across canyons in India, which have developed into living bridges. The programme examines the origins of growing crops and the ongoing influence on the world of wild plants, as well as efforts to preserve species, from snipers firing pesticide bullets from helicopters to fend off invasive plants to plants being painstakingly pollinated using a paintbrush.
Series: The Green Planet

March of the Penguins

       Nature
At the end of each Antarctic summer, the emperor penguins of the South Pole journey to their traditional breeding grounds in a fascinating mating ritual that is captured in this documentary by intrepid filmmaker Luc Jacquet. The journey across frozen tundra proves to be the simplest part of the ritual, as after the egg is hatched, the female must delicately transfer it to the male and make her way back to the distant sea to nourish herself and bring back food to her newborn chick.

Moon Bears on Planet Earth

       Nature
The documentary shows the daily activities performed by the local and international staff who lives and works inside the Bear Rescue Center situated in Tam Dao National park, Northern Vietnam. Interviews, original and archive footage are edited to explain life, tasks and achievements of this NGO managed by Animals Asia.
In this natural sanctuary, moon bears and sun bears are rescued, treated, kept safe and nursed: they are now free from the suffering caused by the cruel tortures of bile farming and extraction process. Since thousands of years bear bile products are in use in traditional oriental medicine and even nowadays it generates around two billions dollars of illegal business.
Animals Asia staff is not only assuring better living and relief for rescued bears but promotes educational awareness about the bile farming issues, employees and generates fare trades for a relevant number of people of this rural area of Vietnam.

Nature Weirdest

   2023    Nature
We love nature and all its glorious diversity. Some creatures we admire for their deadly beauty, others because they are cute, but for some it's hard to figure out exactly why we like them so much, perhaps it's a quirk. How do you decide nature's weirdest animal? Is it the sloth that hangs upside down and moves so slowly that moss grows in its fur? Is it a sea pen that sits rooted to the seabed in endless darkness and emitting its own glow? Could it be carnivorous snails that leave the ocean to digest dead creatures on the beach, finches that drink blood, or the tarantula that keeps a frog as it's pet. But with nature's endless variety, which is the weirdest? We can't decide. Can you?
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The Normans

2010  History
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Planet Earth

2007  Nature
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Leaving Neverland

2019  Culture
Unknown

Unknown

2023  Science
History of the Eagles

History of the Eagles

2013  History