The Future is Wild (2003) s01e10 Episode Script
The Endless Desert
Imagine a world, millions of years in the future.
A world where evolution has written a new chapter in the story of life.
The world is inhabited by very strange creatures, like nothing the Earth has ever seen.
the FUTURE is WILD THE ENDLESS DESER In this future world, a harsh, barren desert stretches for over 9000 kilometres.
At its centre, it seems to hot and too dry for anything to survive.
But in the few places, there are isolated pools.
And where there is water, there is life.
And these mounds are insect cities, each a fortress defended by armies.
Armies of terrabytes.
This desert is so big and so dry because of something that happened, something that changed the planet beyond recognition.
200 million years in the future all of the continents come together to form a supercontinent.
And this is simply a replay of what has occurred in the past in Earth's history, 200 million years in the past we had the supercontinent of Pangea.
The Earth's crust is broken into vast plates which move very slowly over the face of the globe.
Yet even looking ahead 200 million years, we can predict their movement.
Eventually, the continents will fuse into one huge landmass.
And this will affect the climat.
One of the things that happens when all continents become grouped together, you have one huge landmass, surrounded by one huge ocean.
This has an influence on climate and the climates become more extreme.
So we can even predict the future climate because it depends on the shape of the land.
Anywhere where there is a mountain range near the ocean, the inner side of that mountain range is going to develop a rain shadow.
And then even more strongly as we move into the centre of the supercontinent, getting increasingly distant from the sources of oceanic moisture, the continent dries out and the centre of the supercontinent, much like Pangea in the past, will be an enormous desert.
This desert is so vast and parched it is a serious challenge to life.
But all the creatures that do live here are lucky they are the survivors of an even greater challenge to life an event so cataclysmic, it reshaped the whole pattern of life on Earth.
100 million years earlier, volcanic eruptions increased, throwing dust into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun, chilling the Earth and creating an event we call a mass extinction.
A mass extinction is when a very substantial percentage of the species that were alive on the planet disappear in a very short period of time.
Now short period of time to a geologist might be 10, 15 20,000 years, but relative to the millions of years that we are talking, this is a like that.
Mass extinctions have happened several times before in the history of the Earth.
It is certain one will happen again.
And each time it happens, life suffers a heavy blow, and very little survives.
What do we have left? Only those few organisms that generalist enough to get through that period of environmental transition and for quite a period of time after the mass extinction, the world is going to be a fairly lonely place because there will be very few organisms that actually made it.
But something did survive creatures so tough survived several mass extinctions before this one, creatures plenty tough enough to survive even in the harsh desert.
Terrabytes.
Descendants of termites, they made it this far because they are insects some of nature's greatest survivors.
Insects have been around an extraordinarily long time.
400 million years ago, they came out on to land, along with the first plants.
They have survived everything that nature has been able to throw at them since.
So, they passed through the greatest mass extinction we have seen, 250 million years ago or so.
Then survived perfectly well the demise of the dinosaurs.
In fact, this was a time when, in some ways, they were still diversifying.
And I have no doubt at all, that whatever happens in the future, if anything survives, it will include the insects.
We know that in the most inhospitable places in the world today, like the deserts of Namibia, there are beetles, there are ants, there are a number of insects that are able to cope with an environment that is too hostile for almost anything else.
So if anything is going to survive in such a grisly habitat, it will be insects.
Scorching heat and no water.
No problem.
Terrabytes built cities two metre high mounds.
And each city shelters millions of insects from the desert sun.
But terrabytes can't hide in the cities all the time.
This is a raiding party.
Like their termites ancestors, terrabytes are vegetarians they are setting out to harvest the plants around the pool.
But in this desert, the plants can run away.
They are not plants at all, they are animals giant green worms.
And when the terrabytes on the war path, the worms escape, slipping into the safety of the pool.
They are not plants, but they do seem to have something that the terrabytes need.
Garden worms look like plants, but the leaves are fleshy lobes growing out of the worm's body.
But they don't just look like leaves, they work like real leaves because they are packed full of tiny, green single-celled plants algae.
Algae make food from air, water and sunlight.
The garden worms live off this food and nothing else.
A clever trick, that has been in invented before.
It is a curious fact that many animals have learned to live symbiotically with algae there are even flat worms which are bright green because of the algae within them.
They don't have any normal stomach, they absorb food directly and they have to bask in sunlight to grow their own food, if you like.
These convoluter worms depend on the algae inside them for food, so they don't need a mouth or a gut, but without their algae, they would starve.
Basking in the sunshine is like eating a good meal.
But sunbathing is only safe at low water, as the tide floods in, the worms disappear back into the sand or risk being eaten by passing fish.
All the delicious, conveniently packed algae in the Garden worms are there for the taking.
So, to stop the worms long enough to grab some of the algae, terrabytes deploy their chemical weapons a sticky glue.
It takes a lot of glue to slow down a worm, but terrabytes have a special caste, gumspitters that do nothing else.
The termites of the future have taken the social caste system then they have today even further.
They now have a specialised caste of transporters that carry other specialised termites around to do different jobs within the colony.
So, the transporters will take individuals with the chemical weapons to where they are needed, they will take biters to another place.
So the whole system has gone up one level of complexity.
But for every chemical weapon, there is a chemical defence.
The worm secretes a substance from between its segments that dissolves the terrabyte glue and the worm can escape.
Minus a few algae.
Measure and countermeasure.
Chemical warfare has been around for a very long time.
This form of defensive action is known today.
For example, spider webs are extremely gluey.
And most insects when they get stuck, that is it they are dinner.
But, one group of insects, the scorpionflies, has a special secretion it can wipe on its limbs, so that when it becomes entrapped in a spider's web, this secretion actually dissolves the glue, enabling the fly to escape.
The pools that sheltered the worm don't dry out, even in the baking desert, because they are connected to a vast underground reservoir.
They are gateways to a secret world hidden deep below the surface.
A huge network of caves and caverns, underground rivers and lakes.
However hot it gets on the surface above, these caves stay at the same temperature all year.
Dark and cool, running for thousands of kilometres under the desert.
This is where the garden worms live when they are not out sunbathing.
But there are still terrabytes down here.
Wherever there is a pocket of air, there are strange blobs.
These are terrabytes as well, but a different form again.
And there are hundreds of them, 20 metres below ground.
The blobs are water carriers and the only purpose in life is to drink and drink, bloating their bodies with water.
Transporter terrabytes run a regular ferry service to and from the caves, carrying the fully-loaded water carriers back to the nest, far above.
Water carriers are a living irrigation system.
Terrabytes don't just eat the algae stolen from the garden worms, they farm it on specially built platforms tending and nurturing it until there is enough food to feed the whole colony.
A water carrier's job is simply to water the crops.
The tops of the mounds are like green houses with translucent windows of hardened gum that let in sunlight.
But the really ingenious parts of the nest are hidden below ground at the bottom of the mound.
Several metres below the desert, the terrabytes have built their own air conditioning system layers of vanes built from mud and sand.
Water carriers also keep these vanes damp and, as the water evaporates, it cools the vanes and the air between them.
A complex series of tunnels and ducts allows the air to circulate.
Cool air sinks around the outside walls - drawing warm, carbon-dioxide rich air from the nest chambers into the greenhouses above.
A perfect hothouse design to make the algae grow as fast as possible.
It is simply an advanced version of today's insect agriculture.
Many insects today use some form of cultivation.
In termite mounds today organic material, leaves, twigs and the like is brought into the nest where it is broken down by a special kind of fungus and it is this fungus which provides the nourishment for the colony.
In leaf cutter ants, leaves are cut up and transported back to the nest where another kind of fungus, another special kind of fungus, breaks down the leaves into a form that the ant colony can use.
So this kind of gardening is actually quite widespread in the insect world today.
What we are doing in the future, is discovering a termite which, instead of using fungi, is actually cultivating a kind of algal scum which can graze on directly.
Advanced cities, an elaborate caste system, greenhouses built to feed the millions.
But as in all cities everything depends on one vital part of the system: plumbing.
Water comes from underground 20 metres below the surface and the tons upon tons of hard limestone rock.
So the whole system depends on tiny insects getting through all the rock.
This is the job of yet another caste, the rock borers.
Like glue squirters, they do nothing but make chemicals.
In this case, concentrated hydrochloric acid which dissolves the limestone.
Working together, rock borers and biters with strong jaws can burrow through solid rock to get to the water below.
The caves run for thousands of kilometres under the desert, a long way from the sunlit pools above.
Yet they are full of life and aglow with light a very weird light.
Underground, in these deep caves, the conditions may seem rather unpleasant for life, but they are entirely suitable for some specialised kinds of bacteria.
The caves are lit with the bioluminescence the natural light these bacteria produce.
Bacteria, in fact, are capable of living everywhere.
No matter how inhospitable the environment.
Go to a boiling hot spring, some bacteria love it.
Bacteria are ancient organisms have been around on the earth for at least 3000 million years, during which time they have colonised every conceivable habitat.
Many of them live today in places where you would think nothing could live.
In fact, they form the basis of a food chain.
For example, on deep ocean ridges, hot water, charged with sulphur, moves up from the interior of the earth.
Bacteria love it.
Special sulphur-loving bacteria live there in enormous profusion and they, in turn, provide food for a whole series of specialised organisms that live there.
This is a special enclosed world powered by bacteria.
200 million years in the future bacteria, just like these, could be living off minerals dissolving from the rocks.
These microbes form a bright, day-glo green turf dinner for other, bigger creatures.
Half a metre long gloom worms feed on the glowing bacteria.
And even larger creatures feed on our gloom worms.
This is a slickribbon a metre long killer worm.
The predator of the caves.
The worms in the cave have evolved there they have been isolated in this cave system from the rest of the environment, the desert up above, for a long long time.
And the species that are now in that cave system, that form an ecosystem there, have all evolved from a common ancestor.
That common ancestor was a kind of marine worm a very successful, diverse group.
Along each side of their bodies are two rows of complex structures that can be used for burrowing or swimming.
In today's seas, this design works so well, there are thousands of different kinds of marine worms.
But they were almost annihilated by the mass extinction.
But one kind of worm must have escaped into the cave system.
Isolated in its own dark world, that one kind evolved into many different forms.
What is known as an 'adaptive radiation'.
They have been isolated, the environment has been opened to them to explore in a evolutionary fashion, and they have generated a small, adaptive radiation, in order to evolve into these different niches that this cave system represents.
An adaptive radiation of this kind is really something we see all the time in the current modern world, especially in island archipelagos.
For example Darwin's finches are a set of birds that are different species on the archipelagos of a Galapagos island off the coast of Ecuador.
They blew there who knows how long ago and diversified into different species, using the habitat in different ways.
With no competition from anything else on the island, the finches had room to spread their wings.
They evolved different shaped beaks to feed on different kinds of food.
Even more spectacular is the radiation, the adaptive radiation, of the Hawaiian honeycreepers which have evolved very different bill shapes, very different sizes, very different food types all from the same ancestor to take advantage of the highly diverse habitats that they have found when they stumbled across the Hawaiian archipelago.
Isolated for millions of years under the desert, the worms evolved into several very different species.
Eventually, they became gloom worms, slickribbons and garden worms.
And most of them live out their lives in the perpetual underground gloom.
But it is still a matter of life and death down here.
Slickribbon and garden worm: predator and prey.
But the garden worm has a special defence, squirting out a disgusting liquid, right in the path of the slickring buying the garden worm just enough time to get away.
Far above the world of the cool caves, the largest desert the planet has ever known.
Yet life still hangs on strange desert insects, walking plants, killer worms, all survivors of the devastating mass extinction, living out their lives in a strange, new world.
A world where evolution has written a new chapter in the story of life.
The world is inhabited by very strange creatures, like nothing the Earth has ever seen.
the FUTURE is WILD THE ENDLESS DESER In this future world, a harsh, barren desert stretches for over 9000 kilometres.
At its centre, it seems to hot and too dry for anything to survive.
But in the few places, there are isolated pools.
And where there is water, there is life.
And these mounds are insect cities, each a fortress defended by armies.
Armies of terrabytes.
This desert is so big and so dry because of something that happened, something that changed the planet beyond recognition.
200 million years in the future all of the continents come together to form a supercontinent.
And this is simply a replay of what has occurred in the past in Earth's history, 200 million years in the past we had the supercontinent of Pangea.
The Earth's crust is broken into vast plates which move very slowly over the face of the globe.
Yet even looking ahead 200 million years, we can predict their movement.
Eventually, the continents will fuse into one huge landmass.
And this will affect the climat.
One of the things that happens when all continents become grouped together, you have one huge landmass, surrounded by one huge ocean.
This has an influence on climate and the climates become more extreme.
So we can even predict the future climate because it depends on the shape of the land.
Anywhere where there is a mountain range near the ocean, the inner side of that mountain range is going to develop a rain shadow.
And then even more strongly as we move into the centre of the supercontinent, getting increasingly distant from the sources of oceanic moisture, the continent dries out and the centre of the supercontinent, much like Pangea in the past, will be an enormous desert.
This desert is so vast and parched it is a serious challenge to life.
But all the creatures that do live here are lucky they are the survivors of an even greater challenge to life an event so cataclysmic, it reshaped the whole pattern of life on Earth.
100 million years earlier, volcanic eruptions increased, throwing dust into the atmosphere, blotting out the sun, chilling the Earth and creating an event we call a mass extinction.
A mass extinction is when a very substantial percentage of the species that were alive on the planet disappear in a very short period of time.
Now short period of time to a geologist might be 10, 15 20,000 years, but relative to the millions of years that we are talking, this is a like that.
Mass extinctions have happened several times before in the history of the Earth.
It is certain one will happen again.
And each time it happens, life suffers a heavy blow, and very little survives.
What do we have left? Only those few organisms that generalist enough to get through that period of environmental transition and for quite a period of time after the mass extinction, the world is going to be a fairly lonely place because there will be very few organisms that actually made it.
But something did survive creatures so tough survived several mass extinctions before this one, creatures plenty tough enough to survive even in the harsh desert.
Terrabytes.
Descendants of termites, they made it this far because they are insects some of nature's greatest survivors.
Insects have been around an extraordinarily long time.
400 million years ago, they came out on to land, along with the first plants.
They have survived everything that nature has been able to throw at them since.
So, they passed through the greatest mass extinction we have seen, 250 million years ago or so.
Then survived perfectly well the demise of the dinosaurs.
In fact, this was a time when, in some ways, they were still diversifying.
And I have no doubt at all, that whatever happens in the future, if anything survives, it will include the insects.
We know that in the most inhospitable places in the world today, like the deserts of Namibia, there are beetles, there are ants, there are a number of insects that are able to cope with an environment that is too hostile for almost anything else.
So if anything is going to survive in such a grisly habitat, it will be insects.
Scorching heat and no water.
No problem.
Terrabytes built cities two metre high mounds.
And each city shelters millions of insects from the desert sun.
But terrabytes can't hide in the cities all the time.
This is a raiding party.
Like their termites ancestors, terrabytes are vegetarians they are setting out to harvest the plants around the pool.
But in this desert, the plants can run away.
They are not plants at all, they are animals giant green worms.
And when the terrabytes on the war path, the worms escape, slipping into the safety of the pool.
They are not plants, but they do seem to have something that the terrabytes need.
Garden worms look like plants, but the leaves are fleshy lobes growing out of the worm's body.
But they don't just look like leaves, they work like real leaves because they are packed full of tiny, green single-celled plants algae.
Algae make food from air, water and sunlight.
The garden worms live off this food and nothing else.
A clever trick, that has been in invented before.
It is a curious fact that many animals have learned to live symbiotically with algae there are even flat worms which are bright green because of the algae within them.
They don't have any normal stomach, they absorb food directly and they have to bask in sunlight to grow their own food, if you like.
These convoluter worms depend on the algae inside them for food, so they don't need a mouth or a gut, but without their algae, they would starve.
Basking in the sunshine is like eating a good meal.
But sunbathing is only safe at low water, as the tide floods in, the worms disappear back into the sand or risk being eaten by passing fish.
All the delicious, conveniently packed algae in the Garden worms are there for the taking.
So, to stop the worms long enough to grab some of the algae, terrabytes deploy their chemical weapons a sticky glue.
It takes a lot of glue to slow down a worm, but terrabytes have a special caste, gumspitters that do nothing else.
The termites of the future have taken the social caste system then they have today even further.
They now have a specialised caste of transporters that carry other specialised termites around to do different jobs within the colony.
So, the transporters will take individuals with the chemical weapons to where they are needed, they will take biters to another place.
So the whole system has gone up one level of complexity.
But for every chemical weapon, there is a chemical defence.
The worm secretes a substance from between its segments that dissolves the terrabyte glue and the worm can escape.
Minus a few algae.
Measure and countermeasure.
Chemical warfare has been around for a very long time.
This form of defensive action is known today.
For example, spider webs are extremely gluey.
And most insects when they get stuck, that is it they are dinner.
But, one group of insects, the scorpionflies, has a special secretion it can wipe on its limbs, so that when it becomes entrapped in a spider's web, this secretion actually dissolves the glue, enabling the fly to escape.
The pools that sheltered the worm don't dry out, even in the baking desert, because they are connected to a vast underground reservoir.
They are gateways to a secret world hidden deep below the surface.
A huge network of caves and caverns, underground rivers and lakes.
However hot it gets on the surface above, these caves stay at the same temperature all year.
Dark and cool, running for thousands of kilometres under the desert.
This is where the garden worms live when they are not out sunbathing.
But there are still terrabytes down here.
Wherever there is a pocket of air, there are strange blobs.
These are terrabytes as well, but a different form again.
And there are hundreds of them, 20 metres below ground.
The blobs are water carriers and the only purpose in life is to drink and drink, bloating their bodies with water.
Transporter terrabytes run a regular ferry service to and from the caves, carrying the fully-loaded water carriers back to the nest, far above.
Water carriers are a living irrigation system.
Terrabytes don't just eat the algae stolen from the garden worms, they farm it on specially built platforms tending and nurturing it until there is enough food to feed the whole colony.
A water carrier's job is simply to water the crops.
The tops of the mounds are like green houses with translucent windows of hardened gum that let in sunlight.
But the really ingenious parts of the nest are hidden below ground at the bottom of the mound.
Several metres below the desert, the terrabytes have built their own air conditioning system layers of vanes built from mud and sand.
Water carriers also keep these vanes damp and, as the water evaporates, it cools the vanes and the air between them.
A complex series of tunnels and ducts allows the air to circulate.
Cool air sinks around the outside walls - drawing warm, carbon-dioxide rich air from the nest chambers into the greenhouses above.
A perfect hothouse design to make the algae grow as fast as possible.
It is simply an advanced version of today's insect agriculture.
Many insects today use some form of cultivation.
In termite mounds today organic material, leaves, twigs and the like is brought into the nest where it is broken down by a special kind of fungus and it is this fungus which provides the nourishment for the colony.
In leaf cutter ants, leaves are cut up and transported back to the nest where another kind of fungus, another special kind of fungus, breaks down the leaves into a form that the ant colony can use.
So this kind of gardening is actually quite widespread in the insect world today.
What we are doing in the future, is discovering a termite which, instead of using fungi, is actually cultivating a kind of algal scum which can graze on directly.
Advanced cities, an elaborate caste system, greenhouses built to feed the millions.
But as in all cities everything depends on one vital part of the system: plumbing.
Water comes from underground 20 metres below the surface and the tons upon tons of hard limestone rock.
So the whole system depends on tiny insects getting through all the rock.
This is the job of yet another caste, the rock borers.
Like glue squirters, they do nothing but make chemicals.
In this case, concentrated hydrochloric acid which dissolves the limestone.
Working together, rock borers and biters with strong jaws can burrow through solid rock to get to the water below.
The caves run for thousands of kilometres under the desert, a long way from the sunlit pools above.
Yet they are full of life and aglow with light a very weird light.
Underground, in these deep caves, the conditions may seem rather unpleasant for life, but they are entirely suitable for some specialised kinds of bacteria.
The caves are lit with the bioluminescence the natural light these bacteria produce.
Bacteria, in fact, are capable of living everywhere.
No matter how inhospitable the environment.
Go to a boiling hot spring, some bacteria love it.
Bacteria are ancient organisms have been around on the earth for at least 3000 million years, during which time they have colonised every conceivable habitat.
Many of them live today in places where you would think nothing could live.
In fact, they form the basis of a food chain.
For example, on deep ocean ridges, hot water, charged with sulphur, moves up from the interior of the earth.
Bacteria love it.
Special sulphur-loving bacteria live there in enormous profusion and they, in turn, provide food for a whole series of specialised organisms that live there.
This is a special enclosed world powered by bacteria.
200 million years in the future bacteria, just like these, could be living off minerals dissolving from the rocks.
These microbes form a bright, day-glo green turf dinner for other, bigger creatures.
Half a metre long gloom worms feed on the glowing bacteria.
And even larger creatures feed on our gloom worms.
This is a slickribbon a metre long killer worm.
The predator of the caves.
The worms in the cave have evolved there they have been isolated in this cave system from the rest of the environment, the desert up above, for a long long time.
And the species that are now in that cave system, that form an ecosystem there, have all evolved from a common ancestor.
That common ancestor was a kind of marine worm a very successful, diverse group.
Along each side of their bodies are two rows of complex structures that can be used for burrowing or swimming.
In today's seas, this design works so well, there are thousands of different kinds of marine worms.
But they were almost annihilated by the mass extinction.
But one kind of worm must have escaped into the cave system.
Isolated in its own dark world, that one kind evolved into many different forms.
What is known as an 'adaptive radiation'.
They have been isolated, the environment has been opened to them to explore in a evolutionary fashion, and they have generated a small, adaptive radiation, in order to evolve into these different niches that this cave system represents.
An adaptive radiation of this kind is really something we see all the time in the current modern world, especially in island archipelagos.
For example Darwin's finches are a set of birds that are different species on the archipelagos of a Galapagos island off the coast of Ecuador.
They blew there who knows how long ago and diversified into different species, using the habitat in different ways.
With no competition from anything else on the island, the finches had room to spread their wings.
They evolved different shaped beaks to feed on different kinds of food.
Even more spectacular is the radiation, the adaptive radiation, of the Hawaiian honeycreepers which have evolved very different bill shapes, very different sizes, very different food types all from the same ancestor to take advantage of the highly diverse habitats that they have found when they stumbled across the Hawaiian archipelago.
Isolated for millions of years under the desert, the worms evolved into several very different species.
Eventually, they became gloom worms, slickribbons and garden worms.
And most of them live out their lives in the perpetual underground gloom.
But it is still a matter of life and death down here.
Slickribbon and garden worm: predator and prey.
But the garden worm has a special defence, squirting out a disgusting liquid, right in the path of the slickring buying the garden worm just enough time to get away.
Far above the world of the cool caves, the largest desert the planet has ever known.
Yet life still hangs on strange desert insects, walking plants, killer worms, all survivors of the devastating mass extinction, living out their lives in a strange, new world.