Jonny Keeling - Seven Worlds One Planet

1. Foreword
   David Attenborough
2. South America
   Producer: Chadden Hunter
3. Australasia
   Producer: Emma Napper
4. North America
   Producer: Chadden Hunter
5. Antarctica
   Producer: Fredi Devas
6. Asia
   Producer: Emma Napper
7. Africa
   Producer: Giles Badger
8. Europe
   Producer: Giles Badger

Jonny Keeling (Author)

Jonny Keeling is the executive producer of Seven Worlds, One Planet. A longtime BBC collaborator, he has produced and directed numerous wildlife mini-series and documentaries, including The Life of Mammals, Planet Earth, Man Vs Wolf and The Zoo. He has also worked on BBCs wildly popular Planet Earth II, presented by renowned naturalist Sir David Attenborough.

Scott Alexander (Author)

Scott Alexander is the series producer of Seven Worlds, One Planet. He has spent over 20 years with BBC Studios Natural History Unit, filming on all seven continents. He has produced live TV from the middle of the Masai Mara for Big Cat Live, series produced the award-winning childrens wildlife series Deadly60 and worked with Sir David Attenborough on the BAFTA winning landmark series, Life in Cold Blood.

Why dont polar bears eat penguins? The riddle is probably as old as any other that you will find in a Christmas cracker. And the answer is not difficult to work out: penguins and polar bears live at opposite ends of the world and never meet.

But why is that so? To answer that question, you have to consider the Earths geological history. Three hundred million years ago, the only land on this planets otherwise ocean-covered surface was a single super-continent. It was there that terrestrial life began. Eventually, however, this immense landmass began to break up. One fragment started to drift south. As it approached the pole, it became so cold that none of its animal passengers were able to survive. This was the continent we now call Antarctica and no land animals except human beings have ever managed to reach it since.

Questions about why different animals live where they do are likely to occur to anyone who watches a natural history series surveying the entire globe as does the one on which this book is based. But not all are so easily answered. Why, for example, is it deer that nibble grass in North America, whereas the medium-sized mammals that live in Africa in a similar fashion and with a similar diet are antelope? Or why are there apes in the tropical forests of Africa and Asia but none at all in the jungles of South America?

Sir David Attenborough and the stark beauty of Vestrahorn on Icelands Stokksnes peninsula. The sea has eroded the dark rocks, the sediments washed ashore to form black sand beaches and dunes.

The introduction that follows these pages helps to answer such questions. It also explains why communities of animals and plants on the seven continents of our planet are still so different from one another that they can justifiably be described as separate worlds.

Each has its own particular animal treasures. Some are rare and little known. Take, for example, the olm that lives only in the caves of eastern Europe. It is a kind of salamander, as long and as slim as a small snake, and has two pairs of diminutive legs and a moist, scale-less skin. Because it lives in permanent darkness, it has lost its eyes and the pigment in its skin and so has become a ghostly white. Now its life is so uneventful and requiring so little energy that it only needs to eat once in a decade.

Or consider the blue-faced golden-coated monkey that lives in northern China in places that are snow-covered for at least five months of the year. It is so cold there that the monkeys have developed thick furry coats and reduced the danger of their noses being frostbitten by evolving ones that are so severely snubbed that they can hardly be described as noses at all. Both these strange creatures are rare and scarcely known because they live in restricted and little-visited habitats.

There are, however, other rarities whose numbers are also small but for very different and more alarming reasons. They were once abundant but we have displaced them from the territories that were once theirs. Sometimes we have done so for the most trivial of reasons. During the nineteenth century, European settlers both in Australia and North America introduced blackbirds and thrushes from Europe because they considered that their songs were more melodious than those of the local birds. They imported foxes because the hunters among them had nothing they thought suitable for the chase. And some brought their pet cats because they enjoyed having them sitting purring by the fireside. Some of these introductions failed and died out after a few generations. But others flourished and became plagues that had catastrophic effects on the indigenous animal populations.

Sir David is with one of only two northern white rhinos, both female, which survive in the wild in Kenyas Ol Pejeta Conservancy. The last male died in 2018, rendering the subspecies effectively extinct.

Others of our introductions have been accidental rather than deliberate, as on the many occasions when we have allowed rats, hitchhiking on our ships, to escape ashore in territory where they never existed before. Again and again these hardy, omnivorous and prolific intruders have then caused havoc among the local animals which had no defence against them.

But the greatest changes we have caused are those we have made deliberately in order to provide for our ever-increasing numbers. We have felled forests, drained swamps, and covered fertile meadows with concrete in order to build our homes and factories, airports and motorways. So, over the past two hundred years, wild animals that were once relatively abundant on every continent except Antarctica have been decimated and now survive in dangerously small numbers. Such are the Iberian lynx, the European wolf, the Tasmanian tiger, the Arctic musk ox and many others.

Seven Worlds, One Planet describes and illustrates rarities of both kinds, together with some of the most dramatic natural wonders that still remain on Earth. Let us hope that our increasing understanding of the way nature functions will at last persuade people everywhere to care for the animals that evolved on this planets continents and allow them the space they need to live in the particular world that once was theirs.

David Attenborough

About 200 million years ago, our planet looked very different from the Earth we see today. There was only one continent, the supercontinent Pangaea, surrounded by a single superocean Panthalassa, but then something monumental happened. Gargantuan forces began to rip apart the Earths crust and Pangaea broke into two immense mega-continents, which then drifted apart. Millions of years later, these split again, and then again and again, eventually each part separating from its neighbours and moving across the face of the Earth to form the seven great continents we see today.

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