The Future is Wild (2003) s01e07 Episode Script
Flooded World
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 FLOODED WORLD 100 million years in the future, a warm, shallow sea stretches for thousands of kilometres.
Only 50 metres deep at most, the sea covers what was once dry land.
The shallow water is full of strange plant-like structures, and bizarre creatures that thrive in the sunlight and the warmth.
Some spend all their time under water, while others float on the surface.
In 100 million years' time, the climate is warm and stable, and the sea level, 150 metres higher than today.
The sea now covers more than 4/5 of the Earth's surface, changing the face of the globe beyond recognition.
Carbon dioxide from volcanoes has created a massive greenhouse effect, melting the ice caps.
More important, the warmer water in the Oceans has expanded, taking up more room and flooding the continents.
But there is another reason the sea level is so high more volcanic activity means that deep under water, on the mid ocean ridges, molten rock is pushing up from below, trying to erupt actually forcing up the ocean beds.
If these bulge up, they displace the water in the oceans outwards from the ocean basins, off on to the continent.
It's as though you took your tub and you started to push up on the bottom of the tub and, ultimately, a tub full of water will flow out over the margins to either side.
So all the low-lying land on the continents is covered by salt water, shallow enough for plenty of light to reach the seabed.
And in this warm water, evolution could run riot.
This is an Ocean Phantom.
The Ocean Phantoms are huge, they can grow up to 10 metres long.
Yet this complex-looking creature is really a jellyfish.
The Ocean Phantom is an enormous floating jellyfish.
It is not just any kind of jellyfish, though, it is a specialised jellyfish called a siphonophore, and 100 million years from now, it is the largest creature floating in the oceans.
But in today's seas, we have large siphonophores, they are called Portuguese Men of War.
They are made up of not just one jellyfish, but a whole collection, a colony of individual smaller jellyfish that play different roles in the colony.
And some of them are used for catching food and some of them are used for digesting food and some of them are used for propulsion and some of them are used for making babies.
Now, in 100 million years, the Ocean Phantom takes this basic design to a whole new dimension it is the largest thing floating in the sea it is a collection of these specialised jellyfish that all play different roles, and it has an enormous impact on the reef environment.
The Ocean Phantom is made of separate jellyfish, each with their own role to play.
Some of them form sails, which harness the wind and carry the Ocean Phantom across the surface.
Others act as large floats, filled with carbon monoxide, to stop the Phantom sinking.
And yet others hang below the surface members of the colony that reach down and grab the Phantom's food.
An Ocean Phantom is like a floating city a whole community, supporting itself as it is blown across the ocean.
Now do they just blown down wind, crashing into rocks and bays and just being tossed up on beaches all over the world, or can they manage to navigate upwind, can they move around in a more controlled fashion? Now, today's Portuguese Men of War, and a small jellyfish call the vallela, can actually sail upwind with their sail pushing against the tentacles trailing in the water.
And perhaps, our Ocean Phantom can do that, but even better.
The Ocean Phantom's sails work like those of a sailing ship.
By pumping water into the sails, the Phantom can raise and lower them, and turn them, depending on the direction of the wind.
So it can sail across the wind, like a well-crewed galleon.
The Ocean Phantom is much more sophisticated than today's jellyfish.
The simple nerve-net of a modern jelly has become more elaborate, connecting all the different individuals to a city-wide network.
Communication is so efficient, the Phantom can even steer itself specialised polyps in the stern act as rudders.
So the Ocean Phantom uses this elaborate sailing system to cruise the shallow sea, searching out the richest areas where it might find food.
And the best place to search is a reef where, swimming among the plant structures, are Reef Gliders.
Reef Gliders aren't fish, but swimming sea slugs.
Sea slugs are around today.
They are marine snails without an obvious shell.
Brightly coloured, flamboyant most sea slugs live on the ocean bed.
And they are carnivores.
In the future, sea slugs are not so brightly coloured, but they are much more mobile.
These sea slugs are have given up crawling, but they have taken up flying through the water.
They fly by flapping wings along either side.
And they have a whole series of wings down their sides.
And, it turns out, that the order in which these wings beat is very important to efficient propulsion.
The wings beat in turn, starting at the back, rippling towards the front of the glider.
Swimming like this, a Reef Glider can patrol more than 80 kilometres of reef each day.
In a warm, shallow sea like this, you would like to you would expect to find a coral reef but here there is something different.
Instead of coral, these strange plant-like structures grow from hard limestone turrets and cover the sea bed.
They have built a reef like structure, just like coral.
This isn't a coral, but why not? When there is great change in the oceanic circulation or temperature, composition, corals are one of the first groups to disappear so it is not surprising that corals have gone extinct.
But the niche for a coral, the place of life for something that grows like a coral still exists.
And other organisms can form solid structures on the shallow floor of the ocean which we would call reefs, that come from very different backgrounds.
And so it is not surprising, here in the future, that some other organism has stepped into the slot.
And the organism that has stepped into this slot is a red alga.
Now, actually, red algae have made reefs before, they were very important in many times in the past and they have simply come out of eclipse to take over again in the absence of corals.
These reefs of the future grow much faster than coral reefs, the warm, shallow water gets plenty of sunlight, which is ideal for the algae.
But red algae still have a few problems to solve.
In the future when red algae make huge reefs, they have to face the same problem that red algae have had to face their entire history.
And that's that when they reproduce, their sperm cells can't swim they can only crawl from one individual to another, and across huge reefs that is just too far.
So, these red algae need help.
Help isn't far away.
It comes from the Reef Gliders.
Now the algae are flowering algae.
They produce large, conical structures that are a perfect match to the front end of the juvenile Reef Gliders and the Reef Gliders feed off of these flower structures.
But in addition, the pollen from the algae then coats the front surface of the Reef Gliders, and when they move to the next flower, they carry that pollen with them.
Plants that we have in the present day do that all the time, we call it pollination.
And it is mediated by lots of different animals that move pollen from one flower to the next.
Birds, bees, other insects all move pollen and red algae may well be able to use the same kind of thing far in the future.
The partnership between insects and plants, where insects get a sugar-rich nectar as a reward for carrying pollen from plant to plant, has been very successful for both partners.
But it doesn't stop with insects.
Some plants even cooperate with birds or enlist the help of bats.
In the future, the partnership between red algae and Reef Gliders works just as well.
There are so many Reef Gliders among the reefs.
This is why the Ocean Phantom comes here to feed.
The problem is catching such active little creatures.
On the underneath of the Ocean Phantom asked some sinister bell-looking objects.
What they are, are the mouths of the whole colony.
They are suspended on a cable, like an umbilicus, and that cable lengthens and the mouth is lowered down to the reef.
But it isn't just a mouth, it is in fact, ringed by a set of eyes that look around, focus in on what possible prey items there are, then centre that bell right over the The bell is primed and pulled together and, at the right signal it springs open, sucking that pray right inside.
Then the bell can close and umbilicus can contract, pulling the whole prey and the mouth back up to the platform.
The Ocean Phantom doesn't just get its food from underneath, in fact it gets a lot of its food from up above because up above, on its surface, there are luxurious growths of algae.
Now the algae photosynthesise they absorb sunlight and turn that sunlight and carbon dioxide into sugars and they pay for their ride by moving some of those sugars out of their own bodies, into the body of the Ocean Phantom.
So, why does the Ocean Phantom get food from both sides? Using photosynthesis and sunlight from above, but still hunting below? Well the algae provide a lot of energy, but it is like a diet of sugar cubes it's just carbohydrate.
Where do the other elements come from that the algae themselves need to grow? The proteins, the nitrogen, the phosphate? All of the other elements have to come from below and the Ocean Phantom feeds.
So the Phantom catches Reef Gliders, partly to eat, and partly as fertiliser for the garden of algae growing on its back.
But the Reef Gliders it eats are only babies, and eating someone else's babies is a dangerous game.
Especially as the Phantom is only a huge floating jelly, with no obvious means of defence.
All the time that the Phantom is hunting baby Reef Gliders, the adult Reef Gliders are hunting it.
Reef Gliders can grow up to three metres long, and weigh-in at over a ton.
Like sea slug ancestors, they are carnivores.
The adult sea slug, the Reef Gliders, feed on the Ocean Phantoms.
They find them by swimming through the sea, picking up the scent of the Ocean Phantoms.
They have horns on their head that pick that scent out of the water and allow them to direct their swimming right towards their prey.
An Ocean Phantom looks like easy prey for a big Reef Glider, but the Phantom does have a defence.
It has its own private army.
Spindle Troopers huge, sea spiders that live in the chambers on the Phantom rush to its defence.
They will attack anything even a huge Reef Glider, irritating and harassing it until the Reef Glider backs off and leaves the Phantom alone.
The Phantom doesn't get something for nothing, it has to feed its bodyguard of Spindle Troopers.
The defenders of the Ocean Phantom are sea spiders, these Spindle Troopers, about 1m long.
And they are defending the Ocean Phantom against its predators because the Ocean Phantom is their home, and that's when they get their food from.
Channels that go into the bells, that the Spindle Troopers live in, actually provide food to the Spindle Troopers from the Ocean Phantom itself, so this huge colony, this huge siphonophore, is feeding its defenders, in order to use them to drive off the predators.
Now, in modern days, we see this all the time.
This tiny trapezoid crab lives among stags-horn coral, and protects its home from coral-eating starfish.
It nips at their sensitive feet with sharp claws, making the starfish think twice about attacking that particular coral.
Likewise, our Spindle Troopers are sea spiders, they have poisonous chelisera claws at the front that they can use to slash at the sea slugs and drive them off the Ocean Phantom.
In these crowded, shallow seas, partnerships are a good way of increasing the odds of survival.
Offering shelter or food, or both, in exchange for protection.
The Ocean Phantom gets a bodyguard in exchange for sharing some of its food.
But even an army can't defend the Ocean Phantom against one danger.
The weather.
Huge storms, fed by all this warm, shallow water, produce high winds and enormous waves.
Buffeted by the violent sea, the Ocean Phantom seems helpless.
All it can do is lower its sails, and wait for the storm to pass.
But the Ocean Phantom is only a jellyfish after all violent winds and waves tear it apart.
It looks like the end for this complex sailing machine.
But as long as a broken piece of Ocean Phantom still has some members of each type of jelly, it can regrow.
So this storm doesn't destroy the Ocean Phantom, it helps it reproduce making more Phantoms.
A warm, shallow sea full of strange, new life.
Plants that have entered a partnership with Reef Gliders, the Ocean Phantom that supports its army of sea spiders, and reproduces by riding a storm.
As the shallow seas have spread over the planet, evolution has taken advantage of this rich habitat and created some bizarre creatures, living in amazing partnerships.
GREAT THINGS CAN COME FROM PEACE
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 FLOODED WORLD 100 million years in the future, a warm, shallow sea stretches for thousands of kilometres.
Only 50 metres deep at most, the sea covers what was once dry land.
The shallow water is full of strange plant-like structures, and bizarre creatures that thrive in the sunlight and the warmth.
Some spend all their time under water, while others float on the surface.
In 100 million years' time, the climate is warm and stable, and the sea level, 150 metres higher than today.
The sea now covers more than 4/5 of the Earth's surface, changing the face of the globe beyond recognition.
Carbon dioxide from volcanoes has created a massive greenhouse effect, melting the ice caps.
More important, the warmer water in the Oceans has expanded, taking up more room and flooding the continents.
But there is another reason the sea level is so high more volcanic activity means that deep under water, on the mid ocean ridges, molten rock is pushing up from below, trying to erupt actually forcing up the ocean beds.
If these bulge up, they displace the water in the oceans outwards from the ocean basins, off on to the continent.
It's as though you took your tub and you started to push up on the bottom of the tub and, ultimately, a tub full of water will flow out over the margins to either side.
So all the low-lying land on the continents is covered by salt water, shallow enough for plenty of light to reach the seabed.
And in this warm water, evolution could run riot.
This is an Ocean Phantom.
The Ocean Phantoms are huge, they can grow up to 10 metres long.
Yet this complex-looking creature is really a jellyfish.
The Ocean Phantom is an enormous floating jellyfish.
It is not just any kind of jellyfish, though, it is a specialised jellyfish called a siphonophore, and 100 million years from now, it is the largest creature floating in the oceans.
But in today's seas, we have large siphonophores, they are called Portuguese Men of War.
They are made up of not just one jellyfish, but a whole collection, a colony of individual smaller jellyfish that play different roles in the colony.
And some of them are used for catching food and some of them are used for digesting food and some of them are used for propulsion and some of them are used for making babies.
Now, in 100 million years, the Ocean Phantom takes this basic design to a whole new dimension it is the largest thing floating in the sea it is a collection of these specialised jellyfish that all play different roles, and it has an enormous impact on the reef environment.
The Ocean Phantom is made of separate jellyfish, each with their own role to play.
Some of them form sails, which harness the wind and carry the Ocean Phantom across the surface.
Others act as large floats, filled with carbon monoxide, to stop the Phantom sinking.
And yet others hang below the surface members of the colony that reach down and grab the Phantom's food.
An Ocean Phantom is like a floating city a whole community, supporting itself as it is blown across the ocean.
Now do they just blown down wind, crashing into rocks and bays and just being tossed up on beaches all over the world, or can they manage to navigate upwind, can they move around in a more controlled fashion? Now, today's Portuguese Men of War, and a small jellyfish call the vallela, can actually sail upwind with their sail pushing against the tentacles trailing in the water.
And perhaps, our Ocean Phantom can do that, but even better.
The Ocean Phantom's sails work like those of a sailing ship.
By pumping water into the sails, the Phantom can raise and lower them, and turn them, depending on the direction of the wind.
So it can sail across the wind, like a well-crewed galleon.
The Ocean Phantom is much more sophisticated than today's jellyfish.
The simple nerve-net of a modern jelly has become more elaborate, connecting all the different individuals to a city-wide network.
Communication is so efficient, the Phantom can even steer itself specialised polyps in the stern act as rudders.
So the Ocean Phantom uses this elaborate sailing system to cruise the shallow sea, searching out the richest areas where it might find food.
And the best place to search is a reef where, swimming among the plant structures, are Reef Gliders.
Reef Gliders aren't fish, but swimming sea slugs.
Sea slugs are around today.
They are marine snails without an obvious shell.
Brightly coloured, flamboyant most sea slugs live on the ocean bed.
And they are carnivores.
In the future, sea slugs are not so brightly coloured, but they are much more mobile.
These sea slugs are have given up crawling, but they have taken up flying through the water.
They fly by flapping wings along either side.
And they have a whole series of wings down their sides.
And, it turns out, that the order in which these wings beat is very important to efficient propulsion.
The wings beat in turn, starting at the back, rippling towards the front of the glider.
Swimming like this, a Reef Glider can patrol more than 80 kilometres of reef each day.
In a warm, shallow sea like this, you would like to you would expect to find a coral reef but here there is something different.
Instead of coral, these strange plant-like structures grow from hard limestone turrets and cover the sea bed.
They have built a reef like structure, just like coral.
This isn't a coral, but why not? When there is great change in the oceanic circulation or temperature, composition, corals are one of the first groups to disappear so it is not surprising that corals have gone extinct.
But the niche for a coral, the place of life for something that grows like a coral still exists.
And other organisms can form solid structures on the shallow floor of the ocean which we would call reefs, that come from very different backgrounds.
And so it is not surprising, here in the future, that some other organism has stepped into the slot.
And the organism that has stepped into this slot is a red alga.
Now, actually, red algae have made reefs before, they were very important in many times in the past and they have simply come out of eclipse to take over again in the absence of corals.
These reefs of the future grow much faster than coral reefs, the warm, shallow water gets plenty of sunlight, which is ideal for the algae.
But red algae still have a few problems to solve.
In the future when red algae make huge reefs, they have to face the same problem that red algae have had to face their entire history.
And that's that when they reproduce, their sperm cells can't swim they can only crawl from one individual to another, and across huge reefs that is just too far.
So, these red algae need help.
Help isn't far away.
It comes from the Reef Gliders.
Now the algae are flowering algae.
They produce large, conical structures that are a perfect match to the front end of the juvenile Reef Gliders and the Reef Gliders feed off of these flower structures.
But in addition, the pollen from the algae then coats the front surface of the Reef Gliders, and when they move to the next flower, they carry that pollen with them.
Plants that we have in the present day do that all the time, we call it pollination.
And it is mediated by lots of different animals that move pollen from one flower to the next.
Birds, bees, other insects all move pollen and red algae may well be able to use the same kind of thing far in the future.
The partnership between insects and plants, where insects get a sugar-rich nectar as a reward for carrying pollen from plant to plant, has been very successful for both partners.
But it doesn't stop with insects.
Some plants even cooperate with birds or enlist the help of bats.
In the future, the partnership between red algae and Reef Gliders works just as well.
There are so many Reef Gliders among the reefs.
This is why the Ocean Phantom comes here to feed.
The problem is catching such active little creatures.
On the underneath of the Ocean Phantom asked some sinister bell-looking objects.
What they are, are the mouths of the whole colony.
They are suspended on a cable, like an umbilicus, and that cable lengthens and the mouth is lowered down to the reef.
But it isn't just a mouth, it is in fact, ringed by a set of eyes that look around, focus in on what possible prey items there are, then centre that bell right over the The bell is primed and pulled together and, at the right signal it springs open, sucking that pray right inside.
Then the bell can close and umbilicus can contract, pulling the whole prey and the mouth back up to the platform.
The Ocean Phantom doesn't just get its food from underneath, in fact it gets a lot of its food from up above because up above, on its surface, there are luxurious growths of algae.
Now the algae photosynthesise they absorb sunlight and turn that sunlight and carbon dioxide into sugars and they pay for their ride by moving some of those sugars out of their own bodies, into the body of the Ocean Phantom.
So, why does the Ocean Phantom get food from both sides? Using photosynthesis and sunlight from above, but still hunting below? Well the algae provide a lot of energy, but it is like a diet of sugar cubes it's just carbohydrate.
Where do the other elements come from that the algae themselves need to grow? The proteins, the nitrogen, the phosphate? All of the other elements have to come from below and the Ocean Phantom feeds.
So the Phantom catches Reef Gliders, partly to eat, and partly as fertiliser for the garden of algae growing on its back.
But the Reef Gliders it eats are only babies, and eating someone else's babies is a dangerous game.
Especially as the Phantom is only a huge floating jelly, with no obvious means of defence.
All the time that the Phantom is hunting baby Reef Gliders, the adult Reef Gliders are hunting it.
Reef Gliders can grow up to three metres long, and weigh-in at over a ton.
Like sea slug ancestors, they are carnivores.
The adult sea slug, the Reef Gliders, feed on the Ocean Phantoms.
They find them by swimming through the sea, picking up the scent of the Ocean Phantoms.
They have horns on their head that pick that scent out of the water and allow them to direct their swimming right towards their prey.
An Ocean Phantom looks like easy prey for a big Reef Glider, but the Phantom does have a defence.
It has its own private army.
Spindle Troopers huge, sea spiders that live in the chambers on the Phantom rush to its defence.
They will attack anything even a huge Reef Glider, irritating and harassing it until the Reef Glider backs off and leaves the Phantom alone.
The Phantom doesn't get something for nothing, it has to feed its bodyguard of Spindle Troopers.
The defenders of the Ocean Phantom are sea spiders, these Spindle Troopers, about 1m long.
And they are defending the Ocean Phantom against its predators because the Ocean Phantom is their home, and that's when they get their food from.
Channels that go into the bells, that the Spindle Troopers live in, actually provide food to the Spindle Troopers from the Ocean Phantom itself, so this huge colony, this huge siphonophore, is feeding its defenders, in order to use them to drive off the predators.
Now, in modern days, we see this all the time.
This tiny trapezoid crab lives among stags-horn coral, and protects its home from coral-eating starfish.
It nips at their sensitive feet with sharp claws, making the starfish think twice about attacking that particular coral.
Likewise, our Spindle Troopers are sea spiders, they have poisonous chelisera claws at the front that they can use to slash at the sea slugs and drive them off the Ocean Phantom.
In these crowded, shallow seas, partnerships are a good way of increasing the odds of survival.
Offering shelter or food, or both, in exchange for protection.
The Ocean Phantom gets a bodyguard in exchange for sharing some of its food.
But even an army can't defend the Ocean Phantom against one danger.
The weather.
Huge storms, fed by all this warm, shallow water, produce high winds and enormous waves.
Buffeted by the violent sea, the Ocean Phantom seems helpless.
All it can do is lower its sails, and wait for the storm to pass.
But the Ocean Phantom is only a jellyfish after all violent winds and waves tear it apart.
It looks like the end for this complex sailing machine.
But as long as a broken piece of Ocean Phantom still has some members of each type of jelly, it can regrow.
So this storm doesn't destroy the Ocean Phantom, it helps it reproduce making more Phantoms.
A warm, shallow sea full of strange, new life.
Plants that have entered a partnership with Reef Gliders, the Ocean Phantom that supports its army of sea spiders, and reproduces by riding a storm.
As the shallow seas have spread over the planet, evolution has taken advantage of this rich habitat and created some bizarre creatures, living in amazing partnerships.
GREAT THINGS CAN COME FROM PEACE