The Future is Wild (2003) s01e13 Episode Script
The Tentacled Forest
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 TENTACLED FORES 200 million years in the future.
In this part of the world, when it rains, it really rains and creates a massive rain forest, stretching for thousands of kilometres.
Everything that lives here has to put up with the downpour, even having to roost in the torrential rain.
It rains most of the time here, and that is because 200 million years in the future, the world is very different.
All the continents have fused to form one enormous supercontinent, and the North West coast faces into the prevailing westerly winds which bring perpetual rain and storms.
The rain creates ideal conditions for anything to grow.
Below the canopy an alien looking world of lichen trees.
Lichens that were once tiny, growing over rocks and logs, now reach over three metres high.
And living in these lichen trees tiny flying creatures.
These are forest flish.
Only 10 centimetres or so long.
At first sight they look like butterflies.
As you look more closely, bizarrely, they turn out to be fish, but fish unlike any we see today.
They are fish which have ceased living in the water, live entirely on land or, even more, live in the air.
Today, fish occasionally leave the water but they are not know as great fliers.
With a few exceptions, modern fish don't fly.
But a lot of fish flap their wings and fly in water.
There are fish which look very bird-like when they move around, say, coral reefs.
Once you have learned to move your forelimb, once you have developed the musculature around the base of the fin which means you can generate a lot of force with that, then getting into the air with it is very easy.
You can imagine the animal might jump out of the water to escape a predator.
That is exactly what flying fish are doing as they skim over the waves.
200 million years later, the forest flish has evolved powered flight, and has left the ocean all together.
Its pectoral fins have become wings that beat 30 times a second, making them fast and manoeuvrable.
And because they no longer have to swim, their pelvic fins have evolved into hooks, so they can hang upside down when they roost.
At the end of the day, the last of the forest flish come back to the roost.
They spend the night huddled together, clinging under a branch.
But any stragglers still out in forest in the failing light are heading for trouble.
Something is waiting for them.
This is a slithersucker and it lies in wait for forest flish.
The slithersucker is one of the more wonderful envisionments for the future.
But his ancestors were very lowly organisms.
These organisms are all around in the present-day.
If you know where to look for them you will see them, particularly on moist days, moving very slowly, but moving across the forest floor.
A common name for one of these, at least in is North America is "dog's dinner" because they look like the dog just lost its dinner on a surface of the forest floor.
It is also known as a slime mould a primitive collection of single celled creatures that move together as one able to change shape and creep along the ground.
So what we just witnessed that took in that poor unsuspecting flish was a giant, much more organised, descendant of one of these slime moulds that is about as low in the present scale of evolution as we can go in terms of being a complex quote unquote animal, but again, it is not an animal, it is not a plant, it is a very early form of life.
This very early form of life has survived to become a very efficient predator.
They tend to live in the forest as we showed here in the future of giant lichens, lichen trees.
Now, a lichen is an interrelationship between an alga and a fungus.
Today, they do not grow very large at all.
Here, we have allowed them to form large shrubs that make the under-story of a forest.
A lichen is a fairly open structure, there is a lot of holes in it and it is in those holes that the slithersucker hides.
And it comes out at the appropriate time of day when the flish are flying and it drapes itself down, and along comes a poor, unsuspecting flish, flies into this structure and, like a spider web, it wraps around.
The slithersucker secretes a digestive juice and starts to slowly dissolve down the fish.
The poor flish is having a very rough day for sure.
And on the way by, the lichen tree is getting goods out of this because non-digested parts or bits of the flish that get away are going to fertilise the ground of the forest.
Under the circumstances so far, the slithersucker is making a pretty good living it is catching lots of flish, but these circumstances are not necessarily going to hold through time and the environment can change and the number of flish can drop off or something else can change within the lichen tree forest.
So we might envisage that it was time for the slithersucker to move on.
The slithersucker can move slowly, but not for any great distance.
But, like its ancestors, it is a shape shifter.
It can transform itself into something else to attract the attention of another forest creature.
And then it sits on a branch and waits.
If the slithersucker waits for long enough, it will be noticed by a giant of the forest.
A five metre high, eight tonne squid.
A mega squid.
Squid today, of course, live in the ocean.
They have got no skeleton, they are just squishy, and they swim by changing the shape of the body.
But 200 million years in the future, this animal could have got onto land.
100 million years earlier, the world was very different.
A mass extinction had wiped out most land animals, but where there is a gap, something will fill it.
With no predators left, the cephalopods - squid and octopus haul themselves out of the water.
When it first went on to land, it must have dragged itself along.
But the megasquid has evolved from its arms, effectively legs.
The megasquid still has eight legs, even though it now moves on dry land.
And it has to walk without tripping over it itself.
Moving with eight legs, of course, is a problem.
Big animals have two legs or most of them, the big land mammals have four today, but the megasquid has got eight and they are about equal in size and shape.
It can't move all of its legs randomly or it will fall over.
It has got to stay balanced so it has got to keep some of the legs on the ground.
But if it moves the front and back leg on one side and the middle legs on the other, then it moves the other pair, will always be balanced and the legs won't hit into each other, so it can travel forward.
The megasquid doesn't have a skeleton.
With no bones, it still has to support its weight.
Each leg is made almost entirely of muscle, running along and around it.
When the squid puts its weight down, the muscles around the leg contract, holding it in shape.
Muscle is incompressible, so the squid can support itself by muscle power alone.
But walking isn't the only problem for a forest-dwelling squid.
Megasquid is living in a forest and communicating in forest is difficult you can't see very far, there are trees in the way, it may be humid, there may be a lot of cloud.
But forest is often a very noisy place, because all the animals there learn to communicate with sound in one way or another like birds singing, howler monkeys calling so the squid uses sound.
Squid breathe through a tube called the siphon and they use the movement of air as they breathe to make a noise.
Elastic membranes are stretched across the tube and vibrate as the air passes over them just like vocal chords do in mammals.
But this doesn't make much of a noise.
To amplify its call, the megasquid has a resonating chamber an expandable pouch on its forehead.
It's a bit like blowing across a milk bottle a rather small air current produces quite a large sound, because a big area resonates.
Frogs do this with their vocal sack.
Many other animals have similar mechanisms somewhere within, or around, the body.
A forest couldn't be more different from the megasquid's original home, and such a new lifestyle, needs a new diet.
Megasquid, unlike their squid ancestors, have very good colour vision.
Squid today are carnivores, but megasquid have added plants to their diet.
The brightly coloured lichen capsules are easy to see in the forest gloom.
But some fruit are not what they seem.
Remember the slithersucker? It changed its shape to look like a fruit.
And it is still on the branch.
Still, waiting.
It is not a perfect disguise, but it is enough to fool a megasquid.
The slithersucker has no intention of becoming anyone's meal, it is using the megasquid to hitch a ride.
It takes control of the megasquid's mind like some mind altering sci-fi alien.
This was all part of the slithersucker's grand plan.
The slithersucker is inside the megasquid.
The megasquid can travel great distances and thereby carry the slithersucker further than it could possibly crawl by itself, but the slithersucker is inside.
Remember that the slithersucker is an association of separate cells.
Some of those cells migrate up to the brain, inflame the brain and alter the behaviour of the megasquid.
Others migrate out into the air pouches that are on the front of the megasquid the trumpeting sources.
The ones that go to the brain basically drive the poor megasquid wild.
The slithersucker might be inside the megasquid, but there is an easy way out.
It makes the megasquid sneeze.
This achieves an enormous distribution because each time that the megasquid bumps into yet another tree, it is going to leave a few more cells that can re-establish a colony of the slithersucker.
And when finally, the colony sort of runs out or we get rid of most of cells within the poor megasquid, it finally settles down again and that was a tremendous hangover but it recovers and it goes about its business.
Hijacking an animal to get a ride to somewhere else isn't new.
Flatworms that infest snails migrate into the eye-stalk and create pulsating patterns to attract the attention of birds.
When the bird flies away, the flatworms get carried along and dispersed, in the bird's droppings.
At least the megasquid doesn't get eaten.
Once the slithersucker has left, the megasquid just continues its life in the endless forest.
But it is not alone.
This is a squibbon yet another sort of squid.
Even more bizarre than megasquid, this squid spends most of its life high in the canopy, hurtling through the branches.
This is a squibbon, it's an octopus-like creature that has taken to the trees and it is quite the opposite of megasquid it is a very fast, highly agile swinger, basically.
It uses its long arms for swinging end over end, and it can do this because it is freed from a major constraint that vertebrates had when they were swinging from trees, and that is limited flexibility.
The most agile swinger's in the vertebrate world today are gibbons.
For animals with a rigid skeleton, their arms are amazingly flexible, allowing them to swinging through the trees at incredible speed.
A squibbon has eight arms, instead of two and it doesn't have a skelton, just muscle.
There is infinate flexibility in the squibbon, so it has no problem in being an aerial acrobat.
It has got great eyes these eyes are a little bit unusual because they are on stalks.
What it does when it is swinging is to keep these eyes parallel to the body, close to centre of gravity, so all it has to do really is to adjust the position of the eyes on the stalks to keep watching where it is going, the brain takes care of the rest.
To live in the three dimensional world of the forest canopy, the squibbons have to be intelligent.
Young squibbons learn by playing.
A chase sharpens their senses and coordination.
But the young squibbons have more to learn.
The forest can be a dangerous place.
Megasquid don't just eat fruit, they like some meat with their vegetables.
Especially squibbon.
But the squibbon community won't abandon the baby.
The squibbons are much smaller than the huge megasquid, but they can out-think it.
They distract the megasquid, pelting it with spore pods, harassing and mobbing it buying time.
The baby is snatched to safety.
And the megasquid goes hungry.
A squibbon community sharing, looking out for each other.
Could this be the start of a new social intelligence ? If there is going to be continued development of further intelligence after 200 million years, I certainly believe it will be the cephalopods.
A creature like a squibbon is just following through on three billion years of evolution and cephalopods making bigger and better brains and there is no reason they are going to stop doing that.
200 million years in the future, the process of evolution has brought the glimmer of another, new intelligence in the squibbon.
But how far could that go? Could squibbons become even more intelligent? Is it possible that these forests could be the birthplace of new civilisation? What else could the miracle of evolution hold for the future of planet Earth?
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 TENTACLED FORES 200 million years in the future.
In this part of the world, when it rains, it really rains and creates a massive rain forest, stretching for thousands of kilometres.
Everything that lives here has to put up with the downpour, even having to roost in the torrential rain.
It rains most of the time here, and that is because 200 million years in the future, the world is very different.
All the continents have fused to form one enormous supercontinent, and the North West coast faces into the prevailing westerly winds which bring perpetual rain and storms.
The rain creates ideal conditions for anything to grow.
Below the canopy an alien looking world of lichen trees.
Lichens that were once tiny, growing over rocks and logs, now reach over three metres high.
And living in these lichen trees tiny flying creatures.
These are forest flish.
Only 10 centimetres or so long.
At first sight they look like butterflies.
As you look more closely, bizarrely, they turn out to be fish, but fish unlike any we see today.
They are fish which have ceased living in the water, live entirely on land or, even more, live in the air.
Today, fish occasionally leave the water but they are not know as great fliers.
With a few exceptions, modern fish don't fly.
But a lot of fish flap their wings and fly in water.
There are fish which look very bird-like when they move around, say, coral reefs.
Once you have learned to move your forelimb, once you have developed the musculature around the base of the fin which means you can generate a lot of force with that, then getting into the air with it is very easy.
You can imagine the animal might jump out of the water to escape a predator.
That is exactly what flying fish are doing as they skim over the waves.
200 million years later, the forest flish has evolved powered flight, and has left the ocean all together.
Its pectoral fins have become wings that beat 30 times a second, making them fast and manoeuvrable.
And because they no longer have to swim, their pelvic fins have evolved into hooks, so they can hang upside down when they roost.
At the end of the day, the last of the forest flish come back to the roost.
They spend the night huddled together, clinging under a branch.
But any stragglers still out in forest in the failing light are heading for trouble.
Something is waiting for them.
This is a slithersucker and it lies in wait for forest flish.
The slithersucker is one of the more wonderful envisionments for the future.
But his ancestors were very lowly organisms.
These organisms are all around in the present-day.
If you know where to look for them you will see them, particularly on moist days, moving very slowly, but moving across the forest floor.
A common name for one of these, at least in is North America is "dog's dinner" because they look like the dog just lost its dinner on a surface of the forest floor.
It is also known as a slime mould a primitive collection of single celled creatures that move together as one able to change shape and creep along the ground.
So what we just witnessed that took in that poor unsuspecting flish was a giant, much more organised, descendant of one of these slime moulds that is about as low in the present scale of evolution as we can go in terms of being a complex quote unquote animal, but again, it is not an animal, it is not a plant, it is a very early form of life.
This very early form of life has survived to become a very efficient predator.
They tend to live in the forest as we showed here in the future of giant lichens, lichen trees.
Now, a lichen is an interrelationship between an alga and a fungus.
Today, they do not grow very large at all.
Here, we have allowed them to form large shrubs that make the under-story of a forest.
A lichen is a fairly open structure, there is a lot of holes in it and it is in those holes that the slithersucker hides.
And it comes out at the appropriate time of day when the flish are flying and it drapes itself down, and along comes a poor, unsuspecting flish, flies into this structure and, like a spider web, it wraps around.
The slithersucker secretes a digestive juice and starts to slowly dissolve down the fish.
The poor flish is having a very rough day for sure.
And on the way by, the lichen tree is getting goods out of this because non-digested parts or bits of the flish that get away are going to fertilise the ground of the forest.
Under the circumstances so far, the slithersucker is making a pretty good living it is catching lots of flish, but these circumstances are not necessarily going to hold through time and the environment can change and the number of flish can drop off or something else can change within the lichen tree forest.
So we might envisage that it was time for the slithersucker to move on.
The slithersucker can move slowly, but not for any great distance.
But, like its ancestors, it is a shape shifter.
It can transform itself into something else to attract the attention of another forest creature.
And then it sits on a branch and waits.
If the slithersucker waits for long enough, it will be noticed by a giant of the forest.
A five metre high, eight tonne squid.
A mega squid.
Squid today, of course, live in the ocean.
They have got no skeleton, they are just squishy, and they swim by changing the shape of the body.
But 200 million years in the future, this animal could have got onto land.
100 million years earlier, the world was very different.
A mass extinction had wiped out most land animals, but where there is a gap, something will fill it.
With no predators left, the cephalopods - squid and octopus haul themselves out of the water.
When it first went on to land, it must have dragged itself along.
But the megasquid has evolved from its arms, effectively legs.
The megasquid still has eight legs, even though it now moves on dry land.
And it has to walk without tripping over it itself.
Moving with eight legs, of course, is a problem.
Big animals have two legs or most of them, the big land mammals have four today, but the megasquid has got eight and they are about equal in size and shape.
It can't move all of its legs randomly or it will fall over.
It has got to stay balanced so it has got to keep some of the legs on the ground.
But if it moves the front and back leg on one side and the middle legs on the other, then it moves the other pair, will always be balanced and the legs won't hit into each other, so it can travel forward.
The megasquid doesn't have a skeleton.
With no bones, it still has to support its weight.
Each leg is made almost entirely of muscle, running along and around it.
When the squid puts its weight down, the muscles around the leg contract, holding it in shape.
Muscle is incompressible, so the squid can support itself by muscle power alone.
But walking isn't the only problem for a forest-dwelling squid.
Megasquid is living in a forest and communicating in forest is difficult you can't see very far, there are trees in the way, it may be humid, there may be a lot of cloud.
But forest is often a very noisy place, because all the animals there learn to communicate with sound in one way or another like birds singing, howler monkeys calling so the squid uses sound.
Squid breathe through a tube called the siphon and they use the movement of air as they breathe to make a noise.
Elastic membranes are stretched across the tube and vibrate as the air passes over them just like vocal chords do in mammals.
But this doesn't make much of a noise.
To amplify its call, the megasquid has a resonating chamber an expandable pouch on its forehead.
It's a bit like blowing across a milk bottle a rather small air current produces quite a large sound, because a big area resonates.
Frogs do this with their vocal sack.
Many other animals have similar mechanisms somewhere within, or around, the body.
A forest couldn't be more different from the megasquid's original home, and such a new lifestyle, needs a new diet.
Megasquid, unlike their squid ancestors, have very good colour vision.
Squid today are carnivores, but megasquid have added plants to their diet.
The brightly coloured lichen capsules are easy to see in the forest gloom.
But some fruit are not what they seem.
Remember the slithersucker? It changed its shape to look like a fruit.
And it is still on the branch.
Still, waiting.
It is not a perfect disguise, but it is enough to fool a megasquid.
The slithersucker has no intention of becoming anyone's meal, it is using the megasquid to hitch a ride.
It takes control of the megasquid's mind like some mind altering sci-fi alien.
This was all part of the slithersucker's grand plan.
The slithersucker is inside the megasquid.
The megasquid can travel great distances and thereby carry the slithersucker further than it could possibly crawl by itself, but the slithersucker is inside.
Remember that the slithersucker is an association of separate cells.
Some of those cells migrate up to the brain, inflame the brain and alter the behaviour of the megasquid.
Others migrate out into the air pouches that are on the front of the megasquid the trumpeting sources.
The ones that go to the brain basically drive the poor megasquid wild.
The slithersucker might be inside the megasquid, but there is an easy way out.
It makes the megasquid sneeze.
This achieves an enormous distribution because each time that the megasquid bumps into yet another tree, it is going to leave a few more cells that can re-establish a colony of the slithersucker.
And when finally, the colony sort of runs out or we get rid of most of cells within the poor megasquid, it finally settles down again and that was a tremendous hangover but it recovers and it goes about its business.
Hijacking an animal to get a ride to somewhere else isn't new.
Flatworms that infest snails migrate into the eye-stalk and create pulsating patterns to attract the attention of birds.
When the bird flies away, the flatworms get carried along and dispersed, in the bird's droppings.
At least the megasquid doesn't get eaten.
Once the slithersucker has left, the megasquid just continues its life in the endless forest.
But it is not alone.
This is a squibbon yet another sort of squid.
Even more bizarre than megasquid, this squid spends most of its life high in the canopy, hurtling through the branches.
This is a squibbon, it's an octopus-like creature that has taken to the trees and it is quite the opposite of megasquid it is a very fast, highly agile swinger, basically.
It uses its long arms for swinging end over end, and it can do this because it is freed from a major constraint that vertebrates had when they were swinging from trees, and that is limited flexibility.
The most agile swinger's in the vertebrate world today are gibbons.
For animals with a rigid skeleton, their arms are amazingly flexible, allowing them to swinging through the trees at incredible speed.
A squibbon has eight arms, instead of two and it doesn't have a skelton, just muscle.
There is infinate flexibility in the squibbon, so it has no problem in being an aerial acrobat.
It has got great eyes these eyes are a little bit unusual because they are on stalks.
What it does when it is swinging is to keep these eyes parallel to the body, close to centre of gravity, so all it has to do really is to adjust the position of the eyes on the stalks to keep watching where it is going, the brain takes care of the rest.
To live in the three dimensional world of the forest canopy, the squibbons have to be intelligent.
Young squibbons learn by playing.
A chase sharpens their senses and coordination.
But the young squibbons have more to learn.
The forest can be a dangerous place.
Megasquid don't just eat fruit, they like some meat with their vegetables.
Especially squibbon.
But the squibbon community won't abandon the baby.
The squibbons are much smaller than the huge megasquid, but they can out-think it.
They distract the megasquid, pelting it with spore pods, harassing and mobbing it buying time.
The baby is snatched to safety.
And the megasquid goes hungry.
A squibbon community sharing, looking out for each other.
Could this be the start of a new social intelligence ? If there is going to be continued development of further intelligence after 200 million years, I certainly believe it will be the cephalopods.
A creature like a squibbon is just following through on three billion years of evolution and cephalopods making bigger and better brains and there is no reason they are going to stop doing that.
200 million years in the future, the process of evolution has brought the glimmer of another, new intelligence in the squibbon.
But how far could that go? Could squibbons become even more intelligent? Is it possible that these forests could be the birthplace of new civilisation? What else could the miracle of evolution hold for the future of planet Earth?