Animal Files Ⅱ

With this new series, we invite you to join us in a journey at the discovery of the animal behavior. In these latest years, in fact, scientists have been discovering uncountable new aspects about our fellow tenants on planet Earth: their psychology, their intelligence, their rituals.

But it won’t be a serious and boring scientific treaty. On the contrary, it will be a clever and curios, rigorous but pleasant walk into the wild, accompanied by some of the most beautiful images coming from every corner of the planet.

A JOURNEY IN THE WORLD OF EMOTIONS

Darwin himself studied the three fundamental emotions of the animal kingdom: anger, fear and joy. A wolf snarling and displaying his teeth is expressing a clear emotion. And it’s not hard to see the emotional reaction of a gazelle suddenly surprised by a predator, or a joyful wagging of a dog’s tail in front of his beloved human friend. In this episode, we will see how the emotional spectrum of the animal world is far much wider than what we could imagine.

LIFE IN TECHNICOLOR

Colors can be used to attract the partner, and this is especially true when there’s the so-called sexual imbalance, that is when male and female of the same species look extremely different in their colorization. Moreover, colors can be used to send signal to potential predators, warning signs to let them know they are poisonous, toxic, irritating to the senses of simply that they have a bad taste. We will also explore the depths of the oceans, a colorful world which is not reached by light and is still covered by mystery.

PAIR BONDS

As the ancient proverb goes “don't meddle in a quarrel between a husband and his wife”. Well, this time we are about to make an exception, as we will investigate the pair bonds. We’ll discover why some animals decide to stay with the same partner for all their lives while others chose polygamy as reproduction strategy. Some species tend to have a passionate and long- lasting relationship, some others prefer to be superficial and fleeting. So love might be extremely complicated, even in the animal world.

PREDATORS AND PREYS

Coming to the strategies, some animal loves hunting by itself, while some other prefers to live and hunt in herds. Some use immobility as a strategy, while others chase the prey until exhaustion. Prey also have developed an immense number of strategies to keep predators at a distance, hiding, giving the impression of being venomous, scaring or acting if they were dead.

STRENGHT IN NUMBERS

Animals seem to have learned that at perfection: united we stand! Even a large number of individualists, who spend large part of their lives alone, when it’s time to rest, for example, they group together to avoid unpleasant surprises and take a nap in peace. A lot of eyes are better than just two, and consider that a large numbers of mammals and birds also have sentinels to be sure that the community is safe. And this also applies to hunting activities: many animals group together in herds to surround and capture the prey, who also united their forces to escape their predators.