Planet Earth part two - press pack
Planet Earth TV firsts
Planet Earth TV firsts include...
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Animals
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Humpbacked whales creating a net of bubbles to catch their prey in Antarctica, filmed from the air
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Polar bears swimming underwater, caught from the air
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Underwater filming of eiderducks diving for mussels in polynas (iceholes with dangerous currents)
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Time-lapse filming of emperor penguins in a huddle over winter to protect their eggs –
revealing new science about the dynamics of this extraordinary behaviour
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Extensive sequence of a polar bear attacking a walrus herd
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Elusive Tibetan fox filmed hunting pika, small rabbit-like animals that live underground on the Tibetan Plateau
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Two million Mongolian gazelle migrating across the plains
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Lions hunting and killing elephants in the middle of the night, filmed with infra-red cameras
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Flock of 20 million red-billed quelea –
the most abundant bird species
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Blue bird of paradise displaying in the wild
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Gliding leaf frog
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The process of the parasitic cordycep taking over the body of an insect, filmed in time lapse
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Red crab spider living on pitcher plants and catching prey
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Infanticide behaviour of chimpanzees when they capture and eat an infant from another colony
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Extraordinary new behaviour revealed as 30-strong bands of highly venomous sea snakes hunt off newly discovered Indonesian coral reefs
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Killer bull fur seals attack king penguins
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Surfing dolphins at Byron Bay
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Mouse lemurs in the extraordinary baobab trees on Madagascar
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Exquisitely-shelled nautilus hunting in the dark
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Blue whales, weighing over 140 tonnes, feeding on krill
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More than 100 sailfish attacking a shoal of bait fish
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An extraordinary deep sea light show performed by vampiroteuthis –
literally the "vampire squid from hell" –
one of the weirdest of all the deep sea's weird creatures.
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New locations
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Svarthamaren –
the most southerly breeding colony on the planet. These remote nunataks are the summits of mountains that are drowned by the Antarctic ice sheet
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Newly-discovered Raja Ampat Islands, off Eastern Indonesia, which are home to the richest coral reefs on the planet
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Kong Karls Land –
Norwegian Arctic where no human has set foot in a quarter of a century
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Mongolian Eastern Steppe
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Tibetan Plateau
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The first high-definition pictures from extraordinary communities of life that survive on the volcanic hot vents over two miles down off the coast of Japan
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Using remotely-operated deep sea submersibles, remarkable new images of rich communities of animal life that exists in the total darkness at the submerged summits of deep sea seamounts off California and New England.
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New techniques
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The Ciniflex Heligimble –
an aerial photography system developed for Hollywood movies which stabilises a powerful lens so that animals can be filmed from high above without disturbing their normal behaviour
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HD time lapse sequence of Southern Lights –
Aurora australis
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New night-time cameras and infra-red lights used to film lions hunting elephants
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Ultra high-speed cameras creating the ultimate slow motion images of the great white shark taking their seal prey
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A flash strobe system linked to an inbuilt timer mechanism that fires the cameras enabling new underwater time-lapse of feeding corals, sea urchins felling forests of kelp, and giant starfish in a feeding frenzy, using a digital stills camera
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A remarkable new tracking system to carry a camera smoothly up over a 100 metres to the very top of the world's highest tree in a single seamless shot. This complex rig of ropes and stabilising system was also used in the world's rainforest –
not only to travel from forest floor to the top of the canopy, but also moving horizontally though the thick vegetation
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Computerised time-lapse system that ran for many months to show in one gently moving shot a European woodland floor come to life with new flowers, as it went through all the seasonal changes
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Highly sensitive high-definition cameras that filmed spectacular displays of deep sea bio-luminescence of the vampire squid
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A deep sea time-lapse camera that was specially housed to survive the enormous pressures two miles down at the bottom of the abyss. Operated remotely from a submersible, this camera was used to show how the carcass of the dead tuna was quickly consumed by a weird range of deep sea scavengers.
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