Grades:
Length: 48 Minutes
Summary:
The third episode introduces the jungle ecosystem that covers less than 6% of the earth's surface, where plants and animals live. An indri roams across the jungles of Madagascar while facing the competition of survival based on niche. High up on the treetops in Guatemala, a curious young spider monkey gets stuck and is rescued by her father. A young Draco lizard searches for ants on a tree but a larger male challenges him, to which the young male chooses to glide to safety. 300 years ago, a giant hura tree began to grow taller as it races to absorb water and sunlight for survival, which it carries 1000 other plants within its branches. Hundreds of hummingbird species in Ecuador compete with each other to feed nectar. Sword-billed hummingbirds avoid competition with other hummingbirds by using their long beaks to reach the nectar in the deepest flowers which are inaccessible to the other hummingbirds. The rainforest trees provide transpiration as the moisture vaporizes causing rainfall, and supporting all life. Deep in the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil, the trees are suddenly submerged from flooding caused by seasonal rainfall while Araguaian river dolphins, a newly discovered species, use their sonars to hunt in the murky waters. Even though the rainfall causes mass flooding, the jungle provides abundant food within a shallow margin for large animals that thrive through lush vegetation like the mighty jaguar, which ambushes and kills a caiman. Deep in the jungle, animals provide camouflage and mimicry to help evade predators, such as a leaf-tailed gecko which disguises itself as lichen. A male glass frog from Costa Rica fiercely protects his eggs from predatory wasps. Some of the newly hatched tadpoles escape by falling into the stream below. At night, insects glow to search for mates while fungi use bioluminescent light to attract insects like click beetles to disperse their spores. A railroad worm hunts millipedes by turning off its bioluminescence light and deceive it. In Papua New Guinea, several male red birds-of-paradise perform their mating dance to attract females on the canopy while a solitary Wilson's bird-of-paradise seeks his mate on the forest floor by furbishing his display court and enacting his colorful display. Back in Madagascar, the family of indris gather together as they sing to deter other indris from their territory in which the narrator specifies that the Jungle is their sanctuary and their protection for all life on Earth.