Animal Planet: Future is Wild

[seasong]

Sharks work together in the same way that pirahna work together - order coalesces from the chaos of feeding. Some rough rules:

1) Don't attack while another shark is attacking. It's not polite.
2) Don't attack while the prey is facing you. It hurts their feelings.
3) Bite as much off as you can, but dribble some for your homeys.
4) If you smell dribble (at several miles), you're invited.

The result is tactics very similar to wolves, where the ones the prey can see circle, and the flanking wolves attack. And if the bioluminescence isn't needed, it's a waste of energy - that energy costs food, which means that if it doesn't noticeably improve how much food the shark gets, the shark doesn't do as well as its unevolved cousins.

The only thing the sharks did that required teamwork was herd the tiny not-a-fish things, and I'm still puzzled as to why, exactly, they were doing that. If it's too maneuverable to catch, the sharks will hunt something else. Herding it to make catching easier costs energy, and I don't think that the not-a-fishies would provide that much extra energy to pay it back.

What would have been more interesting would have been to see a creature that was evolved to escape unevolved sharks, and possibly a new shark that had developed to catch it anyway.

Maybe a shocker shark that stuns its prey at range? Or maybe a rainbow shark... silent, invisible death zooming through the water at 25 mph. Both of these would have to result in sufficiently more prey to feed the extra energy costs, of course.

 

[seasong]

I, too, liked the program, for the most part. But some things bothered me that nobody has mentioned. Such as:

In the carakiller bit, the "flying dinosaur" that supposedly evoled into birds was a pterosaur, not a proto-bird. But that could just be the fault of the graphics team.

I don't really know enough about the dinosaurs to comment on them . Although personally, since the science team probably wasn't overseeing the dinosaur stuff (busy working on the future), I'd blame the graphics team.

They never explained if the flish were water breathers, or if they still needed to enter the water every few days to replenish.

They seemed restricted to living over the water surface, so I'd guess they probably got their water when they were diving for food.

The idea that the bumblebeetle's reproductive cycle was solely dependant on flish flung into the desert by "hypercanes" (please!) seemed rather far-fetched.

Assuming 4 beetle-babies who grow to 3x the size of the original beetle and a coccoon stage & subsequent hibernation that responds to the wetness of the water flung alongside the flish, it's very fetching . With that much ocean, you'd probably have a lunar-based hypercane anyway, and with a month-long coccoon stage and a month-periodicity hypercane, it also becomes fetching.

But none of this was mentioned on the show, which was one of my original beefs.

But I didn't have a problem with the megasquid preying on squibbons. I got the impression that megasquid were omnivorous, and the squibbons were just a protein supplement.

It would have been nice if they could have said this. And specified why the megasquid went after such difficult prey when there was likely plenty of other protein sources.

Also, was it just me, or did the giant tortoises seem out of proportion, especially the baby that was killed by a swampus?

Yeah, that was whacked. How a 44-lb swampus can wrap its spindly arms around a multiton tortoise, is beyond me.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

Well, it was 200 million years in the future. The bioluminescence could well be as energy consuming as the camouflage ability of the octopus by that time, depending on how evolution goes. 200 million years is a long time. The pack hunting activity of modern sharks is kind of rudimentary, but over the course of 200 million years, and in the face of mass extinctions and climatic changes, this could evolve into more intelligent planning - especially if you consider that the premise is that most other fish died out. For a long time, the sharks would have had to patrol empty oceans; working together could be a distinct advantage in finding food. Being able to identify one's own pack would also be valuable; other packs would be more easily identified as food.

I think what's important to keep in mind is that the show is a companion piece to the book. The book, if it's anything like Dixon's wonderful After Man and The New Dinosaurs, will answer many of the questions raised by the show. Trying to depict an entire ecosystem in a half hour to 45 minutes is tough to do (remember, they tried to show 3 different ages in two hours time).

 

[ColonelHardisson]

]Assuming 4 beetle-babies who grow to 3x the size of the original beetle and a coccoon stage & subsequent hibernation that responds to the wetness of the water flung alongside the flish, it's very fetching . With that much ocean, you'd probably have a lunar-based hypercane anyway, and with a month-long coccoon stage and a month-periodicity hypercane, it also becomes fetching.

Just remember that there are real-life life cycles that would seem ridiculous if we only knew them in fiction. Everything from koalas to mayflies would seem far-fetched. I think this is one of the things Dixon tries to show in his books - evolution can take bizarre, fantastic paths.

 

[seasong]

Just remember that there are real-life life cycles that would seem ridiculous if we only knew them in fiction. Everything from koalas to mayflies would seem far-fetched. I think this is one of the things Dixon tries to show in his books - evolution can take bizarre, fantastic paths.

I think we were in agreement on that point.

Regarding the sharks... there needs to be roughly 10x the mass of a predator available as food, for a predator to survive. I think the rainbow squid demonstrates that there was plenty of food!

Heck, just the not-a-fishies meant that there had to be a fair amount of food. It just wasn't fishes.

I do like the idea of shark packs patrolling near-empty oceans, but for poetic reasons, not practical ones. And the "rudimentary pack tactics" of sharks is about as good as that of wolves, and with their scent and electrosense abilities, they don't really need each other to cover wide ground - at least, not over distances that the bioluminescence is visible over.

Anyway, I'll reduce my statements on the sharks to this: the evolution the show provided was a disadvantage, making it infeasible that it would have survived the predations of the original sharks. That could be because the show producers simply couldn't think of a good way to allow the shark's intelligence to show through - certainly, smart sharks could be scary, if they behaved differently from unsmart sharks. These didn't.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

I think we were in agreement on that point.

Regarding the sharks... there needs to be roughly 10x the mass of a predator available as food, for a predator to survive. I think the rainbow squid demonstrates that there was plenty of food!

Heck, just the not-a-fishies meant that there had to be a fair amount of food. It just wasn't fishes.

I do like the idea of shark packs patrolling near-empty oceans, but for poetic reasons, not practical ones. And the "rudimentary pack tactics" of sharks is about as good as that of wolves, and with their scent and electrosense abilities, they don't really need each other to cover wide ground - at least, not over distances that the bioluminescence is visible over.

Anyway, I'll reduce my statements on the sharks to this: the evolution the show provided was a disadvantage, making it infeasible that it would have survived the predations of the original sharks. That could be because the show producers simply couldn't think of a good way to allow the shark's intelligence to show through - certainly, smart sharks could be scary, if they behaved differently from unsmart sharks. These didn't.

What we saw was the end result of 200 million more years of evolution. After a mass extinction - which we didn't see - there would be a transition period when the land and sea was, indeed, relatively empty, as animal species began to adjust and evolve to fill empty niches (such as the era just after the dinosaur extinction, when birds looked to become the dinos' heirs). By "empty" I don't really mean totally devoid of life. Say most fish became extinct, which would be even more profound an event than the extinction of the icthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. This would happen over a relatively brief period of time, geologically speaking, but the seas would still be teeming with life. It's just that some niches would be unfilled for a while; whales and dolphins took several million years to evolve to fill the icthyosaur and plesiosuar niches. Sharks, assuming they survived, would have to become better and better hunters as they pursued the dwindling fish population. Eventually the sharks would need to find new prey, but little in the seas besides fish were of the size necessary to sustain sharks. Cooperation would become important as large critters are tough to take down by individual sharks, and large groups of small creatures are easier to "corral" with help. Additionally, there would be a time when the only sizable prey in any kind of quantity would be other sharks (still holding to the premise of the show), thus making visual clues to pack association important.

I think you are correct that the show didn't do a good job of showing how the intelligence of the sharks manifested. The pack hunting diagram was not very good.

 

[Sagan Darkside]

Salutations,

I thought the show was fun for ideas- imagine a flying jelly fish cloud that just drifts over towns and snatches up those outside. Anyone stupid adventurers who try to get involved get to meet up with some spiders.

Or a civilization of dwarves kept as cattle by some giant spiders.

I also thought the termites that specialize in carrying other termites had d&d possiblities.

Evolution is so tied to environment- that this show can not be taken seriously, but it is fun to speculate.

I would like to see how living in space has evolved the people who sent those satelites.

Thanks to everyone for the book suggestions.

SD

 

[myrdden]

Don't...get...Animal...Planet...

Can't ...see...show...

So...un...fair...

Does any one know if the show is only on Animal Planet? Could it possibly appear on Discovery?

Boo Hoo....

Myrdden

 

[Umbran]

3. Food & energy. The silver spiders are unlikely to be able to live on the energy of grass seeds converted into meat.

Um, spiders (and every carnivore) already live off the energy of plants converted into meat, so there's nothing unbelievable there. The only thing the Silver Spiders changed was where the meat chose to be. It seems reasonable that it's more efficient to gather the seeds (which don't actively avoid spiders) to attract meat is more efficient than letting the meat find the seeds out in the open, and then hoping it wanders into a web...

 

[seasong]

Um, spiders (and every carnivore) already live off the energy of plants converted into meat, so there's nothing unbelievable there.

Except that there is a lot less plant mass to convert into meat, in this instance. Consider it this way: instead of spiders hunting meat that feeds on plants that are already omnipresent, they are hunting meat that feeds on only as much plant mass as the spiders themselves can carry in (remember the worker spiders?).

If the spiders were growing grass, and feeding on the mammals that grazed the grass, it would be easier to believe. But humans (as an example) wouldn't be able to live on the amount of cattle we could feed with our own hands. The spiders have zero supporting environment.

Agh. I'm getting too into the details. I enjoyed the show. I enjoyed it a lot. At least half of the creatures inspired some germ of an idea in my subconscious, where my Muse will work with it until someday I spring it on my players.

There were niggling little things, areas I felt the producers or science team didn't consider, and I commented on them. I don't want to pick the show apart piece by piece - I'll just leave it at "cool".