Animal Planet: Future is Wild

[Chauzu]

I was looking forward to this show, but I ended up dissapointed by seeing squid-monkeys, flying fish, giant-slow-carivorous-squid-elephant-things, giant-spiders-that-should-not-have-been-able-to-walk, etc.

I did like the giant tortoise though.

 

[Umbran]

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.

We don't know the full environment. We have a couple of minutes of incomplete exposition on a TV show. We may think it unlikely, but those spiders were building some pretty large webs, meanign a great deal of collecting surface. If you put the webs right downwind of great fields of the plants involved, why shouldn't that be roughly equivalent to men bringing in grain for cows?

 

[Tewligan]

but Flish - oh please!!

Did no one else catch the name of the sharks? "Sharkopaths?" What the hell?! In 200 million years, will all animals be named by Insane Clown Posse?

 

[Dr Midnight]

Did no one else catch the name of the sharks? "Sharkopaths?" What the hell?! In 200 million years, will all animals be named by Insane Clown Posse?

HA!

Sharkopathic wicked clownz...
choppin' necks with sloppy soundz
ninja squids out flippin' flish
get neden from some squid *****

Or something.

 

[Lizard]

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

There's plenty of equally limited symbiotic relationships. Hell, there's a species of frog which only lays its eggs in the water collected in a single species of flower, at least according to David Attenborough's old "Life on Earth" series. There are many parasite species wholly adapted to feed off one other species, and species whose lifecycles are dependant on weather phenomenon. I don't find the bumblebeetle all that bizaare. (The silverspiders, however, I consider a bit outre, and I'm not sure how the turtlesaurs didn't sink into the swamp...)

 

[ColonelHardisson]

I'm sorry to quote myself, but this is one of so very few times that I guessed correctly at something, that I wanted to share. I paged through The Future Is Wild, the book the show is based on, and my rationalization below turns out to be remarkably similar to the premise presented in the book. Basically, after the mass extinction, prey became scarce; cooperation helped hedge the bet on finding prey; communication helped this cooperation happen.

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.