The Trials of Life

"Watching and filming animals world-wide has occupied most of my working life. By the end of the 1970's, the marvels and wonders I had witnessed had become a dazzling, almost confusing kaleidoscope and I began to feel a need to put them in some kind of order, to try to produce a coherent survey of the natural history of the planet. So I started on a decade of work which was to result in three books and three 13-part television series: Life on Earth, The Living Planet and The Trials of Life. Between them, they looked at the three major aspects of natural history that can be studied simply by observing living wild animals - their diversity, their ecology and their behaviour.

The Trials of Life surveys the last and most dramatic of these. Every animal, whether rat or rattlesnake, lobster or llama or a human being, must during the course of its life face a series of problems - growing up and collecting food, finding its way around and defending itself against enemies, getting along with its fellows and finding a mate. But though the problems may be the same, the solutions are astoundingly varied. Ants in the Sahara find their way across the featureless sand by taking repeated observations on the sun, fireflies attract their mates by flashing signals like Morse code, and teams of chimpanzees hunt down monkeys in west African forests, collaborating in the most complex way yet observed in the animal world." -- David Attenborough, January 1992