Hippo: Nature's Wild Feast

25 October 2011

TX: Monday 7th November, 9pm, Channel 4

A new high-tech natural history event, Hippo: Nature's Wild Feast will present the most comprehensive illustration to date of nature's food-chain in action. The programme, anchored live from Zambia's Luangwa Valley, will show the events of the past fortnight (which have been streamed live on Channel4.com) as an entire ecological system including  predators, scavengers, birds and insects consumed the enormous carcass of an adult hippo.

Located by a section of the Luangwa river, a prime location for some of the biggest predators in Zambia, the hippo will have been in the sights of the notoriously vicious honey badger, leopards, lions, Nile crocodiles, hyena, wild dogs, baboons, monitor lizards and marabou storks - known as the ‘undertaker birds' which use their 10-foot wingspan to swoop down and see off other smaller vultures.

Giving a whole new meaning to the term ‘food miles' the programme follows the local pride of lions via GPS trackers and by attaching transmitters to vultures and micro-transmitters to insects, tracks the secondary food-chain as the flesh is transported to wildlife beyond those directly at the carcass: such as the young of the predators, or passed on as calories through animal faeces.

The transmitters on the vultures will contribute data including speed, distance travelled and altitude by satellite. At the other end of the scavenger scale, micro-transmitters attached to insects will track the range of the beetles and dragonflies feeding on both the carcass and the waste left by the bigger animals. A laser thermometer and digital microscope will be deployed by an expert entomologist to help capture extreme close-ups of the different insects, maggots and microbes.

Presenter Mark Evans (Inside Nature's Giants, Brave New World) speaks to animal and entomology experts and local guides about the animals' behaviour and biological decomposition. With the potential for fierce showdowns between rivals for these vital calories, Evans will explain the  different eating mechanisms of  the animals - from crocodiles who use each other as leverage for a ‘death roll' to twist off the meat - to marabou storks who gulp down pounds of flesh which they store in their gullets.

The programme will also feature footage from the dens of predators, staked out by specialist wildlife cameramen - Evans will show the location of different packs on a map - plotting our the different territories.

Hippo: Nature's Wild Feast, follows Elephant: Life After Death which aired earlier this year and showed a five-tonne elephant being transformed into six million calories worth of fat, meat and guts, feeding a whole new cycle of life.

Director: Johnny Young

Producer: Sarah Peat

Exec Prod: Dick Colthurst

Prod Co: Tigress Productions

Comm Ed: Tanya Shaw