TROPICAL WORLDS

Hornet attacks, robot cameras and rain. Go behind the scenes of episode one with producer Paul Williams.

- Paul Williams

BBC Wildlife: What’s the theme of the first episode?

Relationships. The tropical world is a dense, tangled environment, containing more than half of the plant and animal species on Earth. This phenomenal abundance of life is all down to tropical plants and the relationships that they have developed with animals, and with each other, over millions of years. The episode has another theme: fragmentation, and how we need to piece our forests back together to preserve this rich life.

What’s the episode’s standout sequence, in your view?

The dipterocarp sequence is very moving. These are the tallest tropical trees in the world – some are over 90m high – and are very abundant on Borneo. They have a remarkable, cooperative survival strategy: the trees go for years without producing any seeds at all, then produce and drop their seeds all at once, billions across the entire forest. Seed predators, such as bearded pigs, can then eat their fill, but enough of the seeds survive to ensure the survival of the next generation. We follow the seeds in slow motion as they spiral en masse down to the enemy waiting below. It reminds me of the scene in Saving Private Ryan when the soldiers go into battle together.

What interesting tech did you use?