From master builders to interior decorators, bulldozers and giant excavators. Wildlife are the architects of engineering marvels Indeed, what we call the wilderness is the home of billions of highly organized workers for far longer than humans and often on a much grander scale, animals have transformed our world. In this episode, works of M. Monumental achievement are constructed by the engineers of animal empires.
Many hands make light work, and there's always safety in numbers, yet, a crowd can also attract the wrong kind of attention. In the vast empires built by wild workers. The largest built structure on earth is not made by humans. So, enormous, it can be seen from space. The Great Barrier reef is one of nature's greatest wonders, constructed by tiny corals.
It is 2,300 km long, and at its widest 240 km across, home to one of the most complex communities on the planet visited by the ocean's most impressive animals. The coral structures we can see are made of limestone, hidden inside, are thousands of very hardworking little animals called coral polyps. They extract calcium and carbon from the water and use it to build their fortresses.
Protection from the outside world, the most industrious, among them, expand their structure by 10 cm a year. Not much on its own, but with billions of coral working together over a half a million years, they've constructed an empire on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend. Most Animal empires begin with an individual or family home before expanding into something much bigger in North America. Prairie dogs belong to close-knit family groups.
A dominant male, several females and their offspring all live under the one roof. The entrance to their home is adorned with a volcano-shaped dome. But inside is where things really get interesting. Spread over, around 30 m of tunneling are sleeping quarters, store rooms, inbuilt ventilation holes, and escape hatches. Some chambers even have onsuite bathrooms and high-tech anti-flooding installations.
Prairie dogs are house-proud and spend a lot of their time on maintenance and diy improvements in the process. Each family loosens and fertilizes nearly six tons of hard-baked soil. Some are a little more fanatical than others. The family also, ms the grass surrounding their burrow into a perfectly manicured lawn.combined with their fertilized soil. The results are stunning and draw in bison and other grazers who benefit from the more digestable cropped grass.
The family rarely wanders beyond the confines of their childhood home, until the young males are ready to start their own family and head out to build a, the new home. They quickly enter a competitive real estate market. Several hundred prairie dogs live together in a giant network of burrows called a town, which can extend over 600,000 hectares. The biggest town is home to 4 million homemakers.
The, there are so many tunnels, not all can be regularly maintained. That's when the squatters begin to move in. Burrowing, owls, and toads, skunks, and stoes and mice in their thousands. What the prairie dogs designed is their perfect hideway has turned into a refuge for freeloaders, whether they like it or not.
Some rather unsavory characters have also moved into the growing neighborhood, like dangerous badgers and coyotes who prey on the rest of the town's inhabitants to cope, the prairie dogs have set up a neighborhood. Watch each tunnel entrance serves as a watchtower, and family members take turns on guard duty. When a hawk appears on the horizon, everyone hears the alarm and heads for cover. However, not all the alarms are the same.
Wherever animals join together in large communities, hunters seek them out. Be eaters try to get the jump on WBE intruders by constructing their homes in hard to reach places, like a medieval castle. Their burrows are built where there are natural defenses. The cliff's vertigal drop is a deterrent for lizards, snakes, and even other birds, hoping to besiege the colony. Date: 2024-01-31
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