TV Show: Madagascar
Aired on: 8:00 PM on February 23rd, 2011 - Wednesday
Channel: BBC TWO Channel
Episode Details: Season 1 Episode 3
Episode Name: Land of Heat and Dust
Preview:
Madagascar is an island of extremes. While the east is cloaked in soaking rainforest, the west and south is almost a desert. This is a scorching landscape where it might not rain for nine months of the year, and some years not at all. To live here, you have to be a specialist. The animals and plants of the dry southern lands are stranger and more mysterious than on any other part of the island, and their strategies for surviving the dryness are extraordinary.
In this programme, we follow their fortunes as the year swings by and they wait for the brief
rains to return. We feature a family of Verreaux's sifakas, a kind of lemur living in one of Madagascar's strangest forests. This is the 'spiny forest', like nowhere else on Earth all the trees here have savage spikes, and some drip toxic chemicals. But the sifakas are totally at home here; they don't need to drink, getting all the moisture they need from the plants' hard leaves. And they have an incredible knack of moving among the dagger-like spines without harming themselves. Slow-motion film shows the siafakas' technique, though quite how they avoid spearing themselves remains a mystery. But how will their tiny babies survive such a hostile place?
Madagascar Season 1 Episode 3 Land of Heat and Dust
