Life at the Extreme

In Namibia, one of the hottest places on the planet, she discovers that despite the insane temperature and lack of water, it is home to an incredibly diverse range of life. There, she stays with San bush people to learn the skills that they have developed to survive, including hunting for water in the most bizarre places.

Davina travels to the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, home to some of the world's deepest-diving creatures including whales. She investigates how animals cope with the pressures of diving - particularly the air-breathing animals - and begins by swimming with a school of dolphins. The ultimate diver in these waters is the sperm whale, capable of diving to over 2,000 metres and holding its breath for over 90 minutes. A world champion freediver teaches her how to swim alongside these huge creatures before she gets permission to take on the challenge.

Davina travels to the Svalbard islands in the Arctic Circle - the icy home of the polar bear and one of the coldest places on the planet, where temperatures can drop to -40C. Just 800 miles from the North Pole, her journey begins in Longyearbyen, one of the most northerly towns in the world. It is April and the beginning of the long Arctic summer, where the sun will not set for four months. Davina watches an enormous polar bear stalk a giant walrus by swimming under the broken ice, before meeting a glaciologist who takes her deep inside an enormous glacier, an ice cave filled with sparkling diamond-like ice crystals.

Davina travels to Costa Rica, which is hot, humid and one of the wettest places on Earth. The rain there is torrential, rivers burst their banks, forests flood and roads become impassable in a matter of minutes. Yet despite being utterly inhospitable for humans, animals love it here. For a country that is less than a quarter of the size of the UK, Costa Rica is home to a staggering diversity of life, numbering some 500,000 species.