The Future is Wild

The Great Plateau (1x9)

Air date: May 28, 2002

The Great Plateau is the ninth episode in the documentary series The Future Is Wild. It is set in a lofty plateau created by the collision of Australia (who moved northward) against Japan and Kamchatka (the Asian tectonic plate), 100,000,000 years into the future. The episode focuses on three species. Silver Spider - a descendant of our spiders, the silver spiders live in huge colonies and have a caste system based on the size of the animal. They build massive webs across canyons. The queens can grow to the size of footballs. Poggle - the last species of mammal on Earth at this time. It is prey to silver spiders and looks much like a hamster. Great Blue Windrunner - a brilliant blue bird with wings on its legs which sees in ultraviolet and lives at the highest points on the plateau. This episode shows how this bizarre food chain works. The silver spiders build massive webs across canyons which catch seeds from grass trees. These are then harvested by the spiders and taken to an underground cavern. In here, the poggle hides and feeds on the seeds until they are killed and fed to the enormous queen. Great blue windrunners feed on the spiders that they pluck from the webs. At the end of the episode, we see the beginning of a mass extinction, which almost wipes the slate clean and allows evolution to start again.