Courtship Life Story

So far on Life Story,

we have seen animals take their first steps...

..grow up...

..find a home...

..and gain power.

Now, they need a mate.

Competition to win a partner

is so intense in nature,

it has created both the most extraordinary beauty...

and life-threatening violence.

A male waved albatross

will have the same partner for his lifetime of over 20 years.

After feeding alone over the Pacific Ocean,

this male has returned here to the Galapagos,

as he does every year,

to wait for his mate to come back to him.

Others are already reaffirming their bonds.

As the years go by and they get older,

there is always the possibility that one of them will not make it back.

But his bond with his partner is so strong,

he will simply sit and wait for her.

In nature, it's rare to form such a lifelong commitment.

For most animals, the mating game is both brief and fiercely competitive.

A female green turtle

must survive the dangers of the open ocean for 30 years

before she's mature enough to mate.

She's come here, to the shallow waters off Malaysia, to breed.

A male.

He's been waiting weeks for this opportunity.

Courtship begins with the gentlest of circling...

..before she accepts his advances.

Their first breath together

is the beginning of several hours of mating.

He will hold on as tight as he can

to keep her all to himself.

Unfortunately, they have company.

Another male.

He will do anything he can to separate the pair

and mate with the female himself.

He targets the soft, vulnerable parts.

He knocks the air out of his rival.

The female is struggling now with the extra weight on her back,

and soon she will need to surface to take a breath.

Another male.

MORE competition.

And here's another.

Now, the female has two males locked on her back

and it's twice as hard for her to get to the surface.

After an hour of battling,

the pair are being harassed by seven males.

But the males are so excited, they start attacking each other.

In the commotion, the couple break away for the surface.

The pair manage to make their escape...

..leaving the rival males milling around in confusion.

Finally, they can mate in peace.

In the mating game, it's usually the males who take the risks

and make the most effort.

HE CHIRRUPS

A flame bowerbird doesn't fight to win a mate.

His strategy is to put on a show.

First, he builds a stage.

In the breeding season, he spends a week creating this construction,

called a bower, in the forests of Papua New Guinea.

He's a stickler for detail.

The stage is set.

Time to paint it with mud.

That makes a darker background,

which will set off his magnificent colours.

Next, there are difficult decisions about the set-dressing.

Perhaps a bit dull.

There's still room for improvement.

Perfect.

Time to call in the audience...

HE SQUAWKS

..if anyone's interested.

This could take some time.

Attracting attention is an essential part of winning a mate.

The world's oceans are filled with brilliant colours,

all designed to make their wearers conspicuous.

Unfortunately, this small, Japanese puffer fish is dull,

almost to the point of invisibility,

but, to compensate,

he is probably nature's greatest artist.

To grab a female's attention,

he creates something that almost defies belief.

His only tools are his fins.

In his head, a plan of mathematical perfection.

He ploughs the sand, breaking it up into the finest of particles.

These shells aren't just rubbish to be removed -

he uses them to decorate the ridges of his construction.

He can't rest for more than a moment,

but must work 24 hours a day for a week,

or the current will destroy his creation.

A final tidy-up and his masterpiece is complete.

Nowhere else in nature does an animal construct something

as complex and perfect as this.

If this doesn't get him noticed, nothing will.

Now, it's ready for inspection.

A female, swollen with eggs.

To make sure she gets the best view, he encourages her into the centre.

Inspection over,

she withdraws to await the final stage of the process.

By the next morning, all the softest sand is now in the middle.

The centre of the arena has been flattened.

Right on cue, here she is.

This is what she wanted.

It's a perfect bed for her eggs.

The male now grasps her cheek and then fertilises her minuscule eggs.

And with a quick flick of his fins, he buries them.

They carry on like this until she has finished laying.

An hour of his rough affection leaves a love bite on her cheek.

Finally, she leaves.

He stays to fan the eggs until they hatch,

while his extraordinary work of art fades away around him.

South Georgia in the Antarctic.

A male fur seal.

He's about ten years old and in his prime.

He's coming ashore to face the fight of his life.

He may even die on this beach.

For the first time, he is strong enough to try to win

a territory that could attract a harem of females.

But there are plenty of rivals here with the same idea.

These are only the preliminary rounds.

The real struggle will begin once the females arrive.

Just a week later, females have filled the beach,

choosing the best territories in which to give birth to their pups.

This male now has a harem of a dozen females

and he's going to have to defend them.

His jealous neighbours will be ready to exploit any sign of weakness.

It's only once the females have given birth

that males can mate with them.

Now this male must ensure that he alone fathers next year's offspring.

But this is the rival's chance, too.

He must act fast.

He won't find them all as easy as this to intimidate.

New males pound up from the sea,

intent on testing the territory holders.

With many more waiting behind them.

The biggest battles are yet to come.

Usually in the mating game, it's not the males

but the females who call the shots.

And this male long-tailed manakin is trying to win over

one of the world's choosiest females.

He's been practising his moves here in Costa Rica

for as long as a decade.

There's another male here, too.

Only the newcomer is not a rival,

he is a junior partner.

They know each other so well, they can finish each other's calls.

But that's not all that they have synchronised.

They are master and apprentice.

The apprentice has also been practising for many years.

But now he must copy the master's every move.

In fact, the master needs his wingman

as a female won't even look at a solo performer,

and, what's more, she will expect perfect harmony,

so they practice together every day.

At last, they're ready.

Here she is.

Rehearsal over,

their performance is the result of more than ten years' hard work.

She won't tolerate a single slip-up.

Suddenly, the master calls time on the dance...

..and the apprentice is banished.

Only the master gets to mate.

For the apprentice, there will be no reward until his master dies

and he can take his place.

The mating game can sometimes be a long game.

A male peacock jumping spider from Australia,

on a quest for a mate.

And when you're the size of a grain of rice,

almost anything here could be dangerous.

He's searching for any sign that a female spider came this way.

And he's found something.

Spider silk, with the scent of a female.

He just needs to follow it...

..wherever it leads him.

Other males have gone on the same quest and have come to a grisly end.

Here's the female and she doesn't look very amorous.

In fact, she kills every male

who doesn't match up to her expectations.

What can he do to win her over?

Dance.

Dance for his life.

He will need a show-stopping trick to avoid becoming lunch.

With his fan unfurled,

he begins an ever more complicated series of dance moves

to try and seduce her.

At last, she succumbs to his advances

and allows him to mate with her.

He matched her expectations.

But she kills him anyway.

After all, his body will make the perfect meal

with which to nourish their eggs.

Back in Papua New Guinea,

the male flame bowerbird is still doing his best to attract a female.

And at last he gets a response.

Unfortunately, it's a young male.

And, worse, he's brought a friend.

They're taking liberties, practising on his bower.

He doesn't seem to know what to do about it.

But enough is enough.

The commotion attracts the attention of another adult male,

a neighbour and rival.

Having destroyed the bower, he even steals the decorations.

The owner arrives back to find a scene of destruction.

No female's going to look twice at this mess.

He'll just have to start all over again.

In life, there will always be rivals in the mating game.

Autumn in the forests of Japan.

The mating season for Japanese macaques.

This dominant male is over 20 years old.

Age has clouded one eye.

He has had a harem of females for many years.

And he can mate with them unopposed.

But time catches up with everyone.

Young rival males are hanging out on the perimeter,

eyeing up his females.

For years, Old Blue Eye has asserted his authority from this tree.

But his authority is waning

and, the moment his back is turned,

his females are lured away by younger males.

Throughout the forest, his females are conducting secret affairs.

Blue Eye tries to guard his females by patrolling the edge of the troop.

Caught in the act.

He attacks his unfaithful female.

He has reasserted his authority.

Or so he thinks.

The moment the old male shuts his eyes,

his females are off again.

Most of next year's babies will be fathered by his rivals.

And he will never know.

In Papua New Guinea,

the bowerbird has lovingly rebuilt and redecorated his bower.

Another visitor.

This time, it's a female.

This is just where he wants her.

Time to begin the show.

First, he expands his pupils alternately.

It's an oddly mesmerising display.

A spot of limbering up,

accompanied by a weird and wheezy call

from deep in his throat.

Now, it's time for his grand performance.

He waves his wing like a matador's cape.

She appears to be transfixed.

This is certainly eye-catching, but it seems he needs to do more.

Generously, she drops him a hint.

It's the bird equivalent of a bouquet of flowers.

It's all going so well,

it's time to get physical, with a few head-butts to her chest.

One final flourish to cap weeks of effort.

But something's wrong.

His rival is back, and at the worst possible moment.

What should he do?

For the female, the moment has gone.

Sometimes, whatever you do, things just don't work out.

On the fur seal beach in South Georgia,

the fighting has been relentless for two weeks.

Bloodied and scarred, this bull has held on to his ground

and his harem against allcomers.

But it's not over yet.

The rivals keep coming.

This new one looks particularly powerful.

When two bulls are as evenly matched as this,

they can trade blows for 20 minutes.

The resident bull is tiring.

The weeks of fighting have taken too great a toll.

Suddenly, his neighbours join in the attack.

Overwhelmed, he's driven from his territory

and out of the colony for ever.

The breeding season is almost over and the seals will soon leave.

Now an outcast, this mortally wounded bull will die here...

..but he will die a winner.

He held his territory for long enough to father offspring.

Success in nature is all about creating the next generation,

whatever it takes.

A male waved albatross waits for his mate to return from the open sea.

Could this be her?

Or this?

Is there something familiar about her?

Recognition.

Reunited.

And they can resume their long-standing relationship.

If love, as we understand it, exists in nature,

then surely this must be it.

Their lifelong bond will help them face the final chapter

of life's story together -

parenthood.

One of the most unexpected stories found by the Life Story team

was that of a small fish who makes crop circles in the sand.

Unfortunately, it builds them right at the bottom of a bay

in southern Japan.

So how do you film a tiny fish, 13 metres under the sea?

Specialist underwater cameraman Hugh Miller's solution

is to build a film studio on the sea bed.

This is a quad, a quad pod.

It's a bit like a tripod, but it's got four legs

and lets us get the camera very, very low to the sea bed.

This metal triangle is going to be the buoyant light rig,

so it's like a little ray of sunshine down at the bottom

of the sea, but this is the first time it's been used

and we're going to find out if it works or not.

Hugh has also designed an underwater crane

to reveal the full complexity of the nest structure.

But however good the equipment, the team will still have to find

the 12cm-long fish in a big bay.

For that, they turn to the expert.

70-year-old Yogi Okata

first discovered the mysterious crop circles

and the puffer fish that makes them.

He and his dive buddy, Toyo, are going to search

several square miles of sea bed, hoping to locate a fish.

Fish is very difficult, almost, camouflaged very well,

like almost sandy, so just I can see shadow or just eye.

So it's very difficult.

But eventually Toyo and Yogi have good news,

they've found what turns out to be the only male fish in the bay.

12 metres, yeah.

They've even drawn a map for Hugh to find it.

If I get lost, I'll be holding this.

Time to build the studio.

All the kit is taken to the sea bed to be carefully assembled.

The last thing in place is Hugh's little ray of sunshine.

The fish won't start building a new nest for several days,

so there's time to test his reaction to the kit

while he fans his eggs on his old, disintegrating nest.

He's certainly not camera shy.

And now Hugh's had his first good look at the fish.

The biggest surprise was the fish is a little bit smaller

than I first hoped.

In fact, he's only, well, he's really only about this big.

So to suddenly be faced with a fish

that's probably half the size of what I was hoping,

I thought, "Well, this is going to be a little bit harder

"than I first thought."

Yogi and Toyo keep watch

and it's not long before they spot the fish starting to construct

a new nest, which Yogi expects will take him seven days to complete.

He surprises everyone by finishing it in three.

Yogi warns the crew to be ready at dawn the next day

for a visit from a female fish.

They spend three hours crouched over the camera

to film the action as it unfolds, just as Yogi predicted.

-So what happened?

-Spawning!

We've got it.

The little chap was doing very well for himself.

But the male built his nest so fast

that Hugh never had time to film a top-down shot

for the ultimate reveal of his hard work.

This requires the crew to become builders, too.

They build an A frame to hold the camera perfectly steady

well above the nest.

Yogi and Toyo position the frame near to the old nest.

Now the crew just have to wait

for the fish to finish tending his eggs and resume building.

But a few days later, there's bad news.

We've been watching a typhoon system far to the south of us

for a number of days, and we haven't really felt its effects until now,

and today was going to be the first day of the puffer fish

beginning its next cycle of nest building,

and it's been completely blown.

So rather than going in with the cameras

and starting the new cycle, we're actually going in

just to recover equipment, which is a real shame,

cos we don't know what's going to happen next, really.

It's five days before the storm blows through.

Finally, the sea calms down and the visibility returns.

But for Yogi and Toyo, it's back to square one.

They must find the fish all over again.

Day after day they search, and Toyo, acting as interpreter, reports back.

Erm... No nest, no male.

The news gets slightly better.

We find a fish.

Just one fish but no nest.

We find the male at the 20 metre deeps,

but not make circle.

The storm has put the fish off his construction work.

Time is up and the team reluctantly start to dismantle

the underwater studio.

But the fish has one more surprise in store.

Well, it just couldn't come at a later point, the last dive.

We're...we're going in to pull out the kit,

and there's a male making a nest.

One final chance to get the perfect top shot from the A frame.

A shot that truly does justice to the fish's extraordinary artistry.

Next time on Life Story,

animals raise offspring with great commitment,

bad behaviour,

lessons to be learned

and life and death choices.

Success means leaving a legacy for the future.