'Planet Earth: Asia' is a Work of Art & Science

David Attenborough’s new series, Planet Earth: Asia (simply titled Asia in the U.K.), is a thrilling, gorgeous paean to the earth’s largest continent. Four years in the making, Asia explores the continent in depth for the first time, including its thousands of miles of coastline, three oceans, and twenty seas, spanning the globe from Arabia to the edge of the Pacific. An additional episode, “The Making of Asia,” goes behind the scenes and the camera with the skilled production crew, and each episode concludes with a tech segment where the story behind the story is revealed.

Attenborough is as clear-eyed as he always is about the dangers threatening these fragile, complex, and beautiful environments. The opening episode, “Beneath the Waves,” explores Asia’s rich seas, which host sixty percent of the world’s species in abundant coral reefs. Attenborough describes these as bustling ocean cities. Animal behavior is frequently surprising. Moorish Idol fishes pair up to breed but leave the safety of the coral reef to swim in a vast crowd in open water, where sharks are pursued and attacked. By the time the sharks are sated, only a handful of fish remain, and it’s only then that they mate, preserving a delicate balance of species.

Other species are plain weird, like the mudskipper, a land-dwelling fish inhabiting the coasts’ mangrove forests. (One-third of the world’s mangroves grow in Indonesia.) The mudskipper can absorb oxygen through its skin, and flippers on its belly enable it to climb trees and skip across the water. When the male mudskipper spies a potential mate, it builds a breeding burrow, digging out the mud with its mouth, and frequently, rival males will duel.