Original subtitles

[narrator] Meet the heavyweights. - These are massive, massive animals.

They're one of the big ones.

[narrator] When they fight, everything is supersized.

The stakes...

Any fight can unfortunately lead to death.

[narrator] The weaponry.

It's got a razor-sharp hook at the end of the beak.

[narrator] And the attitude.

This is my last warning. If you don't listen to this,

we're about to get in a fight.

[narrator] These big brawlers will do whatever it takes to get what they want.

These are not playful little playground shoving matches.

You're going to see punches, you're going to see wrestling.

[narrator] They bite with no remorse.

Their mouth, those huge canines, that is their weapon.

[narrator] And one apex alpha,

with a reputation as gargantuan as its mouth.

White sharks leave other predators in the dust.

[intense music]

[narrator] Everyday, everywhere,

our planet is a battleground.

Turf wars.

Food fights.

And mating mayhem rage on,

as animals outwit and outmanoeuvre their own kind

in Battle of the Alphas.

[♪]

In the jungles of equatorial Africa,

he is King.

The largest primate on Earth.

Powerful,

and intimidating.

The gorilla is huge. These are big guys.

The males can get up to 400 pounds.

When they stand up or raise up,

they can get about six feet tall.

They have an arm span of six to seven feet.

These are massive, massive animals.

And yet even with all that power,

they are surprisingly peaceful.

[narrator] Gorillas live in troops of up to 30 members,

led by a mature, dominant male,

known as a silverback.

He gets the largest share of food,

even when resources are low.

And has almost exclusive mating rights

with every female in the troop.

Serious perks.

But for all the glory,

he also carries a hefty responsibility.

The troop leader is really responsible

for the decision-making of the group.

You know, this is where we're going to nest.

This is where we're going to eat.

But he's also responsible for protecting them.

He has a really big job looking after his family.

[narrator] Every day, this alpha leads his troop

through the Virunga Mountains in East Africa.

They never sleep in the same spot twice.

If you stay in an area too long,

then you're going to completely deplete your resources.

And you're going to have nothing left.

So they're kind of always moving on, you know,

grazing from spot to spot to spot.

But, you know, there's more than one troop of gorilla

out there at a time. And so,

there's a chance that they'll bump into one another.

And that's when you'll start to see

really this uncommon violence.

And they'll try to mitigate it to start with.

But if they get pushed too far,

then they will get kind of nasty.

[narrator] So what pushes an alpha over the edge?

Up and coming males might want to, you know,

challenge the alpha for his position.

The benefits of being alpha is access to those females.

They're the ones having the babies,

so he's siring the next generation of gorilla

for years to come.

[narrator] Gorillas learn to fight from a young age

You're going to see punches,

you're going to see biting, you're going to see wrestling.

[narrator] Their teeth are powerful weapons.

That is a scary mouth. Look at that skull.

That strong skull

that houses some really strong jaw muscles

that can chop down and do some real damage to an enemy.

[narrator] It looks incredibly rough,

but it's all play for these youngsters.

We really think that these play fights

really serve as an opportunity for young ones

to earn their skills, to gain expertise,

to build up muscle.

[narrator] It's training for the violence they may encounter as adults.

Improving coordination.

Developing motor skills.

And testing their own strength.

After years of play fighting,

this silverback is ready for the real deal.

He wants dominant status

and all the perks that come with it.

He approaches the alpha,

who rises to attention.

And sizes up his competition.

It's not always ideal for a gorilla

or really any animal to get into conflict.

It imposes a huge cost.

Not only might you get injured,

but you might also lose your dominant status.

So they really have to weigh

when it's appropriate to get into any sort of fight.

[narrator] Before launching a physical attack,

dominant males play the intimidation game.

What they want to do is show their strength

and their prowess.

[narrator] They pound their chest,

cupping their hands to amplify the sound.

That sound, that thump, really communicates.

It's what we call an honest signal.

In other words, that signal tells you something true

about that animal's size and condition.

[narrator] The bigger the male,

the lower the frequency of the thump. - So the rival gorilla might not even be

directly in front of them. But just hearing that

from a distance is like,

"Oh, maybe I don't want to mess with that gorilla." [narrator] And if chest beating isn't enough

to make an opponent scram...

- They'll just do a full-on - charge towards the opponent. - And, you know, in and of itself, that's terrifying.

Along with that, you might also see

some pounding on the ground.

They'll start grabbing vegetation

and throwing it everywhere.

Just making this huge display showing, you know,

"You didn't listen to me the first time.

So now I'm going to show you

this is really what I'm capable of.

And this is my last warning.

If you don't listen to this, we're about to get in a fight."

[narrator] For the dominant male,

the stakes are sky high.

Gorillas are one of the many species

that we see infanticide in.

So if an incoming male wins,

he might kill some of the older gorillas' existing offspring.

And that can be disastrous.

Because that's the end of his line.

That's the end of his legacy.

So when that's taken away, that is just the ultimate cost. [narrator] Today the alpha won't have to pay that price.

His threatening display scares the challenger off.

Sometimes the male will just, you know,

just throw his hands up and say, you know, "I bit off

more than I can chew here and I need to just back off."

[narrator] The heavyweight defender

strides back to his troop.

Today he's a winner,

but who knows who he'll meet in the forest tomorrow.

[♪]

From the largest primate

to the largest member of the deer family.

Moose are imposing creatures.

Moose are huge. They're one of the big ones.

They can get over six feet tall,

which is about nearly two metres high

from foot to shoulder.

And they are heavy.

They can get up to about 2,000 pounds,

so nearly a ton in size.

And it's not just the body that's big.

If you've got a male, you've got these great big antlers too. And they are not just like some tiny little horns

sticking out the side. They are heavy,

big pieces of weaponry.

[♪]

[narrator] Known as a rack,

a set of antlers can weigh 40 kilograms

and be as wide as a person is tall.

Every year males grow a new set,

just for mating season.

By having a giant rack,

a male gets to communicate without ever getting into a fight,

"Hey, females, I'm pretty big. You might like me.

Hey, males, I'm pretty big.

You probably don't want to fight me."

And as they mature every year, the antlers come back.

And if they're doing good and staying healthy

and eating well, those antlers will come back bigger

and more beautiful year after year.

[narrator] This bull is itching for love.

Quite literally.

As his hormones shift into breeding gear,

the soft, blood-filled skin, known as velvet,

that helped his antlers grow, begins to shed.

If you see it, it's a pretty grisly sight.

It's like rips of bloody fabric coming all off.

It can be a little gross.

[narrator] He looks like a bloody mess now,

but within days, he scratches the dead skin off

and emerges with a magnificent rack.

But looks aren't everything.

Smell is important too

and males create their own special brand of cologne.

A moose can dig a little pit, squat down,

pee into that pit in a way so that the urine sprays back

and hits the body.

It gives a signal to females that,

okay, this male is in good condition.

He probably will have some good genes to pass on

to my offspring.

Now, as a human,

you probably think peeing all over yourself is disgusting. I would never do that. But if you think about the things

you do to try to be attractive.

The effort you put into dressing yourself,

fixing your hair, putting on your makeup.

That is exactly what peeing on yourself does for moose.

So, you know, before you start poo-pooing their weird thing

about peeing on themselves, you know,

how come you spent so much time fixing your hair?

[narrator] Females like it so much,

they'll fight each other for access to a prime urine pot.

It can get feisty.

But the nastiest bash ups are between bulls,

as they compete for mating rights.

When bull moose fight, they mean business.

The breeding period is a really,

really short period of time for moose.

It's a quickly closing window for them.

85% of the pregnancies are going to happen

in a 10-day window from late September

to early October.

[narrator] Moose are solitary creatures,

but during that short breeding window,

they gather together.

The males will kind of come and show out,

tussle with one another, size each other up.

The females are hanging out on the edge,

checking out who all the fellas are,

to see who's available.

[narrator] To limit the competition,

males try to scare each other off.

Bellowing out warning signals

and aggressively raking their antlers across shrubs.

It creates this kind of clack clack,

clack, clack, clack sound.

That's a signal to others in the area,

to rival males how big he is.

[narrator] It's noisy

and males aren't the only ones making a racket.

When the females have something to say,

it changes the whole dynamic.

[narrator] This is a protest moan,

a female's way of telling a suitor

that she's just not into him.

In other words, she's like, "No, not interested in you."

And when that goes out into the environment,

it really alerts bigger males in the area.

Like, literally their ears perk up and go like, what's going on?

It has the effect that it makes all the males go nuts.

Once they hear a female make that noise, they're like,

"There's a female who's not impressed around here somewhere."

And so it's been shown in scientific studies

that when a female makes that noise,

the males all start fighting more.

She wants to make sure she has

the best genetic contribution possible.

And so strong males only need apply.

And that's a pretty powerful trick that a female can do

to influence all the males that way.

[narrator] They fight with everything they've got.

These are not playful little,

you know, playground shoving matches.

[narrator] There's a lot on the line.

One study that ran for a long time in Alaska

showed that just a handful of males were having

90% of the sex.

And the rest of them were left with nothing.

It's not easy being a moose.

[narrator] After hours of shoving,

one fighter gets the upper hand.

They can sometimes get a spot on the side of the neck

or in their flank and pierce them or poke them

and cause an injury.

And that's enough to cause a competitor to back off

and be like, "Oh, this is gone too far.

I've gotten hurt. I must go now."

[narrator] With the battle complete,

both male and female step forward to collect their prize.

When it's all said and done, it becomes a win-win situation.

For the male that wins, he knows he's won access

to these females in estrus.

And for the females, it's a win because she knows that

she's got the strongest competitor possible

in that moment.

[narrator] It's a riveting love story, with a big, happy ending

[♪]

[narrator] From colossal antlers designed for mating brawls......to huge bills perfect for food fights...

Pelicans have a lot going for them.

Agility...

They just shoot down like bullets

and then plunge underneath the surface

to catch what they're looking for.

[narrator] Size...

Pelicans are huge.

The bird with the largest beak is the Australasian pelican.

They can weigh up to 12 kilograms.

So this is a big, big, beautiful bird.

[narrator] But when it comes to personality...

I think the word you would use is grumpy.

If you think of the most crotchety person that you know

and then kind of amp that up by a couple of degrees,

you might have the personality of a pelican.

[narrator] There are eight pelican species.

They live and fight on every continent,

except Antarctica.

I think one of the facts that really surprised people

about pelicans is that they're a migratory bird.

They can actually migrate long distances.

[narrator] Their wingspan can reach 3.5 metres.

And they use those giant wings to stay in the air

for up to 24 hours at a time.

They're not very good at the flapping flight.

But what they are good at doing is using

those very large, rounded wings to ride thermals,

invisible clouds of warm air that are flowing up

much like a hawk or an eagle would on migration.

[narrator] They usually migrate in large harmonious flocks,

but that doesn't mean they get along all the time.

They squabble over mates,

to protect their nests,

and things get really messy around meal time.

There is one way that humans and pelicans are pretty similar,

and that's that we get even grouchier when we're hungry.

[narrator] In a pelican food fight,

its bill is its weapon.

One it's been wielding since birth.

So female pelicans often just lay two eggs.

But only one of the young from that nest

tend to survive into independence,

and there's a number of reasons for that.

The older sibling tends to be incredibly rough

with its younger sibling.

It tends to outcompete it for food.

It tends to get kind of physically aggressive with it.

And this can get to the point where...

they kill their younger sibling outright,

literally by pecking it to death.

[narrator] By the time a pelican is full grown,

its bill can reach lengths of up to 50 centimetres.

It's got a razor-sharp hook at the end of the beak.

This is incredibly useful if you're a fish-catching bird,

but it's also incredibly useful

for fighting with other pelicans.

[narrator] It's an impressive piece of anatomy,

but a pelican's pouch is the real showstopper.

They've got this an amazing sort of thick,

leathery skin sack that stretches

from their lower mandible to their throat

called the gular sack.

And these sacks expand,

and they use those sacks underwater

to grab a whole bunch of water and a whole bunch of fish.

[narrator] Contrary to what some think,

pelicans don't stockpile food in their pouch.

It's not a fridge, it's a fishing net.

And once they've got a bunch of water

and a bunch of fish into their gular sack,

they will slowly drain out the water,

leaving the fish for their meal.

And it's quite difficult if you're a pelican

to swallow what you've caught.

You need to kind of gulp it,

a fish down in the right orientation.

And that is the time when you are extremely vulnerable

to attack from those who would want to steal your food.

[narrator] This is a little something called

kleptoparasitism.

A long scientific term that means stealing resources,

including food, from another animal.

It can manifest into some brutal brawls.

So what pelicans will do is come in and attack

and peck at the bill and at the gular sack

that's holding the fish.

Just trying to get them to drop what they caught.

[narrator] The defender fights back with everything it's got.

They are extremely motivated to try and keep the meal

that they worked so hard to get.

So they'll do almost anything they can.

They'll maneuver, they'll try and fly away,

they'll attack back with their wings and their own bills.

And they do actually manage to keep ahold

of their hard-won catch most of the time.

[narrator] In this battle,

the defender does keep its catch

and neither bird is seriously injured.

So these aggressive interactions

are usually very, very quick.

They're generally focused on food

and they seldom lead to any major damage.

[narrator] These grumpy giants may be kleptos,

but they know when to draw the line.

[♪]

All species fight their own kind.

But for the top of every food chain there is no contest

this is an apex alpha.

After 450 million years,

this may be nature's perfect killing machine.

The Great White Shark.

It is the finest piece of kit

that evolution has ever come out with.

This thing is so beautifully built

that you really can't improve on it at all.

Unmatched, unrivaled, and just kick ass.

[♪]

[narrator] Sharks grow as they age,

and they never stop growing.

Females can get up to six metres long.

That is a big girl.

They'll weigh well over a tonne-and-a-half.

[narrator] Great White Sharks are the largest

predatory fish in the ocean.

Alpha, alpha predators.

With an incredible sense of smell.

They smell the way you hear.

They have nostrils on either side of the snout,

and they pay attention to the differences

between the smells that go into each of those nostrils.

So they can smell in stereo

and know which direction the smell is coming from.

And as they're swimming through the scent current,

"Oh, it's a little stronger on the left.

Oh, it's a little stronger on the right."

[narrator] Smell brings them close enough

to see their target.

Excellent eyesight helps them hunt

even in the dark depths of the ocean.

But when a great white is withi striking distance,

it rolls its eyes back to protect them

and can no longer see the prey,

so it switches to another sense.

It's got the five senses that we've all got

and then it's got this amazing sixth super sense

that just catapults it into another dimension.

They can detect electrical fields, electro reception.

[narrator] All living creatures generate electric fields.

Great whites can sense them

with special jelly-filled pores on their snout.

A superpower that keeps them locked on their target.

Pair that with a great white's distinct hunting strategy

and it's unstoppable.

It's going after a seal.

That is a very hard thing to catch.

Those things are predators in their own right,

going after elusive fish.

So for a shark to be able to sneak up on that and take one of those out, that is an impressive ability.

[narrator] Hunting at dawn gives the white another edge.

The sharks have an unfair advantage against seals

and sea lions and the other animals they eat

because those are visual prey. They're looking for threats.

And so by hunting at night or early dawn,

the shark doesn't need to use that light.

It can use its super sniffer to find that mammal

and get close to it

when the mammal doesn't even see it coming. [narrator] Target identified.

To go high, the white goes low...

Deep enough to be undetectable before launch.

Pumping its tail, the shark charges upward

at 40 kilometres per hour,

launching its body vertically out of the water.

It's called a polaris attack.

It's not just a matter of clamping onto it.

It's trying to kill that animal.

And it does that by whipping its head back and forth,

hopefully snapping the neck of the prey

so that it can't swim away,

even if it does survive that first bite.

[narrator] That's not likely.

It's got 300 teeth in its mouth at any one time,

and these are the active teeth.

These aren't the teeth that are waiting to come round in this fantastic conveyor belt system.

Great White Shark has the chance to go through

20,000 teeth in a lifetime.

Be glad you're not a great white shark tooth fairy

because you would be bust very quick.

There's big daggers all through the mouth

and those just rip the flesh apart.

But there's no chewing.

The thing goes down in big, ugly chunks.

Parts of it come out the gills, out the side.

It's a giant mess.

[narrator] Their table manners may be lacking,

but these alpha hunters don't go hungry.

White sharks leave other predators in the dust.

If you have a lion,

it might be successful a quarter of the time

that is goes after an animal. If you have a cheetah,

it might get half of the prey it goes for.

But if you're talking about a shark,

I mean, they have like an 80% kill rate.

That's unreal.

They're not going after easy things.

They're just really good predators.

[narrator] The great white shark is critical

to the balance of the marine ecosystem.

In the past few years,

the alpha predator has reappeared near Cape Cod. A direct result of the surge in the seal colonies

along the New England seaboard.

A great white shark keeps the colonies of seals

at smaller levels so they don't get out of control.

And as a result of that,

you've got more of the fish that the seals would otherwise eat.

So there are all these animals that can only exist

because they're protected by the great white shark.

It's counterintuitive, but if you take the white sharks out,

it means death for way more animals

than if you leave them in.

[narrator] The typical lifespan of these colossal

denizens of the sea is 30 years.

But some live into their seventies.

Which leaves a lot of time to kill.

[♪]

When you're this big,

fighting is a huge deal.

With menacing weapons,

and life or death stakes.

In a clash of the titans,

there can only be one winner.