Primates

Captured with BBC Studios Natural History Unit’s signature style, with immersive cinematography, emotional storytelling and new insight into the animals we thought we knew, Primates combines celebration with revelation. We meet familiar primates with new stories and new species rarely seen on screen.

Chris Packham narrates the definitive series about our closest relatives.

At the heart of this ground-breaking series is incredible animal behaviour. New technology has captured primates on their level and in their world, whether that’s in the treetops of a flooded forest, or the tangled undergrowth of the Sri Lankan night.

Over the course of two years, the Primates team embarked on 28 filming expeditions across the world. They battled snowstorms in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, and forded or floated through flooded jungles in remote corners of Sumatra and Brazil. Along the way, they captured some of the very first images of the newly described Tapanuli orangutan, and were the first crew in years to attempt to film the bald-headed white uakari. And in Equatorial Guinea, one team spent over two months, camped on a remote beach, to capture the most intimate images ever seen of a drill, one of the world’s least understood primates. And in Sri Lanka, another crew captured the very first low-light colour images of the elusive gray slender loris at night in the wild.

Engrossing new stories combine family drama with the latest science. On Congo’s volcanic slopes, we meet an apparently fearsome silverback mountain gorilla, who turns out to be a gentle and attentive father to his young. Cutting-edge research indicates that caring fathers are the most successful silverbacks. In South Africa, we join an elusive and diminutive lesser bush baby from a newly discovered urban population, on a night-time raid of the city zoo. In Malaysia, we experience a Lar Gibbons’ canopy world from their perspective, in a filming first.

From snow-capped mountains to the hottest deserts, and from the most remote, unexplored landscapes to the very heart of our modern world, Primates is the ultimate, definitive celebration of our very own animal family.

• Narrator - Chris Packham was born in Southampton in 1961. A trained Zoologist, he has been a familiar face on British television since 1986 and is known for being one of the most passionate and authoritative voices on natural history
• Executive Producer - Michael Gunton (Dynasties, Big Cats, Planet Earth II)
• Series Producer - Gavin Boyland (Big Cats, Animal Babies, Monkey Planet)
• Producers
  Nick Easton (Big Cats, Life Story, Africa)
  Nikki Waldron (Springwatch, Life In Cold Blood)
  Victoria Buckley (MSc in Primatology, World’s Sneakiest Animals, Monkey Planet)
• Researcher - Dr Camila Coelho (Experienced Primatologist, with broadcast credits on Earth’s Wildest Rivers and Wild Brazil)
• Scientific Consultant - Dr Russell Mittermeier, Chief Conservation Office, Global Wildlife Conservation, chairman of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group. And he’s the first man in history to see all 79 genera of Primates!

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Technology within the series

Primates - treetop specialists as you’ve never seen them before

New technology has captured primates on their level and in their world with tiny remote cameras, canopy cams and a huge, state of the heart 360 rig.

360 degree camera

To capture gibbons as never before, the series pioneered the use of a 360 degree camera. Producer Nick Easton and specialist 360 operator Steve Flanagan used a camera mounted on a cable sliding through the canopy to capture gibbons as they swung alongside it. The camera is a sphere composed of 24 individual cameras. By digitally stitching the multiple images together, the team were able to offer a completely unique, on the move perspective on gibbons as they move at ease in the trees.

Canopy pole cam

To get a new viewpoint up in the canopy, the team developed a pole cam that allowed the crew to get a miniature camera up at eye level with the primates. It took two people to operate, and involved some delicate manoeuvring, but gave us some really intimate portraits of monkeys from up in their world.

Interesting facts

Primates are mostly tropical creatures, with over 90% of them found in tropical forests. However, they are also incredibly adaptable, and primates in some form can be found in every continent except Antarctica and Australia. Across the world there are over 500 different species of primates, from tiny mouse lemurs to huge gorillas. A fifth of all primates are the lemurs, that live only on the island of Madagascar.

Key species featured

• Barbary macaque - Morocco
• Bearded capuchin - Brazil
• Blue-eyed black lemur - Madagascar
• Bornean orangutan - Borneo
• Chimpanzee - Uganda
• Common marmoset - Brazil
• Drill - Bioko, Equatorial Guinea
• Dusky langur - Malaysia
• Gray slender loris - Sri Lanka
• Golden-headed lion tamarin - Brazil
• Hanuman langur - India
• Kipunji - Tanzania
• Lac Alaotra gentle lemur - Madagascar
• Lar gibbon - Thailand
• Lesser bush baby - South Africa
• Lion-tailed macaque - India
• Long-tailed macaque - Thailand
• Mountain gorilla - Democratic Republic of Congo
• Owl monkey - Argentina
• Rhesus macaque - Nepal
• Tapanuli orangutan - Sumatra
• White-cheeked spider monkey - Brazil
• White uakari - Brazil
• Yellow baboon - Zambia

Primates by numbers

• Bearded capuchins use six different tool (mostly sticks and stones tools in a host of deliberate ways) - a record for any monkey (chimps can use nine)
• Lar gibbons can travel through the trees at speed in excess of 30mph
• The largest primates in the world (Eastern Lowland gorilla) is over 5,000 times larger than the smallest (Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur)
• Bush babies can leap ten times their own body length
• More than 90% of primate species are found in tropical rainforests
• One newly discovered behaviour was the anointing by blue-eyed black lemurs of acid from carpenter ants - thought to be a natural ‘bug spray’ to ward off parasites.
• The Lac Alaotra gentle lemur is the only primate to live it’s entire life above water
• 800 - the estimated number of Tapanuli orangutan in existence, our crew met nearly 1% of the population during a month trekking in Sumatra
• Over 60% of all primates are under threat and 75% of primate species have populations that are declining
• Over 180 rangers have died protecting Virunga National Park and its Mountain gorillas
• Since 2000, 95 primates have been fully described - it is an exciting time
• There are 111 species and subspecies of lemur, which live in Madagascar and nowhere else - so Madagascar is the world’s single highest major primate conservation priority 

Biogs

Mike Gunton
Executive Producer

Michael Gunton is the Creative Director of Factual and The Natural History Unit for BBC Studios. Within this role, Mike works as an executive producer on many BBC titles, acts as an ambassador for BBC Studios internationally, and is responsible for bringing new and pioneering stories about the natural world to global audiences.

Mike has worked on many critically acclaimed series including Galapagos, Yellowstone, Madagascar, Life, Africa, Shark, Attenborough And The Giant Dinosaur and Life Story, and speaks internationally at media and scientific gatherings as an ambassador for natural history filmmaking, the BBC and the natural world.

Mike’s most recent series include Planet Earth II and the ground-breaking animal behaviour series Dynasties. Mike is a fellow of the Royal Television Society.

Gavin Boyland
Series Producer

As an award-winning producer Gavin has a wealth of experience making wildlife shows for the BBC and international broadcasters, from filming mountain gorillas with Sigourney Weaver to chasing mammoths across Siberia. Gavin studied primates at Cambridge University before starting a career in television. Ring-tailed lemurs remain his favourite animal. His recent Series Producer credits include Animal Babies, Big Cats and Primates.

Related Web Links

• BBC Studios