Heartbreak as adorable Planet Earth III wolf and two pups drown shortly after being filmed for latest episode of BBC documentary
- Their habitat, the Cerrado in Brazil, is being destroyed by humans for agricultural land
A wolf and two of her three cubs, who appeared on Planet Earth III last night, were found dead shortly after filming for the series wrapped.
In a first, the show’s filmmakers and researchers managed to film inside the mammals’ den in Brazil’s Cerrado grassland.
But two puppies and their mother Nhorinha were later found to have died after drowning in a ditch on nearby farmland, the report said. Mirror.
The BBC One documentary showed how the red-coloured wolves have lost half their habitat to farmers who burn the land to grow crops.
One of the other distinguishing features of these wolves is their diet of fruit and particularly long legs.
A mother wolf and two of her three pups, filmed in an episode of Planet Earth III, have been found dead
The red-colored maned wolves have distinctive long legs and a diet of fruit
But their habitat, the Cerrado in Brazil, is being destroyed faster than the Amazon rainforest relative to its size
Sir David Attenborough warned in the program that the loss of the Cerrado’s maned wolf population could spell the end of the entire ecosystem
The Cerrado is being destroyed at twice the rate of the Amazon rainforest relative to its size.
Planet Earth III producer and director Kiri Cashell said the deaths were not isolated incidents, as filmmakers discovered through tracking collars that several others had died.
She added that the entire population of maned wolves in the Cerrado could be wiped out in just 30 years, a scenario Sir David Attenborough explained in the program could cause the entire ecosystem to collapse.
Conservationists remain hopeful that a solution can be found to save the habitat.