For the past 15 years, National Geographic photographer Joel Sartore has gone to any length to add new species to the Photo Ark...but he's never done this. In the first hour of the two-hour, ride-along special Photo Ark, we catch up with Joel in Brazil as he's crawling on the ground in order to be eye-level with the largest armadillo species on the planet: the giant armadillo. The unexpected part is when he's short on supplies and improvises an unconventional photo studio for the tank-like, 40-pound giant armadillo using...a walk-in shower. Joel's deep in the Amazon rainforest, the most biodiverse place in the world, to photograph a dazzling array of amazing creatures. He stops in on a federal wildlife confiscation center which rescues, rehabilitates, and releases victims of the illegal pet trade. It's here that he meets arguably the cutest grey woolly monkey in the world, although she shows clear signs of malnutrition and permanent physical deformations due to a poor diet as an infant. He also meets another primate here, the pied tamarin, found only in and around Manaus, Brazil, a jump-off point for all-points deeper into the jungle. Over the years this critically endangered animal has lost so much of its habitat to human development that it is now one of the top 25 most endangered primates in the world. Trading in the jungle heat for some high-altitude cool, Joel climbs to 12,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies armed with a camera and some emergency oxygen. He's gone up all this way to see about a 15-year old research study into an animal that some say resembles a potato with Mickey Mouse ears: the American pika. Researchers think the pika can serve as a canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change since it requires a very particular set of conditions for survival: the right amount of snow, the right temperatures, and a specific plant diet highly dependent on that snow and temperature.

Die Sendung wird ausgestrahlt am Montag, den 30.11.2020 um 05:45 Uhr auf National Geographic Wild.