inside the mud ring panic and leap out of the water to escape the trap, straight into the waiting mouths of the pod. In Kenya's Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, three cheetah brothers have learned to take on prey many times their own size. They are filmed bringing down an ostrich, but also hunt zebra, eland and oryx. A film crew travelled to the Falkland Islands to follow up reports of an orca that had learned to take elephant seal pups from a nursery pool. On the Indonesian island of Rinca, the first footage of Komodo dragons hunting a water buffalo corroborated new scientific evidence suggesting the dragons used venom to kill their prey. Other sequences had previously proved too difficult to film. The humpback whale heat run has been dubbed "the biggest battle on Earth", but the whales move so fast that underwater cameras struggle to keep up. The Life crew used cameras mounted on helicopters and boats along with a team of free-divers to follow the action. The biggest filming challenge was to show a year in the life of an oak woodland using timelapse photography. After capturing real-world footage of a Devon wood, the crew rebuilt the entire scene in a studio in Exeter and digitally superimposed 96 separate layers of footage to create the final one-minute sequence. The whole project took two years. Super high-speed cameras capable of shooting up to 8,000 frames per second were used to slow down dramatic action. For the first time, these were used underwater to reveal the hunting behaviour of sailfish. They were also used to show 'Jesus Christ lizards' running on water, the courtship flight of the marvellous spatuletail and flying fish leaving the water. The first footage showing Antarctic killer whales hunting a crabeater seal, but the seal survived. The pebble toad's strange escape method had been caught on tape for the first time. Broadcast Life debuted on British television on 12 October 2009, with a standard definition broadcast on BBC One and a high-definition simulcast on BBC HD. The series was sold to international broadcasters by the BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, and marketed under the BBC Earth brand used for all BBC-produced natural history content. The global success of Life was noted as one of the key factors behind BBC Worldwide's record profits in 2010. The series received its North American premiere on Discovery Channel Canada on 15