Urban Scavengers: How Hidden Wildlife Keeps Our Cities Alive (Documentary, 2019)

Nature's Cleanup Crew tells the story of the busy scavengers who live among us in our cities, recycling the mountains of waste our consumer society leaves behind. To us, it's garbage. To them, it's dinner. With the help of thoughtful and passionate scientists who have come to understand and love them, we find out what makes scavengers tick. We debunk myths about them. We ask... What adaptations have they evolved to do their job? What benefits do they provide humanity? How can we humans work with them, so that they can do their job even better? On Broadway in Manhattan, we see the tourist crowds from the ants' point of view, as a team of young entomologists discover how important they are to keep the streets clean. In Berlin, we discover how scavenging foxes have adapted to survive in an urban environment – something they've had to do because they have nowhere else to go. In Toronto we hunt for the elusive opossum – the shyest scavenger of all – to find out how they help to make our cities healthier. In Quebec City we meet a brilliant scientist who has identified extremophile bacteria with the power to neutralize carcinogenic waste oil. In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia we track the city's teaming population of vultures to find out how they protect people from deadly disease. By the end, we may not see vultures, ants, opossums, foxes and the rest of nature's cleanup crew as beautiful creatures the way some scientists do. But we might be more willing to give them the respect they deserve. ------- Chapters ▷ 00:00 - Introduction ▷ 01:28 - Ants of New York - The City's Secret Workforce ▷ 03:26 - Pavement Ants vs. Rats - Who Eats More Trash? ▷ 06:22 - Ant Empires - Queens, Workers & Life Underground ▷ 11:06 - Opossums of Toronot - Misunderstood Scavengers ▷ 13:30 - Night Shift - Skunks, Raccoons & Opossums Clean Up ▷ 15:55 - Tick-Eaters & Super Moms - Opossum Superpowers ▷ 18:22 - Smarter Than They Look - Opossum Intelligence Test ▷ 20:12 - Back to the Wild - Releasing Young Opossums ▷ 22:42 - Berlin's Foxes - Urban Predators on Clean-Up Duty ▷ 26:27 - Fox Tracking - City Survival, Dens & Dangers ▷ 30:49 - Micro Cleanup Crew - Bacteria That Eat Oil ▷ 34:31 - From Lab to Field - Enzymes Clean a Toxic Site ▷ 37:23 - Vultures - Nature's Most Important Scavengers ▷ 41:22 - Poisoned Skies - The Global Vulture Crisis ▷ 47:24 - Saving Vultures & Rethinking Nature's Cleanup Crew ▷ 51:24 - Credits #documentary #animals #wildlife #nature #ants #urbanwildlife #cleanup #biodiversity #ecosystem #animalbehavior #animalplanet ------- Subscribe to wocomoWILDLIFE: https://goo.gl/L5puvQ Follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wocomo ------- Original title: Nature's Cleanup Crew A film by Robert Lang © 2019, Licensed by Albatross ------- Videos about animals, aquatic life and nature: wocomoWILDLIFE offers high-quality entertainment. The films on our channel are produced by leading production companies. Check out our other channels to watch high quality documentaries: ▷ wocomoHUMANITY: https://www.youtube.com/@wocomoHUMANITY ▷ wocomoDOCS: https://www.youtube.com/@wocomodocs ▷ wocomoHISTORY: https://www.youtube.com/@wocomoHISTORY ▷ wocomoTRAVEL: https://www.youtube.com/@wocomoTRAVEL ▷ wocomoCOOK: https://www.youtube.com/@wocomocook WocomoWILDLIFE is part of the Wocomo channel network by NIKITA VENTURES. Wocomo - wonderful content in motion.