It is a scene that will make every parent shudder and fuel the generation wars debate.
David Attenborough’s new series, Parenthood, features sinister behaviour that has not been captured by TV cameras before of a 1,000-strong pack of young African social spiders hunting prey in a game of “grandmother’s footsteps” during which they freeze in unison like musical statues then eat all their mothers and elderly relatives alive.
Attenborough was both “delighted and horrified” by the groundbreaking footage when he narrated it, according to the series producer and director, Jeff Wilson. Wilson, who has worked with the broadcaster for years, said he had “never heard Sir David deliver a sequence as good as that … it sort of brings a lump to your throat … he’s the master at delivery”.
The combination of Attenborough’s words, atmospheric music by the Mulan and Ted Lasso composer Tom Howe (which “adds to the whole horror”) and painstaking filming to capture the spiders in their nest, is “probably one of the best” sequences Wilson said he had worked on in 30 years of film-making, but will also chill parents “to the bone”.
He joked: “There will not be a parent of the land who won’t turn up to school pickup without snacks ever again!”
The spiderling matricide scene is likely to spark debate among parents about the sacrifices they make for their offspring; scientists think the ageing mother spiders deliberately make similar vibrations to those of insects caught in a web so their children prey on their decaying bodies to ensure the youngsters’ survival.
The footage may also become a breakout moment in the way Planet Earth II’s “iguana v snakes” did and provoke discussion about the generation wars: the spiderlings eating all their elderly relatives so only the younger generation remains in the nest is a situation that some millennials keen to get on the property ladder may take note of.
Wilson said: “It makes one feel quite sort of chilled to the bone that you know that your own young could do that. It’s an extraordinary behaviour [but] when you step away from it and from the horror of it, it sort of makes sense.”
Filmed over three years on six continents in conjunction with scientists, the five-part Parenthood is the first BBC natural history series about parenting and also looks at how animals are adapting to ensure their children can survive in the face of climate breakdown.
That affected the producer Silverback Films’ shooting plans. “Some of the things that we set out to film were extremely difficult to pin down, simply because the climate is changing around all of our locations and the behaviours that you would normally expect at certain times of year are changing,” Wilson said.
The “fieldcraft” skill required by Silverback’s camera crews was immense due to the “intimate, delicate relationship between parent and offspring”, which meant ensuring the animals were not disturbed.
New methods of filming were used – such as military-grade, infrared cameras mounted on gimbals on off-road vehicles – to enable filming of hippos being chased by lions at night.
Wilson thinks such fieldcraft means artificial intelligence will never replicate the “serendipity” of natural history TV: “There are things that happen in the natural world, whatever behaviour you’re going to film, that outweigh any scripting process or anything that one could design, you know, through AI or through a computer.
“There is more magic out there than anybody understands or even believes in. As a good film-maker, you have to build time in for that magic to be part of your narrative.”