Wild Caribbean reef fish anywhere in the Caribbean. The final island to be featured is Trinidad, cut off from South America by rising sea levels 2,000 years ago. Its island fauna include many mainland species such as red howler monkeys, capuchins and scarlet ibis. Coral reefs, which thrive in the warm, shallow waters around Caribbean Islands, are the subject of the second programme. Hard corals are the reef-builders, and grow their tough external skeletons by extracting nutrients from algae growing within them. Time-lapse footage shows coral polyps emerging at night to trap drifting plankton. Marine life featured includes Caribbean reef squid, octopus
Mammals of the Caribbean connecting South America with one or more off-shelf islands). Colonization of a series of islands can occur either by an iterative rafting process ("island-hopping"), or by colonization of a large ancestral island which is then subdivided by into smaller islands by subsequent geologic or sea level changes (island-island vicariance). The restricted, unbalanced nature of the Caribbean mammal fauna implies that rafting was part of the overall process. This is consistent with the fact that megalonychid sloths, platyrrhine monkeys and caviomorph rodents have all shown a capacity for this type of dispersal (in their colonization of North America from South America