The Most Dangerous Lions in the Deadliest Battles | FULL EPISODE | Wildlife Documentary follows the lion, the elephant, the spotted hyena and the giraffe through the end of the dry season on the Savuti grassland of northern Botswana, where a pride of lions sleeps up to twenty hours a day and every other species pays for it, and then carries the same question into the ocean, from Monterey Bay in California to Seal Island in South Africa. Here, rank is measured in the hours you dare to close your eyes. Through cinematic footage and educational storytelling, this documentary measures the price of sleep for every animal that lives beside the lion. Free living wildebeest sleep only four and a half hours a day, and a single distant roar raises the time a herd spends on watch from about one percent to nearly thirty six. Elephants in Chobe sleep just two hours a day, mostly on their feet, and can stay awake for forty six hours while walking nearly nineteen miles. Spotted hyenas in the Maasai Mara pack almost all of their activity into the hours lions are least awake. And at the end of the dry season, when the zebra and wildebeest have left for Linyanti, the lions of Savuti turn to the only prey big enough to feed the whole pride: young elephants, taken on moonless nights, on average one every three days. What follows is the part almost no wildlife documentary shows. Angolan giraffes in Namibia allow themselves less than nine minutes of deep dreaming a night, while one sentinel neck stands guard against a lioness in the grass. In Monterey Bay, California sea lions sleep in floating rafts above a submarine canyon where killer whales rise unseen, and southern sea otters wrap themselves in kelp yet still carry the marks of white shark test bites. On Seal Island, 64,000 Cape fur seals sleep safely on bare rock, but every meal means passing a door of deep water at dawn, in the two hours when great white sharks strike most often. On land, others pay for the sleep of the strongest. At sea, every animal pays for its own. Epic Moments in This Documentary: A pride of lions lunging into the dust where a wildebeest herd stood a second earlier Elephants walking through the Savuti night on just two hours of sleep A clan of spotted hyenas pacing the calf at the back of the elephant line A lion pride closing in on a young elephant on a moonless night A lioness creeping toward resting giraffes guarded by one upright neck A lioness standing her ground inside a ring of spotted hyenas Killer whales rising from the Monterey canyon beneath a raft of sea lions A great white shark breaching at Seal Island as a fur seal pup twists away
