- Their habitat, Brazil’s Cerrado, is being destroyed by humans to create farmland
A she-wolf and two of her three cubs featured in last night’s Planet Earth III were found dead shortly after filming for the series wrapped.
The show’s filmmakers and researchers were the first to manage to film in the mammal’s cave in the Cerrado grasslands in Brazil.
However, it later emerged that two puppies and their mother Nhorinha had died after drowning in a ditch on nearby farmland, the Mirror reported.
The BBC One documentary showed how red wolves have lost half of their habitat to farmers who are burning the land to grow crops.
Other special features of these wolves include their diet of fruit and their particularly long legs.
A mother wolf and two of her three pups filmed in an episode of Planet Earth III have been found dead
The red-colored maned wolves have characteristic long legs and feed on fruit
But their habitat, the Brazilian Cerrado, is being destroyed faster than the Amazon rainforest relative to its size
Sir David Attenborough warned on the show that the loss of the Cerrado’s maned wolf population could mean the end of the entire ecosystem
The Cerrado is being destroyed at twice the rate of the Amazon rainforest relative to its size.
Planet Earth III producer and director Kiri Cashell said the deaths were not isolated incidents, as filmmakers discovered through tracking collars that several other people had been killed.
She added that the entire population of maned wolves in the Cerrado could be wiped out in just thirty years, a scenario that, as Sir David Attenborough explained on the program, could cause the entire ecosystem to collapse.
Conservationists remain hopeful that a solution can be found to save the habitat.