Andrew Peach

part of a national park on the banks of the Luangwa River.

Here for five years, we've been following the remarkable story of four rival families.

Matt Becker is chief executive of the Zambia Carnivore Programme in Nsefu.

He's been telling my colleague Nick Robinson about the value of studying animals over a long period like five years.

These animals are really complex.

They're the most social of all the carnivores.

And they're highly intelligent, and they're also highly interactive, as anyone who watches the program will see.

And so studying them for that long was basically what was required to capture these dynamics.

And also the BBC Natural History Unit was able to plug into our longer-term studies that go almost two decades now, studying these individuals that were featured in the films and

but also their great-grandparents and sisters and brothers and parents.

And so long lineages stemming from a long-term study that was ongoing and joined forces with the BBC to produce this.

It's fascinating hearing you talk in that language, talking of them as families, grandparents, all the rest of it.

But these families' fate, these different species, they are interlinked intimately, aren't they?

Yes, they are.

I think while they're very diverse, as you'll see in the show, everything about them evolved with competition between each other.

So lions, hyenas, leopards, wild dogs, their behavior, their diet, their activities, everything about them is to coexist and successfully compete.

We tend to focus, and inevitably, I guess, documentaries focus on the predators rather than the prey, but they're a pretty crucial part of this story.

Absolutely.

Predators, they are the top, we call them apex predators in ecosystems.

So they have an inordinate influence, important to understand them.