TOLLYWOOD DON....: Great Migrations

Great Migrations

Move as millions, survive as one. That is the subtitle to the new seven-part television series from National Geographic called "Great Migrations". Animals great and small are on the move around the world, chasing resources in dangerous journeys that might take mere hours or span generations. To capture the images and video for the series, they spent two and a half years in the field, traveling 420,000 miles across 20 countries and all seven continents. The fine folks at National Geographic have been kind enough to share with us some images from "Great Migrations: Official Companion Book" below. Great Migrations premieres in the U.S. on Sunday, November 7 on the National Geographic Channel. (29 photos total)

Going to sea on the Antarctic Peninsula, Gentoo penguins line up and quickly dive in together.

A wildebeest herd stampedes across the dusty plains of Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. Every year, wildebeests travel some 1,800 miles across equatorial East Africa in a race toward rain and the green it engenders.

To the walrus, ice is life. An oxygen-breathing marine mammal, it relies on the ice as a place to rest, to give birth, to nurse and to migrate. And with global warming, the ice is disappearing. Their annual migration is becoming a race against time and distance, depth and disaster.

A zebra calf stays close to its mother for months, recognizing her by voice, smell and pattern of stripes.

Golden jellyfish of Palau receive their namesake color from algae-like, single-celled organisms named zooxanthellae, which live within jellyfish and provide it with the energy required for life. They follow the sun in a daily migration that feeds their passengers and ensures their own survival.

A male wandering albatross displays its 11-foot wingspan to a female on South Georgia Island. The courtship ritual renews their pair bond after months of roaming the Southern Ocean.

Bellowing elephant seal bulls - weighing up to four tons and as much as 15 feet long - are doing more than boasting. Their battles are often vicious, and opponents may be severely injured. The top winner becomes the colony's "beachmaster."

Spawning salmon dominate traffic in the Ozernaya River on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia.

Immense flocks of white pelicans funnel through the Mississippi Flyway every day during the birds' twice-yearly travels between wintering and breeding grounds.

A sperm whale pod with a large calf migrates offshore of the Azores Islands in the eastern Atlantic.

Bald eagles migrate along the Mississippi corridor in the spring, toward breeding grounds in the northern United States and Canada, finding plentiful food resources, and sometimes joined in feasting by common ravens.

White-eared kob race across the plains of Southern Sudan.

Elephant seals migrate to the Falklands, sub-Antarctic islands circled by relentless ocean winds and currents, to breed. The youngsters receive careful attention from their mothers.

Army ants move to an almost unfathomable instinct, their seething colonies of 500,000 to two million individuals so finely tuned that they operate as if they are the cells of a single organism.

A closer view of the head and mandibles of an Army ant. The workers' duties include carrying the colony's pre-adult pupae while migrating.

After wintering as far from the Falklands as South Africa, black-browed albatrosses form a colony of their own, and birds of a breeding pair groom each other's neck feathers. A pair's single chick may not survive.

It takes zebras anywhere from 10 to 20 days to cross the roughly 150-mile mosaic of savanna grassland and woodland that lies between the Okavanga River in the Kalahari desert and the brutal salt pans of the Makgadikgadi.

Off the coast of western Australia, small fish cluster around a whale shark, using it as shelter from predators.

Monarch butterflies clump by the millions on oyamel trees in Mexican forests. But before migrating northward in the spring, the butterflies drop from the trees and begin a giant mating spree.

A polar bear stands on sea ice. The ice is critical to its habitat, and is decreasing in the warming Arctic.

Mali elephants must travel in a perpetual migration across the arid Sahel region in search of food and water. Their yearly 300-mile trek is the longest known elephant migration. As the climate becomes more fickle and human demands on land and water increase, these desert nomads face an ever more uncertain fate.

A female Bornean orangutan carries her one-year-old offspring to safety. Orangutans are always after food. Their lives revolve around the search for it. Remarkably, they seem to memorize an internal guide that leads them back to trees just at the time they are in fruit.

During their weeklong migration, the red crabs of Christmas Island must climb down precipitous cliffs, where many fall and die before reaching their destination on the shore.

Plains zebras typically accompany the wildebeest - danger lurks if the big equines become separated from the herd.

An advancing white shark typically means doom for any large sea mammal it approaches, even for huge elephant seals off Guadalupe Island off Mexico's Pacific coast.

Rangeland fences are an omnipresent barrier to the pronghorn, which is not designed for leaping high. When it tries to squeeze under, it can be ensnared in a barbed wire death trap.