British television naturalist David Attenborough joined Instagram on Thursday at the age of 94, gaining 3 million followers in just one day.
“I am making this move and exploring this new way of communication for me because, as we all know, the world is in trouble,” he said in his first video message that attracted over 12 million views and 40,000 comments.
“Continents are on fire. Glaciers are melting. Coral reefs are dying. Fish are disappearing from our oceans. The list goes on and on,” said the broadcaster, who has enjoyed a 60-year career chronicling the natural world for audiences.
Attenborough joined the social media site, which is owned by Facebook, ahead of the release of his latest film “A Life On Our Planet” on Netflix from October 4.
The Instagram account will be managed by the documentary’s makers and host further video messages from Attenborough in the coming weeks, they said in a message posted on the site.
“Join me, or as we used to say in those early days of radio, stay tuned,” he added as he concluded his first post.
Earlier this month, he gave a severe warning on the need for humanity to safeguard species from mass extinction for the sake of humankind’s own survival in a one-hour film ‘Extinction: The Facts’.
It aired on the BBC in Britain in the same week as international experts warned in a report that global animal, bird and fish populations have declined by almost seventy percent in less than 50 years due to humans’ extreme over-consumption.
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