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Why invertebrates?
Well, that's quite a big question.
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I mean, for a start,
there are enormous number of them.
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It's estimated that there are
200 million land invertebrates to every person.
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And, like,
there's 300,000 species of beetles alone,
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120,000 species of flies, you know,
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so there's an enormous variety to choose from.
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And if you think of all the things
that you can see around you quite easily,
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even in your own back garden
or when you go out for a walk,
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all the millipedes, the centipedes,
the beetles, the bugs, the flies,
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moths, butterflies, scorpions
and everybody's favorite, the spiders,
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you know, you've got a lot to choose from.
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But, oddly enough, I mean,
they've been largely ignored by filmmakers,
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wildlife filmmakers, up to now
partly because of the difficulty of filming them.
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You know, you're filming, often,
very, very small creatures.
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But quite recently, the advances in lenses,
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in the sort of cameras we can use and so on,
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it's just given us an opportunity
to get down into their world
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and see them, you know, at their level.
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And that is extremely exciting.
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The other thing is that, you know,
they have a fascinating range of behaviors.
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And this isn't just... exotic species.
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We filmed all over the world,
we filmed the best examples
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of different behavior and so forth
all over the world.
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But you can see an awful lot, again,
in your own patch.
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I mean, take an example, you go out
into the garden and there's a hover fly...
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seemingly staying in the same place and always
coming back to that little spot of sunlight
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by the fruit tree and you might wonder,
"What's it doing?"
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Well, you know, in one of the programmes,
in programme two, you'll find out what it is.
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I mean, it's a male hover fly,
it's holding a territory.
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It's having to, every now and again,zip off and chase rivals away.
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But it's all to do with mating, actually,
it's all to do with females,
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you know, coming by and seeing that this is
a strong male that's able to hold a spot.
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And, erm...
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And so if a female comes by,
they'll zip off and mate with her as well.
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But, you know, those sort of things,
they are things that everybody can see
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and we've chosen a lot of, you know,
home, UK, British examples,
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European examples as well as exotic ones
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so that it will hopefully give people
this nice insight into, you know, a world
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that they might, you know,
we all to a certain extent ignore.
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We tread on them and
they're in the undergrowth all the time
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but, you know...
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we only take notice of the obvious ones,
either the beautiful things like butterflies
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or the ones that buzz around us
and annoy us and sting us.
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But there's a lot more to choose from.
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Insects, invertebrates as a whole,
are important to humans.
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I know David Attenborough
in his last statement makes the point that
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if... all the vertebrate animals, you know,
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the mammals, the birds, ourselves, disappeared,
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it wouldn't make much difference to the world.
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In fact, probably the world might be
a darn sight better off.
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But if the insects disappeared...
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then we would be, for instance,
we'd be knee-high in dung
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because if you imagine all the beetles,
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not just the obvious dung beetles
on the plains of Africa,
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but all the burying beetles in this country
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or anywhere where there is dung,
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you have beetles that are burying it
and using it for their eggs.
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And so, you know,
they are great clearers-up of debris.
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And there's all the other ones
that chew leaf litter and so on
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and turn it into nice growing medium for plants.
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There's also, you know, another very obvious
important role that insects have to play,
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is pollination.
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You know, they evolved with the flowering plants,
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a lot of them, particularly the bees
and wasps and the flying insects.
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They have an enormous role to playin pollinating, you know, not just flowers
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but our crops and so on as well.
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So in many ways
they are very prominent and important.
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Our prime aim with this series
was to get right down there
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on the level of ants and other tiny, tiny creatures.
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Get the cameras right down beside them
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and that means actually getting the lenses,
you know, at their level.
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And I think it's in the lenses
that's been the great advance recently.
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We've got, sort of, much better depth of focus
so that you can see,
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you know, not just that tiny insect that might
only be a few millimeters long doing its thing,
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but you can see the background as well,
and that helps place it in its environment.
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Not create a sort of miniature world,
we're not trying to do that.
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We're trying to see them on their own scale.
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Pinhole lenses, another one we've used a lot.
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Tied to that is the cameras that we've used,
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even with film cameras, the film is a lot faster
nowadays, so you can film in lower light.
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But we have used video a lot as well
on this series,
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high-definition video,
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and even little MiniDV as well,
in awkward situations.
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And that, of course, is more light-sensitive
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so you don't have to pour all that light
onto your subjects
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and frazzle them, you know, with hot, bright light.
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So you can get a lot more behavior.
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Sometimes there is behavior, we found,
that is impossible to get with light at all.
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And so we've done a lot
with infrared cameras where you use,
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you know, an infrared light
that isn't visible to the insects,
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the creatures concerned.
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And then with infrared-sensitive cameras
recording to video,
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we've got, you know, some behavior...
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that people, even the biologists we're
working with, didn't think we would be able to get.
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For instance, I've just seen
in the other cutting room...
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a sequence of a velvet worm.
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It's a very primitive, early type of predator
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that came on land quite early onin the evolution of land invertebrates.
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And this thing goes along and it's blindbut it has these sort of antennae
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and it taps around looking for preyand very delicately, sort of,
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finds out where the prey is and then squirts...
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When it finds something it wants to overpower,
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it squirts this sort of sticky liquidout of hydraulic pipes on the front of its head.
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And it's a most amazing thing and nobody
has really ever managed to film that before.
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But with infrared the animal behaved,
you know, absolutely perfectly.
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There are lots of other examples.
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Another piece of equipment we've used is...
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a flexible endoscope
with a tiny lens on the end, about...
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about the diameter of a pencil.
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And that actually has got a chip.
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It's like a little camera, actually.
It's called a chip-in-the-tip camera.
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And it's on the end of this flexible linethat you can steer
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and so we've been able to go down burrows.
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There's a lovely sequence where we've gone...
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We've actually shown David Attenboroughgoing down a burrow with this thing,
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steering it down to seewhether there's a scorpion in there.
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We've done another sequencewhere a trapdoor spider...
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We've been able to, sort of, drill a holeinto its nest from the side,
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put this little camera in, steer it looking upwards,
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and then you can see the trapdoor spidergoing out of its trapdoor to grab something.
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Just gives you a different angle on things
that you wouldn't otherwise be able to get.
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And I suppose the final thing
which we've used a lot
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is ultra high-speed video cameras...
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which have advanced enormously of late.
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People might have seen them
in cricket coverage and tennis
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where you can analyze
the way the ball is spinning.
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Well, it's the same sort of cameras
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and we've been using the most up-to-date ones.
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And, of course,
for the flight programme in particular,
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this has meant that we've been able to analyze
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and look at the way dragonflies fly,
the way, you know...
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ordinary houseflies, bluebottles,
take off and so forth.
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And you see it in, you know,
slowed down a thousand times or so on.
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And it really has been a revelation
what this camera can show.
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The thing about it is that it records continuously.
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You can press it
at the moment the action happens
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and it will record about eight seconds back.
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So it's much easier to get your shot
than with film cameras
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where you had to sort of wait till the thing
was about to happen and press the start button...
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you know, at the moment,
trying to anticipate this takeoff.
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So that's been interesting.
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Arachnophobia, yes, that is a thing
that slightly worried us with this series
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because we don't want arachnophobics,
people who are scared stiff of spiders,
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not to watch.
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And one of the things we've done is,
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we've called that particular programme
that contains a lot of spiders,
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we've purposely gone for The Story of Silk
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rather than call it a programme about spiders.
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And I know that might sound a bit subtle
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but the fact is that silk is
a unique invertebrate invention.
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You know, caterpillars use it, all sorts of other...
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invertebrates other than spiders
use it for various things.
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And so we've started off
with non-spider use of silk.
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And then people get used to that,
and then we've gone into the fact that,
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you know, of all the invertebrates,
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spiders have brought the use of silk
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to its absolute, you know, extremes.
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And the different kinds of silkand the way they use it is just marvelous.
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But we had one of our production coordinators
on the team
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who was really not happy about spiders at all...
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and didn't go on many trips.
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I don't think she went on a single trip
that had spiders.
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She managed to sort of avoid those shoots,
went on a lot of others.
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But when she saw the film
that includes all the spiders,
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she said at the end of it, she said,
"You know, that has absolutely cured me.
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"I think they are so clever, so beautiful,
so fascinating...
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"that, you know, it's totally changed my mind."
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And when you see a female wolf spider,
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again, another thing
that you can see in your own garden...
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you know, laying down an immaculate silk pad
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with sort of loopy bits of soft silk...
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ready to take her eggs,
which she then lays on this,
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and then delicately unpicking it around
and folding them up
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into this wonderful and waterproof...
She puts waterproof silk on the outside
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and then she carries it around with her.
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When you're seeing that filmed in detail,
you think, "Wow!
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"You know, this is fascinating and beautiful
and not too scary."
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I think, you know, the actual...
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The biggest arachnophobe
that we met during the filming
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was an Australian spider research biologist,
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believe it or not,
who had been absolutely petrified of...
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particularly, redback spiders.
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As you know, a lot of Australian spiders
are pretty venomous and you need to avoid them.
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But redback spiders are the ones
that come into people's homes
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and they like, sort of, hard surfaces,
like toilets and things like that.
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And as a child,
he'd had awful experiences with these things.
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I think he had been bitten and nearly died,
'cause they can kill a child.
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Anyway, so he decided
he wanted to learn more about them
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and he's now the world's expert on these things.
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And, you know,
he's still a little bit scared of them,
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but he's also in awe of them.
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And again, we've done a wonderful sequence
showing how these redback spiders
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use a particularly springy silk which they...
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They pull down a thread, anchor it to, you know,
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say, if they're under a chair,they'd anchor it to the floor.
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And do that, make a series of linesand then if anything stumbles into it,
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like an ant,
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there's a sticky bit on the bottom,the ant gets caught
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and there's a weak, weak little joint in the silk.
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And because it's under tension,once the ant gets caught,
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it just goes "ping" and shoots up towhere the spider is waiting to grab it.
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And that is, you know, again,
another great thing to behold.
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And this arachnophobe is the guy who's worked
out how they do all this and helped us film it.
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New behavior.
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I think that has been a thing
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that has been a real eye-opener
for all of the team working on this series.
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Because, of all the creatures
that you could hope to look at,
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I think it is the invertebrates
that are still being studied,
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still being...
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I mean, new species are being found,
but also new behaviors all the time.
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And, erm...
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What we found is that, you know, because of this,
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the biologists that work on them
and are finding things out all the time,
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were very keen for, you know,
to tell us their stories
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and get us involved and get us filming their stuff.
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I mean, for instance, take an example,
we were in Costa Rica...
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filming various sequences, mostly during the day,
at a research station called La Selva...
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in the rainforest.
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The routine is that most of the biologists,
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they're studying all sorts of things,
mammals, birds and insects,
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but everybody goes out in the day
and does their research and gets filthy
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with, you know, mud and it rains
and so on and so forth.
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Then at the end of the day,
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you come back, have a shower
and everybody sort of smartens up
225
00:17:09,161 --> 00:17:14,224
and goes into the communal
sort of dining room for a meal
226
00:17:14,333 --> 00:17:16,858
and people chat about
what they've seen and so on.
227
00:17:16,969 --> 00:17:18,903
And for filmmakers like ourselves
228
00:17:19,004 --> 00:17:23,907
it's a brilliant place
to pick up ideas and new information.
229
00:17:24,376 --> 00:17:29,143
And there was this one guy
who went right against this pattern.
230
00:17:29,248 --> 00:17:35,619
He was always sitting there at supper
with all his dirty old field clothes on
231
00:17:35,721 --> 00:17:38,349
and his notebook and his bag
232
00:17:38,457 --> 00:17:41,551
and a big, powerful head spotlight.
233
00:17:41,927 --> 00:17:45,385
And we sat with him one time
and he turned out to be...
234
00:17:47,566 --> 00:17:53,061
a very enthusiastic Harvard professor
called Piotr Naskrecki.
235
00:17:53,172 --> 00:17:54,901
And, erm...
236
00:17:55,007 --> 00:17:58,443
And he said to us...
You know, we told him what we were doing
237
00:17:58,544 --> 00:18:03,038
and he said, "God, you wanna come out
at night with me. That's where the action is."
238
00:18:04,483 --> 00:18:08,544
So he persuaded us to go out with him,
and true to his word,
239
00:18:08,654 --> 00:18:12,146
I mean, under every leaf and on every tree,
240
00:18:12,257 --> 00:18:17,923
there was something he wanted to show us
that, you know, was sort of different.
241
00:18:18,063 --> 00:18:22,432
But there was one thing that he'd just discovered
which he showed us and that was...
242
00:18:23,469 --> 00:18:29,237
It's a sort of...
It's called a lantern bug and it taps...
243
00:18:29,341 --> 00:18:34,108
It's quite big, about that size,
and it taps into the tree bark
244
00:18:34,213 --> 00:18:36,340
and he found one to show us.
245
00:18:36,448 --> 00:18:40,009
It has a lot of excess sugar
246
00:18:40,119 --> 00:18:44,556
because it's sort of into the sapand it takes the proteins and things it needs,
247
00:18:44,656 --> 00:18:46,283
but the excess sugar...
248
00:18:47,025 --> 00:18:49,391
it squirts it out and there's a...
249
00:18:49,495 --> 00:18:53,261
There's a moth that comes in behind,that you can see here now,
250
00:18:53,365 --> 00:18:58,393
that actually puts its proboscisinto the stream of droplets
251
00:18:58,504 --> 00:19:01,996
that the thing is exuding
252
00:19:02,107 --> 00:19:03,836
and then sucks it up.
253
00:19:03,942 --> 00:19:07,878
And this saves the mothfrom flying around all night
254
00:19:07,980 --> 00:19:12,246
to find flowers to feed from.
255
00:19:13,085 --> 00:19:15,576
You know, it's totally new behavior.
256
00:19:16,355 --> 00:19:20,519
Other examples, well, there's a lovely
British example, actually, of brand-new research.
257
00:19:20,626 --> 00:19:22,617
There's a quite well-known thing
258
00:19:22,895 --> 00:19:27,559
where the blue butterfly has a relationship
with a certain type of ant.
259
00:19:27,666 --> 00:19:32,399
You find these in the Dorset heathland
and places like that.
260
00:19:34,173 --> 00:19:36,266
Somehow or other, there's been a...
261
00:19:36,375 --> 00:19:41,312
The blue butterflies evolved a process
whereby its caterpillar...
262
00:19:42,247 --> 00:19:46,479
is taken down by the ants into the ants' nest...
263
00:19:47,219 --> 00:19:51,178
and fed as if it was their own.
264
00:19:51,290 --> 00:19:55,522
I mean, the caterpillar's enormous
and the ant's own larvae are tiny,
265
00:19:55,627 --> 00:20:02,396
but somehow or other, the butterfly caterpillar
has the right sort of pheromones,
266
00:20:02,501 --> 00:20:07,495
the right chemical smells
to convince the ants that it's one of theirs
267
00:20:07,606 --> 00:20:11,542
and should be fed and nurtured
until it sort of grows up
268
00:20:11,643 --> 00:20:16,376
and turns into a pupa and then a butterfly.
269
00:20:16,648 --> 00:20:20,084
That's fine. That's quite well-known.
We filmed all that.
270
00:20:20,185 --> 00:20:24,952
But there was one biologist who's discovered
that there's a parasitic wasp
271
00:20:25,057 --> 00:20:29,426
that somehow or other has also evolved a way of...
272
00:20:29,528 --> 00:20:34,727
finding these caterpillars in the wasp's nest...
273
00:20:35,434 --> 00:20:37,732
In the ants' nest, sorry.
274
00:20:38,270 --> 00:20:43,469
And... goes down the ants' nest and lays its eggs
275
00:20:43,575 --> 00:20:48,103
in the blue butterfly caterpillar.
In other words, it parasitizes them.
276
00:20:48,213 --> 00:20:52,274
Normally, you'd expect the ants
to swarm all over it and chase it out
277
00:20:52,384 --> 00:20:54,579
'cause they're very protective of their nests.
278
00:20:54,686 --> 00:21:00,090
But somehow or other,
the wasp as well has got a chemical smell
279
00:21:00,192 --> 00:21:03,320
that makes the ants accept it.
280
00:21:03,629 --> 00:21:08,896
And so it can go down there,
lay its eggs in the blue butterfly caterpillar
281
00:21:09,001 --> 00:21:13,267
and then, when that turns into a cocoon,
282
00:21:13,372 --> 00:21:17,570
instead of a butterfly coming out,
of course, baby wasps come out.
283
00:21:17,676 --> 00:21:22,670
So it's one of these incredible
sort of partnerships that...
284
00:21:23,215 --> 00:21:29,211
that, you know, is almost unbelievable
and yet is there to film
285
00:21:29,321 --> 00:21:32,552
and that's the sort of thing we've been doing.
286
00:21:33,492 --> 00:21:39,522
It's always challenging
to film in a tropical rainforest
287
00:21:39,631 --> 00:21:42,099
because of the humidity,
288
00:21:42,200 --> 00:21:46,193
the fact that
you've just got set up and it pours with rain
289
00:21:46,305 --> 00:21:48,136
and all that sort of stuff.
290
00:21:48,640 --> 00:21:54,442
But that's sort of well-known.
It comes with the job, as it were.
291
00:21:55,247 --> 00:22:00,082
But I think
probably the most challenging environment
292
00:22:00,218 --> 00:22:04,177
that any sequence was filmed in in this series
293
00:22:04,289 --> 00:22:08,453
was a bat cave in Venezuela
294
00:22:08,560 --> 00:22:12,360
that was not only miles from anywhere,
295
00:22:12,464 --> 00:22:14,523
but was...
296
00:22:14,633 --> 00:22:18,228
Well, A, full of bats. B, full of bat guano,
297
00:22:18,337 --> 00:22:21,636
like mountains of the stuff on the floor...
298
00:22:23,108 --> 00:22:26,134
was very deep into the mountain
299
00:22:26,244 --> 00:22:31,307
and so, you know, you had to go a long way in
to get to where the action
300
00:22:31,416 --> 00:22:34,146
that I'm about to tell you about happens.
301
00:22:35,120 --> 00:22:37,987
The whole of the floor, because of the bat guano,
302
00:22:38,090 --> 00:22:41,150
was absolutely crawling
with enormous cockroaches,
303
00:22:41,259 --> 00:22:46,162
with beetles, with all sorts of things
that feed or live in the guano.
304
00:22:47,599 --> 00:22:52,935
And the action that we wanted to film
happens at night,
305
00:22:53,038 --> 00:22:58,032
so you've got, you know, dark cave,
dark night, stumbling around in bat guano...
306
00:22:58,710 --> 00:23:01,110
millions of bats flying overhead
307
00:23:01,213 --> 00:23:07,516
and what we went to film was the biggest
centipede that anybody could imagine.
308
00:23:07,619 --> 00:23:09,985
I mean, it's about this long.
309
00:23:10,689 --> 00:23:13,123
It's sort of the world's biggest centipede.
310
00:23:13,225 --> 00:23:17,389
It's extremely venomous
and extremely aggressive.
311
00:23:17,963 --> 00:23:21,524
And you've really got to keep
your eyes about you...
312
00:23:22,467 --> 00:23:26,563
to make sure you don't get bitten by this thing.
313
00:23:27,038 --> 00:23:32,908
And Tim Green, our assistant producer
who undertook to do this filming,
314
00:23:33,011 --> 00:23:35,673
together with the cameraman Rod Clark,
315
00:23:35,947 --> 00:23:39,144
they had to spend about 10 nights in this cave
316
00:23:39,251 --> 00:23:42,118
trying to film with infrared again,
317
00:23:42,220 --> 00:23:44,586
the activities of this giant centipede.
318
00:23:44,689 --> 00:23:49,649
Because it had been told to usin an unpublished paper as yet,
319
00:23:49,761 --> 00:23:55,324
that these centipedesactually caught bats in midair.
320
00:23:55,434 --> 00:24:01,236
In other words, they hung on the roof of the caveby their back legs
321
00:24:01,339 --> 00:24:05,935
and grabbed bats that came past,particularly baby ones,
322
00:24:06,044 --> 00:24:08,535
and then fed on them.
323
00:24:10,248 --> 00:24:14,651
They did, in the end, two trips to this cave
324
00:24:14,920 --> 00:24:18,014
and they did, in the end, film it but it was...
325
00:24:18,123 --> 00:24:22,082
I mean, Tim Green says,
"I never wanna go back there again,"
326
00:24:22,194 --> 00:24:24,185
but it made a wonderful sequence.
327
00:24:24,963 --> 00:24:30,128
Another quite uncomfortable environment
to film a sequence in
328
00:24:30,235 --> 00:24:35,002
was in Malaysia, where for programme five,
329
00:24:35,106 --> 00:24:39,099
which is largely about ants and bees and wasps...
330
00:24:40,979 --> 00:24:45,245
we wanted to do a sequence about giant bees.
331
00:24:45,484 --> 00:24:51,013
These make nests in the top ofthe very tallest jungle trees,
332
00:24:51,122 --> 00:24:52,646
on the surface.
333
00:24:52,757 --> 00:24:57,319
But they are extremely large
and very aggressive and have...
334
00:24:57,429 --> 00:25:03,527
You know, if more than two or three sting you,
you are in really big trouble.
335
00:25:04,202 --> 00:25:06,636
So everybody had to wear...
336
00:25:08,607 --> 00:25:14,568
complete, you know, bee suits
which look a bit ridiculous but you need to do it.
337
00:25:14,679 --> 00:25:18,115
Crew and David Attenborough,
everyone, everybody.
338
00:25:18,216 --> 00:25:22,983
But we needed
to get David Attenborough up the tree
339
00:25:23,088 --> 00:25:27,491
to describe the behavior of these things.
340
00:25:27,959 --> 00:25:32,362
So Steven Dunleavy employed a couple of guys
341
00:25:32,464 --> 00:25:37,595
that the unit use a lot
for doing, you know, stuff up in the canopy.
342
00:25:37,936 --> 00:25:40,700
A rope system to get David up there.
343
00:25:42,641 --> 00:25:46,042
And the sequence was done
344
00:25:46,144 --> 00:25:50,706
and a few people did get stungbut, luckily, not too badly.
345
00:25:50,982 --> 00:25:54,577
But that was quite an awkward
sort of sequence to do,
346
00:25:54,686 --> 00:25:58,247
just because of
the equipment and everything needed,
347
00:25:58,356 --> 00:26:02,850
but also the danger
from disturbing these giant bees.
348
00:26:03,695 --> 00:26:08,428
There was one particular thing
for the flight programme, actually.
349
00:26:08,533 --> 00:26:13,129
It's called "oliarchaes".
It's a strange sort of lacewing moth
350
00:26:13,238 --> 00:26:17,038
that lives in Arizona
351
00:26:17,142 --> 00:26:21,203
in a very remote part called the Black Mountains.
352
00:26:22,080 --> 00:26:27,541
Miles from anywhere. It's about a, sort of,
six-hour, four-wheel drive journey.
353
00:26:28,053 --> 00:26:29,611
And, erm...
354
00:26:31,156 --> 00:26:35,320
the scientist who'd sort of seen
this happening said that
355
00:26:35,427 --> 00:26:42,094
there is an absolutely spectacular emergence
of millions of these all together,
356
00:26:42,200 --> 00:26:45,363
like, over two mornings.
357
00:26:46,738 --> 00:26:51,402
But it only happens if the rain,
several months beforehand,
358
00:26:51,509 --> 00:26:58,005
has triggered the larvae
to go into their final stage
359
00:26:58,116 --> 00:27:02,143
to get their wings and then disperse.
360
00:27:02,253 --> 00:27:04,949
And we tried...
361
00:27:05,056 --> 00:27:10,187
We camped out there
with the cameraman and so on
362
00:27:10,295 --> 00:27:14,527
for two lots of two weeks at a time
363
00:27:14,633 --> 00:27:17,295
with everybody thinking it was about to happen.
364
00:27:17,402 --> 00:27:21,065
And it never did!
So it was a big, big disappointment,
365
00:27:21,172 --> 00:27:26,269
this sort of spectacular happening
never got down on film.
366
00:27:26,378 --> 00:27:29,074
And never actually happened to my knowledge.
367
00:27:29,314 --> 00:27:32,078
So that was a downer.
368
00:27:32,183 --> 00:27:37,348
There was one or two, you know,
other things that we tried for and didn't get.
369
00:27:37,455 --> 00:27:40,151
There was a beetle...
370
00:27:40,258 --> 00:27:43,591
The biggest beetle in the world
is called the Titan beetle...
371
00:27:44,996 --> 00:27:48,488
and what we wanted to find...
372
00:27:49,067 --> 00:27:54,437
We found the beetle and David could describe it,but it must have a larva,
373
00:27:54,539 --> 00:27:57,531
as he describes, that is twice as big as that.
374
00:27:57,676 --> 00:28:01,578
So the biggest of these beetles
is about seven or eight inches long
375
00:28:01,680 --> 00:28:04,308
and the larva is absolutely enormous.
376
00:28:04,416 --> 00:28:08,512
Nobody has ever found them
and we did want to find that.
377
00:28:08,620 --> 00:28:12,920
We had two goes at it but didn't find it,
378
00:28:13,024 --> 00:28:17,586
so we had to make do just with the beetle itself,
379
00:28:17,696 --> 00:28:20,392
which is still, you know, spectacular.
380
00:28:24,069 --> 00:28:29,132
Who'd want to handle that?
David's very good at handling beetles.
381
00:28:29,240 --> 00:28:33,973
Very vicious.
Those jaws can actually snap through a pencil
382
00:28:34,079 --> 00:28:36,877
and they'd certainly do you
a lot of damage in your finger.
383
00:28:37,515 --> 00:28:41,679
One of the things we really wanted to do
in this series...
384
00:28:43,088 --> 00:28:47,991
is actually change people's perception of insects
385
00:28:48,093 --> 00:28:50,027
and other invertebrates.
386
00:28:50,662 --> 00:28:55,497
Because there is this feeling that they are
creepy, crawly and nasty and so forth.
387
00:28:55,633 --> 00:29:00,161
And I think that
some of the sequences we've filmed,
388
00:29:00,271 --> 00:29:05,436
I mean, we hope that people will see that,
you know, not only is the behavior fascinating,
389
00:29:05,543 --> 00:29:10,003
but they are actually, really,
you know, very beautiful at times.
390
00:29:10,115 --> 00:29:12,049
Highly colored.
391
00:29:13,351 --> 00:29:17,981
And for instance, I mean, here's a cicada
392
00:29:18,089 --> 00:29:21,957
coming out in time-lapse
and developing its wings.
393
00:29:23,128 --> 00:29:25,096
These...
394
00:29:25,196 --> 00:29:30,031
These cicadas come out only every 17 years.
395
00:29:30,135 --> 00:29:32,365
Nobody knows how they time that,
396
00:29:32,470 --> 00:29:38,409
but they are called 17-year periodic cicadas.
397
00:29:38,510 --> 00:29:41,673
Those are their empty shells on the screen now.
398
00:29:43,181 --> 00:29:47,379
It is a spectacle that is just amazing.
399
00:29:49,187 --> 00:29:54,523
You know, by timing, getting our timing right,
getting there at the right time,
400
00:29:54,626 --> 00:29:59,689
I think, with this cicada sequence
and lots of other sequences,
401
00:29:59,964 --> 00:30:02,626
we will show people, I hope,
402
00:30:02,734 --> 00:30:08,502
that insects can be, you know,
very beautiful, very fascinating
403
00:30:08,606 --> 00:30:13,339
and well worth the watch, I hope.
38127
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