Original subtitles

We're used to seeing Britain in a certain way.

The big stuff.

But there's a much smaller Britain right under our noses.

From a simple grain of sand

to some of the most complex designs evolved by nature.

It's a fascinating, beautiful place

and is essential to all life on our planet.

I'm George McGavin, a biologist,

and I want to take you on a journey round Britain,

to show you this secret world.

To travel to the heart of this tiny kingdom full of wonder

and to take a close look at its inhabitants.

They're even living in our homes.

It's time to get sucking.

I want to show you the animals and plants

responsible for the air we breathe...

for the land beneath our feet, even for the food we eat.

Oh, my hat's gone!

That's what happens when you're having fun and you don't look what you're dong.

You'll never look at your world in the same way again.

Welcome to Miniature Britain.

The British Isles.

It has such a rich variety of wildlife and landscapes.

At just over 700 miles long it's not a large country.

But those 700 miles are packed

with a surprising variety of animals...

great diversity of habitats...

and rich communities of plants...

as well as some of the most stunning coastline in the world.

And yet all of this simply wouldn't exist

if it wasn't for the miniature world I'm going to show you.

It holds the key to life and I'm going to reveal some of its secrets.

To do this I've got my hands on a revolutionary new microscope camera

that's seven thousand times more powerful than the human eye.

This is its first time out on the road

and I can't wait to see the miniature wonders it should open up.

And this is Emilien, who's going to operate it.

We're going to start our journey in Britain's countryside,

and what wonderful countryside it is.

You don't have to spend long in a wild flower meadow

to see why they provide such inspiration

to so many poets, composers and artists.

Well, I'm in a flower-rich field

and this is one of the most quintessentially English habitats you'll find.

What makes this habitat so special

is it's actually rarer than a tropical rainforest.

Since the Second World War construction and modern farming

have changed the face of our countryside.

We've lost over 90% of our classic hay meadows

and the diverse life they support.

I mean, in the area I can reach with my hands here

there are probably dozens if not a hundred species of flowers,

of grasses.

Buttercup.

Bluebell. Plantain. Clovers.

And one of the things that I've always thought that people don't do enough

is to get down in a habitat like this

and just simply look at what's happening.

Just look at this world that our camera lets us see.

It's what this programme is all about,

this fascinating miniature kingdom that's so beautiful

and there's so much more out there I want to show you.

The flowering part of a plant is all to do with reproduction.

The flowers need the bees' and insects' help with this,

so the bright colours of the petals attract them in.

Incredible - I've never seen a petal close up like this before

and look, you can see that the surface of the petals

are far from smooth.

They're covered in tiny raised bumps.

It's these bumps that are thought to reflect ultraviolet light in a certain way,

directing the bees and other insects down to the precious nectar.

And if you keep absolutely still,

you suddenly realise that it's absolutely crawling,

it's alive with stuff.

And the more you look the more interesting it becomes.

Thanks to this camera we can see a whole world we usually miss

and it's full of surprises.

When I was a boy I was told that this was called cuckoo spit

and I thought, well, it obviously hasn't got anything to do with cuckoos

and it's not spit either, so what is it?

What it is, is actually quite remarkable.

I've got a nice spittle bug for you, Emilien. Thank you.

Let's see how that looks.

Well, this is absolutely amazing.

This is the frog hopper, the tiny bug nymph

that was in that pile of foam.

All of this foam is made by the bug.

It keeps it from drying out and disguises it in a cloak of bubbles.

The foam itself tastes pretty unpleasant

so predators leave well alone.

But what's really interesting is what's happening at the rear end,

because how it makes this foam nest is

it basically blows air through its backside as it feeds -

all the excess sap, all the waste sap is being fired through the gut

and every time it moves its bottom it makes a little bit of foam

and it builds up until you get a big mass.

It's just one of the cleverest tricks.

So it's not cuckoos and it's not spittle, it's bug poo.

Which I think is a lot more interesting, actually.

HE LAUGHS

Much of this rich countryside simply wouldn't exist

without the animal I want to have a really close look at next.

They're responsible for a third of the food we eat

and yet they're no bigger than your thumbnail.

It's the hard-working honey bee.

One of the great secrets of bees' success

is their ability to defend themselves - their sting.

And I want to take a closer look.

Bee time!

Bees are great.

To bee... Or not to bee.

That's... That is the question.

What?

A bee sting has an ingenious way of delivering its toxic venom...

and I'm hoping our camera will reveal all.

It's time to suit up so we don't get stung in the process.

Now, there's a very good reason why you should be careful with honey bees.

They're going to protect their supplies of food and their brood.

So when you enter a hive like this,

you really have got to have protection on,

otherwise you run the risk of being stung.

It's amazing to think that without honey bees,

in fact without bees in general,

we wouldn't have any flowers, we'd have no vegetables, no fruit.

It would be a very bad state of affairs.

Now, that's honeycomb, so there's lots of honey in there, in the cells.

Let's get a couple of bees over to the microscope

and see what they look like.

Ah, Emilien, I got stung! Oh!

Quick, quick, quick. Get the camera in there.

That's what happens if you get a gap in your clothes.

Ah! I should have had that pulled down.

Now she's trying to take the sting out

but because she's got a barb in the end of the sting,

she can't pull it out very easily.

Ah! There! There's the sting.

Now, you watch this. It continues to pulse there on its own accord,

so even after the bee has gone,

the sting's sac has its... almost has its own existence.

It pulses away and that's forcing the venom out of the venom sac

into my skin.

There, look at that. That is incredible.

The sting is right in my skin and the sac is pulsing,

it's forcing the venom down this tube into the sting.

That will continue to pulse for probably eight minutes or something.

Does it hurt now, George? It's hurting now, yeah. Yeah.

I'm gonna pull out the sting, OK? Wait a sec.

Trying to get the sting out.

Ooh! There. Nice!

Yeah, look at that hole. And it's red. Look at that - it's red.

Wow.

There's the sting.

OK, let's have a look at the sting

because the barbs are very small but they're there

and we should be able to see them.

Look at this. So there's the sting sac.

Go in right on the tip. Went in your skin really easily.

Yeah. It's very sharp.

Go right in, right in. Wow, look at this.

It's like a harpoon. Right.

160 times, fill that screen. Yeah.

There you go.

One, two, three, four, five barbs on that

and that's why it's so hard for the bee to actually pull her sting out

because it's anchored

and that actually helps, when she walks away or flies off, it rips the sting out of the bee,

so it continues to pulse and pump the venom in.

It's beautifully evolved.

HE GASPS

Shall we call 911? Huh? Shall we call the police.

911?

In this country, it's 999 actually.

999. Yes, yes.

"Hello, er, ambulance, please."

No pain, no gain.

That sting is a brilliant weapon for defending their stores of honey.

Now I want to show you what makes these guys such perfect pollinators.

Well, there is the head of a worker bee and that is just beautiful.

What a fantastic animal.

And the whole of her is covered in these long, branched hairs,

which are unique to honey bees.

These help trap the grains of pollen.

She will then use her front legs and her middle legs to groom herself

and she'll transfer the pollen backwards to her hind legs

where she will store it all

and eventually she'll fly back to the hive

and that is a very rich supply of food for the young bee larvae.

The bees get their food

and at the same time carry pollen from flower to flower

to ensure that the plants get fertilised.

Our countryside is full of these intricate relationships

between living things

and our camera helps to see them in glorious detail.

So now I want to use it on a true English icon.

It's a plant that's more important to the wildlife of Britain than any other.

It's the majestic oak.

The oak is so important for the simple reason

that there are so many things living on it and within it.

It's home to around 350 different species of insects.

Its bark can have as many as 30 different sorts of mosses and lichens growing on it.

And huge numbers of creatures seek food and shelter

in the crevices of the bark, amongst the canopy of fresh green leaves,

even in the rotting trunks of old trees.

One of the things I've always loved doing ever since I was a little boy

is climbing trees and this one's just crying out to be climbed.

And this one, it has got a fantastic big hole.

It goes right down into the interior of the tree.

HE GRUNTS

Whoa!

Now we're talking.

It is just the most amazing habitat.

This wood's been completely hollowed out by insects

that have eaten their way along here.

This is a very useful device for sucking up small insects

because you can't really handle them all that easily,

so you can suck them up with this tube device,

which is called a pooter.

And there's lots of beetles here

but this one, I've just found a ground beetle.

There's a nice spider there.

Centipede.

There's a little nest of a mouse in here or some small furry animal.

And there's also one up here, which is composed of sticks.

This tree is crawling with small things

but actually quite large animals as well.

Right. It's exit time.

I've seen all I can with the naked eye

but I think with the camera's help

I can reveal even more intimate relationships in the oak's web of life.

Look at those little legs.

Oh, quick in on that! Ah, it's minute - absolutely minute.

This for me is just one of the most amazing eye-openers

of the machine here.

Here is a millipede just crawling through frame here,

it's quite big and yet on its leg here is a tiny mite just there

and it's sucking its blood through the skin.

Millipedes under dead wood I've seen before

but I've never seen a mite sucking their blood at this magnification.

It's every other leg.

Here's one leg and it's got two on it.

Even a creature like this, you know, under the bark of an oak tree

is being absolutely hammered by blood sucking bugs

and yet it itself is tiny.

Here's one here.

Now, here's a pin.

I want to see just how small that is.

That is amazing.

Wow.

It is, quite frankly, unbelievable.

Next I want to turn my attention to this oak's precious canopy...

packed with juicy nutritious leaves

and there is one resident who is perfectly adapted

to taking advantage of this abundance.

Caterpillars are masters of the high life

but that can make it hard work to get one down.

I want to show you them in a new light.

There's a whopper over here. Look at the size of that one.

In you go. Look at that.

It's really only when you see a caterpillar up close

that you realise just what an amazing piece of engineering it is.

This caterpillar is just investigating an oak leaf here.

You can see the little tiny eye spots here in the head

and here down the side of the body are the spiracles,

the air holes through which it breathes.

Now, caterpillars have got these amazing feet

and if we go further down, they have adhesive pads,

plus a row of tiny sharp hooks that anchor it on the leaf.

There, look at that adhesive foot,

armed with sharp spines, a row of sharp hooks on either side,

and that makes it able to hang on to this plant.

They cling on to the underneath of leaves high up in the tree,

where they spend their time as eating machines.

Eventually, after all that leaf munching,

they turn into one of Britain's most beautiful creatures.

To see them is going to require some specialist equipment

and a bit of luck.

Well, I'm going to leave this ultraviolet bulb on all night

and we'll come back in the morning and see what we get.

I can't wait to see what I've caught.

Moths, attracted by my UV light.

They often seem to lose out to butterflies in the beauty stakes

but I think that's only because you rarely see moths up close.

Brindle beauty.

Brimstone.

They're incredibly evocative names.

It's only when you really look at a moth's wings close up

that you realise how intricate they are.

The entire surface of the moth and its wings are covered

in a series of tiny scales which overlap a bit like roof tiles.

Just look at the incredible pattern on its wing.

It's like a work of art.

These scales are as practical as they're water resistant.

They've evolved to fall off if the moth scrapes its wings,

so helps in protecting the delicate wing membrane underneath.

And even their patterns are designed to protect the moths.

Birds like nothing better than a juicy moth for their supper,

so the moths have become masters of disguise to stay alive.

This is the adult of the buff tip

and it is one of the most perfectly camouflaged moths you'll ever find.

At rest it sits with its wings folded together

and the head end is a sort of ochrey pale colour.

It looks just like a broken twig.

From moths to millipedes to mites,

this oak tree provides a safe home

to thousands of individual creatures.

And they in turn provide food for such a variety of wildlife,

including bats, frogs and birds.

It's estimated that chicks alone eat

a staggering 35 billion caterpillars a year.

Without them, the food chain starts to collapse.

The little stuff really matters.

And it matters closer to home, too.

Time to hit the city streets.

Now, you might think of our urban jungle as an unlikely place to find wildlife

but even here amongst the concrete there is a hidden world.

Now, I know this may sound a little crazy

but I'm actually on the hunt for a bear.

There are thousands of them around me now

but I just have to find one.

This bear is like no other

and has earned the reputation as the toughest creature on the planet.

They can survive in any environment,

from the highest mountains to the bottom of the deepest oceans.

In order to see just how tough they really are,

they have been blasted into space...

exposed to fatal levels of radiation...

and frozen solid.

So surviving Edinburgh will be no problem.

They're fondly known as water bears

but their scientific name is a tardigrade.

And my first challenge is finding one.

This is Mark Blaxster

and he has seen thousands of them

and me, well...

I'm almost ashamed to own up that I've never seen a tardigrade.

You've been walking on them all your life

because they're in the mosses, in the grasses, in the soil.

So everywhere here? Everywhere.

There are tardigrades all around here? All around here.

So here, where are they? Where would you find a tardigrade?

You'll find the tardigrades anywhere where there is moss.

So if I collect this, that piece of plant...?

Many, many hundreds. I mean, it's crawling with them.

Remember, they're very small and very prolific.

Right, I want to see one. Yeah, let's go.

Emilien, meet Mark, our tardigrade expert. Nice to meet you. And you.

Right. I can't wait to see this.

OK, so let's get going.

Oh, my goodness! A tardigrade.

Looking at you... Oh, that's fantastic! ..with its two little eyes.

Look at its little feet. It's got claws.

Yeah, they've got little claws at the end of their feet. Little claws on their feet.

And that's why they're known as water bears -

they look like miniature bears, claws and all.

I have to admit they look pretty cute.

It has two little eyes at the front end. I can see them.

And the brown stuff you can see... Is the gut.

Is the food in the gut, so it's been eating algae

and that's the food in the gut.

Right, here's a pin.

I want to see how big that tardigrade is

in comparison to the sharp end of a pin.

Right, that, that is the sharp end of a pin.

So it's a very small animal.

That's incredible.

These animals have actually been used in space, haven't they?

Yes, because they can do this cryptobiosis,

this life without water.

The European Space Agency exposed them to the vacuum of outer space

and to solar radiation which would kill us in seconds

and then took the tardigrades back down to earth.

And lo and behold... Added some water

and lo and behold they came back to life.

So they're being used to look at how we might protect humans

on long space journeys

but also it's interesting, just how resilient they are.

There we have probably one of the earth's extreme survivors,

animals that will certainly be here long after we've gone.

Oh, yeah.

Tardigrades might be small but that doesn't mean they're insignificant.

There are billions of them all around us,

an army of miniature grazers playing a vital role

in maintaining the balance of nature.

Tiny urban ecosystems don't stop at our front doors.

Believe it or not there's a miniature kingdom inside your carpet.

Now, in order to show you what's lurking about your home...

it's time to get sucking.

The micro critter I'm going to show you

has infested our homes by the million.

They breed in our beds. They forage on our carpets and in our sofas.

Yet whilst we might be horrified

by the thought of them sharing our homes

they're actually doing us a favour.

The creature I'm looking for is a dust mite

and I'm hoping my bit of spring cleaning

should have hoovered up one or two of them.

Got a fibre here. There's a hair here.

Look at this. This there. That's amazing.

The majority of these tiny flakes are actually skin.

It's absolutely incredible.

Every human sheds about three and a half kg of skin flakes every year,

that's about eight pounds.

And just to give you an idea,

that works out at around seven boxes of cornflakes.

Anyone for breakfast?

Which is great news for our dust mites

as they like nothing more than munching on all that old skin.

Now all we need to do is find one.

That's skin, bits of grit.

Bits of plant debris.

Look, here's one. Where?

Ha! A mite. Look right there.

And it's actually eating a tiny skin flake there.

You can see the black jaws are chomping away there.

And that little tiny flake of skin is its meal.

That is quite amazing.

I mean, that is something you don't see very often. HE LAUGHS

But it's happening all around you.

I mean, this is a minute animal.

A dust mite like this is about the thickness of a human hair.

What is this?

Oh, that's a woodlouse, that is a dead woodlouse,

which has obviously been hoovered up off the stairs.

And what's that? Look there.

A little, tiny mite,

which is surviving by eating the remains of a dead woodlouse.

Fascinating, it's eating inside.

It's like a hyena on an elephant remains.

It's exactly the same only smaller. It's just much, much smaller.

So even inside a dead woodlouse

you'll find something alive eating it,

which is probably just as well

because if we didn't have things eating dead insects and skin flakes,

we'd probably end up up to our armpits in the stuff.

So the micro world is working hard to keep things in order,

even in our sofas and carpets.

All of this essential work carries on unnoticed

and the same can be said of creatures lurking in our own back gardens.

Now, these days we all like to think we're doing our bit for recycling

but there's an animal that lives most of its life underground

that could teach us a thing or two about being green

and it lives in a place

where there's more muck and free love than a pop festival.

But danger lurks round every corner.

And the place I'm talking about? Your compost heap!

Weevils that spend a lot of their adult life having sex.

Beetle larvae on the kill with crushing jaws.

Alien forms about to break out of pupae.

Slugs with more teeth than a shark.

And there's blood-sucking mites crawling over everything.

They're all here

but the creature I've come to take a microscopic look at

plays a vital role in the life of the whole planet.

Earthworms are undoubtedly one of the most important organisms on earth.

They are essential at recycling

and they make soil - I mean, essentially, soil is worm poo.

In rich farmland where there are perhaps animals grazing,

you might have up to two million earthworms per acre

and the total weight of those earthworms will be greater

than all of the animals on top of the land.

Without earthworms we simply wouldn't have soil.

There's a secret to the way worms move

that I'm hoping our camera can show us.

Oh, look at that!

Earthworms move by being able to send a wave of contractions along themselves

but in order to pass through the soil

they need to anchor themselves with little tiny hairs,

There! There it is there.

There's a little tiny set of tough spiny hairs called setae.

And as they contract, these come out and anchor against the soil.

They can then drag the rest of the earthworm up.

These are the key to how earthworms actually move through the soil.

And I have never seen this happening actually live.

Amazing!

As they move, they eat decaying food waste.

It passes through their guts and out as rich, fertile soil.

This is the rear end, yeah? Yeah, that's the rear end.

There is the earthworm heading off into the soil where it wants to be.

Oh! And a farewell poop there, as it went.

One of the most important substances on the whole planet, worm poo.

HE LAUGHS And I'm seeing it as I have never seen it before.

So all those worms are busy in Britain's compost heaps,

recycling all of that rotting fruit and veg.

But the story doesn't end there.

All that decaying organic material also plays host

to one of the most important organisms in the natural world.

This organism is neither plant nor animal.

It has over 100,000 species.

It can both cure disease and cause it.

Some taste great, while others can kill you.

This may look like the surface of some strange alien planet

but it's actually much more at home in a bowl

with cream and sugar on it.

What you're looking at is actually a magnified old strawberry

with fungus growing on it.

But it's this fungus that's so special

and I'm going to show you why.

Look at that! That is, that is absolutely gorgeous.

Each of these threads bears at the end, at the tip, a tiny little ball

and they will be full of spores, so when they become mature,

they'll burst open and then billions of spores will drift off elsewhere.

And fungi are the world's decomposers.

They really...

Without fungi we'd be in a right old state, wouldn't we, basically?

They're probably the most important group of organisms on earth.

Wow. That is just phenomenal. Amazing.

On a fruit bowl that's gone off,

you might have 20 or 30 separate sorts of fungi.

Look at that.

We use fungi in many ways.

We eat them, we make pesticides from them.

Without one of them - yeast - we would have no beer or wine or even bread.

They're also used to make life saving drugs, such as penicillin.

Shall we have a look at the raisins? The grapes.

Grapes. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Raisins! Sounds cool, raisins.

They will be raisins eventually.

Smells a bit like, like wine.

Hm. Doesn't smell too bad, actually.

No, no.

Ooh. Now that's not something you'd particularly want to eat.

But our camera reveals a beautiful miniature world.

Looks like flowers, these. They're like little flowers.

It's very romantic.

Really, you think?

I think if I brought my wife a bunch of those,

I don't think I'd get a very good reception.

THEY LAUGH

Whether it's dust mites in the carpet, worms in the garden

or these surprisingly beautiful fungi,

these miniature recyclers play a vital role

in our urban world and beyond.

Well, it's time to hit the trail

and I want to take you to a place

which I think is one of the most beautiful locations in Britain

and it simply wouldn't exist without fungi.

Are you OK to clear all this up? Oh! Again?

Thanks. Bye.

He's such a "fun guy". GEORGE CHUCKLES

I'm heading north to the Blackwood of Rannoch in Scotland.

You couldn't imagine a greater contrast with our cities and towns.

Yet these trees depend on fungi even more than we do.

This forest is only here because of a giant fungus

many miles across and thousands of years old

and that's what I want to show you.

STAG ROARS

There's a unique community of wildlife here

that all, ultimately, relies on that fungus.

It's a fungus which lives underground, hidden beneath my feet.

So I'm going to take a handful of the soil that it lives in

to show you this incredible ancient organism up close.

Fungi are among the oldest and largest organisms on earth.

All people usually ever see of fungi are the toadstools etc,

the things above ground that are obvious.

But the real bulk of the fungus is underground

in the form of these threads or hyphae

and they have amazing interactions with trees.

The fungal threads that we see here spread throughout this whole forest

and they join this tree with that tree, with that tree,

with the trees over there.

They're all connected. It's like a giant hidden underground web.

And it's an interaction that goes both ways.

The fungi get carbon and energy from the tree

and in return for that, the trees extract lots of elements and food

through the agency of the fungi themselves.

So, without the fungi the trees just wouldn't survive.

And without trees there would be no insects, no birds,

no clean air to breathe.

CROAKING

I can't stress enough how important fungi are

to the life on this planet.

Before I leave this beautiful Scottish forest,

there's one more surprising critter I'd like to show you,

a carnivore that keeps the whole forest ecosystem in balance.

Oh!

Oh!

Oh...

Ow! Ooh, that was a bad one.

Oh!

HE GASPS Ooh!

This is a wood ant nest

and it contains probably several thousand, up to 100,000, individual ants.

Now, they don't have a sting but they have got very sharp jaws

and they're able to spray formic acid.

They're amazing creatures.

I mean, one of the things that, I think everyone's surprised about,

if you say carnivore to the majority of people

they would think lions, tigers, that sort of thing.

But actually ants are the major carnivore in the world.

In fact, in any habitat,

whether it's your back garden or the African plains,

ants are taking away far more animal flesh than all the big carnivores added up.

And it's this carnivorous activity that has a crucial part to play

Trees provide the ants with somewhere to live

and a constant supply of food.

The ants in turn take away all the plant-eating caterpillars and bugs

that would damage the tree.

It's the perfect arrangement.

But you can see how ferocious they are.

If I put my arm down in the colony there...

Look at that! Whoa!

HE PANTS

And they are biting and stinging.

Wood ants are particularly fearsome because they have such huge nests.

Any animal or any object which is alien will be attacked,

so, I mean, they're superb at clearing anything off their home range.

I now have several under my shirt

and one is just going up into my armpit.

Oh! And got me!

Ooh!

Emilien, have you enough of this film? I think...

Well, we have a few nice images, definitely.

Ow.

Annoy them a bit. Yeah that would... Why don't you do that, Emilien?

That's a good idea.

EMILIEN LAUGHS

The way ants protect these trees from pests is just another example

of the enormous importance of some of the smallest animals.

The more I delve into Britain's miniature world,

the more I realise how it shapes this wonderful island

and keeps it ticking along.

As an island nation this delicate balance is never more significant

than in the seas that lap the length of its shoreline.

This is where lots of things hide when it's low tide.

Oh, look at that!

No one living in Britain is more than 70 miles from the coast.

We rely on the natural resources it provides for food, our weather,

the climate, even the air we breathe,

so this is the final world I want to explore in miniature

with our camera.

Hi. Hello there.

I wondered what you were hunting for.

Well, I got my nets down. I just took the fish out of my nets.

I'm George. Oh, how do you do, George.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

What have you got? Well, I've got just dogfish in that one.

Oh, wow. We got... You've got loads in here.

In here we've got dogfish, bass, mullet.

And so you collect these for...? That's just for eating.

For eating. Just for eating for us and our friends, yeah.

Wow.

One of the things that's great about sharks and dogfish

is that if you stroke the skin that way it's nice and smooth,

go that way it's incredibly rough. RASPING NOISE

You can hear it. Of course, in the old days

the carpenters used to use it for sand paper. That's what they had.

Now I've got a special instrument on the beach.

What I'd really like to do is to examine the skin really up close.

Would you be happy if I...? Yeah, let's go and have a gander.

That's fantastic. I'll carry this one.

You all right with that one? Yep. Right. Oh! That's the light one.

You must have a healthy appetite. That's why I'm probably so fat!

This is a great opportunity

to see how well adapted animals have to be to survive here.

Dogfish are a part of the shark family,

fast aquatic predators who really need speed.

Derek, Emilien. I brought something. Pleased to meet you. Hello.

It's not small but I brought you this. Looks nice.

But there's a reason for it.

If you look at the skin on that,

I think you'll find it's quite an amazing structure.

This, I want to see.

The skin of a dogfish or a shark is very smooth

if you stroke your hand from the head to the tail.

Now, do you know why it's that way?

No, not really. Only because of the roughness, I presume.

It's smoother flow if you have these minute little bits that face backwards.

If you had an entirely smooth fish

it wouldn't be quite as streamlined, in fact, as it would with this,

so these little tiny bits of the skin,

which are sharp and point backwards,

actually allow the fish to swim more freely,

more, more agilely through the water.

Perhaps I better reshape having my hair cut so I can swim faster.

Do you swim? Not very well.

No, well, but you see if you had that on, Derek,

you could really move. Move, yeah.

As Derek heads out to catch his tea, Emilien and I learn a vital lesson.

Time and tide wait for no one,

especially biologists peering down the barrel of their microscope cameras.

Er, Emilien, this is getting very wet here.

Oh, the tide's coming in, this is getting a bit dangerous.

We need to switch that off quick.

Emilien, we need... Oh, my hat's gone! THEY LAUGH

Can we...? Ready? Yep.

Hup! Ooh.

That's what happens when you're having fun

and you don't look what you're doing,

at what's happening around you.

Big one. Yeah.

Whilst we wait for the tide to recede,

it's time for a spot of lunch.

I'm really enjoying eating here on the beach

and this cheese is absolutely delicious.

I'm just wondering if I might be eating more than I bargained for.

A closer look at this cheese

may reveal something a little surprising.

Well, one of these cheeses is a rather nice French cheese

called Beaufort de Montagne

and the rind is very interesting.

If I put the camera on it, look at that -

It's crawling with cheese mites, little tiny mites

that are just infesting the whole of the rind

and it's that infestation that some people say

gives the cheese it's very special flavour.

HE LAUGHS They must love cheese, these guys.

They live in the rind, they eat their way through it

and they give the rind that sort of holey texture

and when you eat it, you're eating the cheese, the rind

and you're also eating the mites and their poo

and it's just great.

Tastes fantastic and it's completely harmless.

Who wants a piece? Surely? Just a little tiny bit, come on.

I think if you're going to experience the cheese

you really need to eat the whole thing.

Just imagine - I'm now eating cheese plus several thousand cheese mites.

Now, as nice as a bit of cheese is,

you can't beat having a bag of chips when you're at the seaside,

though it does attract the attention of some unwanted guests.

But watching these seagulls flying around

does give you food for thought.

Britain is famous for its seabirds,

long-distance travellers that fly far out to sea in search of food

and brave the most extreme weather conditions.

If you're flying over rough seas there's no room for error.

Those vital wings must stay in tip-top condition.

Birds' wings are actually one of the most incredible adaptations

of almost any animal group.

Something as simple as a feather is

an evolutionary feat of micro-engineering.

Now, Emilien has set up our camera in a beach hut

and it's here that I'm hoping we can reveal

some of the secrets of flight.

That seagull there, that's your feather right here.

That's your feather, mate, right here.

Yeah, so thanks for that.

Now, that is one of the most incredible things.

It's evolved to be a flat surface

but it's made up of hundreds of tiny barbs with hooks on them.

Let's have a look at that and see what it looks like.

Look at it - that's amazing, look at it.

So many small hairs.

It's highly branched

and each of the individual elements of the feather on either side

have hairs that come out and interlock.

So does this make it waterproof as well? Wind proof. Wind proof.

Yeah, I mean, if you're going to fly

you have to have a flat surface which is airtight,

and that is the easiest way of doing it.

You know when you see a bird having a preen? Yep.

They're oiling the feathers

but they're also trying to get any breaks joined up again.

Because you can break them very easily.

You see if you pull that apart, it just goes pop

but if you do that again it re-engages

and they hitch back together again.

I mean, that's one of the most highly evolved structures

and that's what makes birds such successful animals.

If they weren't able to do that with their wings

and if they didn't have that structure, they wouldn't fly.

And now we are at 350 times.

That is millions of years of evolution

to produce the perfect flying surface.

To meet our final players in this micro drama

I'm returning to where we started - Old Harry Rocks in Dorset.

The life forms I'm looking for are fundamental to life

not only in Britain but to the whole planet.

They're crucial to the food we eat, the air we breathe

and even the land beneath our feet.

In order to meet them, I've got to take to the high seas.

There's no better example anywhere in the world

of the power of minute organisms than these chalk cliffs.

These cliffs were formed between 30 and 130 million years ago

by the steady accumulation of the remains of tiny marine algae.

These algae are known as phytoplankton

and they're absolutely essential to all life

and it's Sarah Jane, a marine biologist,

who's going to help me find them.

Well, I'm feeling decidedly queasy.

Yeah, it's a little bit windy today, isn't it? And choppy.

This shouldn't take too long.

What I've just thrown in here was the plankton net. Right.

And we've got another one here. It's got a micro filter at the end

and we're going to drag it up through the water column

and hopefully collect any little animals

that might be living in the water in here to look at later. Right.

So if you want to... Can I have a go?

Yeah, if you take... Make sure you keep hold of the end.

Make sure I keep this end, yeah. That's the important bit. Just throw it over.

Whee! And then what we're trying to do is we want it to sink down,

so if you try and let the weight go out

and then just feed the rope out.

Yeah. Let's just pull them up so we don't lose them under the boat.

I think mine's caught on something. Might have caught a crab.

So essentially, all the stuff gets washed down

into this little bit at the end here.

Yeah, into the end here

and then what we can do is we can just wash that out into a cup

and we can collect that to look at under the microscope later.

And that's it. Wow.

To actually see them we're going to have to push our microscope camera to its very limits.

Oh, what on earth is that? Something's just swum past.

Now, what I really want to see, Emilien, is the phytoplankton.

Maybe we can zoom in on this one right here.

Oh, that's nice. Yeah, they look like some diatoms.

There he is. Oh, that is beautiful. Fantastic.

GEORGE CHUCKLES It's an absolute soup.

Phytoplankton are microscopic algae

that live in the ocean by the trillions,

making them some of the most numerous organisms on earth.

Phytoplankton are essentially the green plants of the ocean -

that's what everything eats.

They're the base of the food chain.

Yeah, they really are right at the bottom,

so they are the bottom of the food web

and everything else is completely dependent

on the productivity of these organisms.

So without phytoplankton at the base of the food chain

we wouldn't have fish to eat

and there wouldn't be whales, dolphins, sharks or seabirds.

The oceans would be barren.

They're even responsible for the very air we breathe.

Now, I've heard that, of course, it's the green plants on earth

that are really important for oxygen and so on.

That isn't really quite true, is it? No, not quite

because actually most of the oxygen produced on this planet

is by these marine phytoplankton,

It's actually about every second breath that anything takes on earth,

that oxygen is formed by these phytoplankton.

So if we didn't have minute marine algae, we wouldn't be here.

When they die, they sink to the bottom of the ocean.

In time, billions and trillions of their calcified skeletons build up

to form enormous rock formations,

including Britain's iconic white cliffs.

So all because of trillions and trillions of tiny algae,

we've got oxygen to breathe, we've got food to eat

and we've got fantastic cliffs.

Yep, basically, they're the root of most life today.

My journey into Britain's micro kingdom has revealed

some of the secrets of this hidden world.

I've spent my life examining the miniature world around us

but I've never seen it like this before.

Wow! That is amazing.

It really is the small things that shape our world

and what a beautiful, awe-inspiring place it is.

From the pollen collecting hairs unique to the honey bee,

the essential life-giving qualities of fungus,

the evolutionary splendour of a feather

that holds the secret of flight,

to the very organisms that make the air we breathe,

creating, nurturing, constantly correcting the balance,

the inhabitants of this micro kingdom are the true guardians

of the planet we call home.

I hope it's made you think that it's worthwhile taking a closer look

at the magical world that's right under your nose.

You might be surprised at what you'll find.

Makes you think, huh?