Episode 1 Nature's Weirdest Events

In this episode, we'll explore an extraordinary relationship...

HE SPEAKS PORTUGUESE

..reveal prehistoric creatures that could come back from the dead

and find out why Spain is under attack from space balls.

It could be capable to destroy a house.

But first to America, and to the coast of California,

where, in February 2016, a gourmet restaurant became famous

for a very unexpected guest.

I came in, and yes, she was there,

in booth number 65, which is the best table in the restaurant,

right on the water.

To Chef Bernard's surprise, a tiny sea lion pup was sitting,

waiting for service.

I've been here for 21 years and I've never seen something like this.

He named her Marina.

And stranger still, she wasn't a one-off.

This sea lion pup turned up on the streets of San Francisco.

Another was found in a toilet.

Whilst this one was caught on CCTV indulging in a spot of shopping.

Up and down the coast, lots of these animals were giving up on the ocean

and moving inland.

Strange behaviour indeed.

And sea lions weren't the only animals behaving oddly

on the California coast.

Check this out.

During 2015 and 16, millions of pelagic red crabs washed up

like a crimson tide.

And deadly venomous sea snakes

that are usually only found in the tropics

littered the state's beaches.

But why were these marine creatures suddenly turning terrestrial?

Well, Chef Bernard's uninvited guest could give us a clue.

By seeking out a seafood restaurant, Marina was smarter than the other

sea lion pups because they all had one thing in common...

..protruding ribs,

glassy eyes.

These pups were starving.

Marina was just one of over 6,500 skinny pups

rescued across the state.

The pups that are coming in are extremely emaciated.

A lot of our pups come into us about six months old,

and they're coming in just barely over birth weight.

What was causing these starving pups to come ashore in their thousands?

Well, there's one last unexpected piece to this puzzle.

Just a week before Marina showed up

at Chef Bernard's restaurant, something

truly extraordinary made a sudden appearance

just 15km down the coast.

Wow! Look at that.

As the tide falls back along the beach in Coronado,

a piece of the past is unveiled.

You're looking at the remains of the 300-foot long SS Monte Carlo.

But the SS Monte Carlo sank back in 1937.

So where had this wreck suddenly appeared from?

And how can it explain the sea snakes,

crab invasion and sea lions starving to death?

Well, all these bizarre events

were just symptoms of something much bigger and much stranger.

2015-'16 was what's known as an El Nino Year -

a global weather event powerful enough to affect the whole planet.

Normally, trade winds in the Pacific blow from east to west,

dragging warm surface waters towards Indonesia and Northeast Australia.

Meanwhile, deeper colder waters in the east rise to the surface.

But every few years, the trade winds weaken and can't change,

bringing in warmer water to the West Coast of America.

And it's these unusually warm waters

caused by El Nino that explain our Californian conundrum.

They triggered severe storms

that washed away tonnes of sand and exposed

the long-lost wreck of the SS Monte Carlo.

And warm currents brought sea snakes and red crabs up from the tropics.

But why would a hotter ocean spell starvation for Marina and thousands

of other sea lions?

Well, there's still plenty of fish out there,

but not in the right place.

It shifted into the cooler waters,

further down below or further offshore,

and that's what El Nino does. El Nino brings in this really warm

water current, and so, their cold-water prey

move with the cold water.

Adult sea lions can follow the fish offshore,

but breeding mothers and pups can't.

Many perished, but the lucky ones were rescued.

And Chef Bernard waved a fond farewell

when Marina returned to the wild.

Whoo! She really, really regained a lot of weight,

so she went from 20lb, became 40, 45lb.

So she was healthy, she was happy,

she was sassy and she was like, "Hey, Chef Bernard,

"time to go back in the big great blue!" And that's what we did.

So, a sea lion sauntering into a seafood restaurant was just a small,

skinny symptom of the world's largest weather phenomenon.

And the 2015-2016 El Nino was no ordinary El Nino.

It was the strongest since the 1950s and its effects were felt far wider

than the Sunshine State.

Yes, this was some seriously weird weather.

Yes, whilst strange weather was to blame for the peculiar events in

California, our next mystery was washed up by unusual currents

off Brazil.

Every June, 71-year-old Joao Pereira waits for his best friend,

Dindim, to arrive.

HE SPEAKS PORTUGUESE

They haven't seen each other for months,

because Dindim's been away at sea.

But finally, the wait is over.

Sorry, I didn't tell you, did I?

Dindim's a penguin.

A Magellanic penguin, to be precise.

And for the past five years,

Dindim and Joao have been devoted to each other.

So how did man and bird become such bosom buddies?

Joao's house backs onto Proveta Beach, near Rio De Janeiro.

In May 2011, he found Dindim on the sand,

barely moving and covered in oil.

Joao looked after the penguin.

He cleaned his feathers.

And fed him sardines.

After a few days,

when he thought Dindim was strong enough to fend for himself,

Joao took the penguin to a nearby island

and released him into the sea.

But just a few hours later, Joao heard squeaking in his backyard.

Much to his surprise, the penguin was back,

and made himself at home with Joao and his wife.

Dindim and Joao were inseparable for 11 months.

But then the penguin suddenly left.

Perhaps his instincts had kicked in and he'd gone to find his own kind.

Magellanic penguins live in the sea off of South America,

and sometimes they'll venture as far north as Rio here.

But once a year they have to head back south to Patagonia to breed.

So Joao could only imagine that Dindim, fully restored to health,

had hopped down off of the sofa,

taken to the sea and swum south to be reunited with

some of his fellow penguins.

But what's incredible

is that a few months later, much to Joao's delight,

Dindim returned.

HE SPEAKS PORTUGUESE

And the same thing happens every year.

Dindim heads out to sea for a few months to feed,

but he always returns to Joao.

So what's going on?

Why does Dindim keep coming back to Joao

rather than living with his own species?

Well, the answer may lie in the fact that the penguin was only about

a year old when Joao rescued him.

It could be that Dindim has imprinted upon Joao

to the extent that he sees Joao as his parent.

You see, when birds hatch,

they do so with little sense of identity.

They have to look around them to see what they are and how to behave.

And sometimes, if the first thing they see is a human,

they bond to it for life.

So perhaps this special relationship is due to some kind of

delayed imprinting. A case of mistaken identity.

But there could be another possibility that Dindim sees Joao

not as a parent, but as his partner.

You see, Dindim always returns around July,

which is the beginning of the penguin breeding season.

Other Magellanic penguins are in Patagonia then,

raising a family with their mate.

So is Dindim's affectionate behaviour actually

an attempt at courtship?

Well, it's not quite that simple.

Penguins are usually very loyal to the places that they spend their

summer months.

They breed in Patagonia,

they usually come back to the very same beach every year and they nest

in the very same hole every year with the same partner.

Most of them are like that.

Because Dindim spends so long with Mr Joao on Proveta Beach

he probably imprinted and learned that

that place is a safe place to be,

and is the place he has to go during the summer months.

So it seems that because Dindim spent his formative first summer

with Joao, he now sees that beach as his home.

Whatever the biological explanation may be,

the warm fuzzy feeling between

this penguin and his pal is clearly mutual.

So Dindim is usually very calm and comfortable and happy around

Mr Joao, and the opposite is true as well.

He is in heaven when Dindim is around.

I would say this is a friendship, why not?

What better definition for friendship than that?

Without Joao's help, Dindim surely would have died.

His kind actions have earned him an unlikely new best friend.

While Atlantic currents delivered this penguin to a loving new home,

unusual weather revealed a puzzle in the permafrost.

Siberia. Where temperatures often fall to minus-40 degrees.

And the ground is frozen solid year round.

But in August 2015,

a freak flood in the Sakha Republic exposed a fresh patch of tundra.

Scientists working in the area

stumbled across a weird-looking lump.

They chipped away at the block of ice...

Something furry emerged.

The scientists had uncovered two frozen animals,

but what could they be?

Wild dogs?

Polar bears?

No, this was something even more extraordinary.

A couple of very young lion cubs.

Wait a minute.

Lions in Siberia, how could that be?

I mean, we all know that lions roam the plains of Africa here.

And that there is a small population over here in north-western India.

But that's still more than 3,000 miles away from Siberia, here.

So how did those cubs turn up so far from home?

Well, in fact, the icy Siberian tundra was their home.

But not for 10,000 years.

These are baby cave lions, and they've been extinct for millennia.

Cave lions were around from a little over 300,000 years ago,

when we first find them in Europe.

To approximately between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago

was when they started to disappear from most of the range.

Cave lions were about 10% bigger than modern African lions

and roamed most of the Northern Hemisphere,

from Alaska to eastern Russia.

After detailed investigation,

biologists hypothesise that the cub's mother

left them in a den while she went off hunting.

And then while she was away,

a landslide caused the den to collapse,

and the cubs perished.

But if these cubs have been dead for over 10,000 years,

how do they look so good for their age?

Well, a simple demonstration should make that clear.

But I warn you, it's not pretty.

Look away if you're squeamish.

Left alone at room temperature,

a chicken decomposes within a week or so.

Bacteria and maggots make short work of the carcass.

But if we simulate the Siberian permafrost,

the chicken is frozen in time.

It's not just icy temperatures

that keep the flesh nice and fresh, though.

A combination of a lack of oxygen and no sunlight

also meant the cubs were preserved for thousands of years.

A chance in a million for biologists.

From a paleontological standpoint, it's a hugely significant find.

We very rarely get soft tissue preservation of extinct animals.

Not just the skeleton, but all the soft tissue, you know,

all the muscles and the brain and the fur.

It's just amazing.

And the soft tissue is the final twist in this Siberian story.

You see, not content with merely uncovering these cubs,

biologists plan to do the unthinkable.

To clone the cave lion.

To bring it back to life.

But how?

Well, science has progressed a lot since the first mammal was cloned

back in 1996.

'Scientists in Scotland have produced the first-ever clone

'of an adult animal.

'Dolly, a seven-month-old sheep,

'was created in a laboratory using a cell from another sheep.

'The new step involves taking a cell from an adult sheep

'and removing the genetic material from it.

'The genes are then inserted into an empty egg cell taken from another

'sheep. The egg is then used to start a pregnancy,

'the offspring being a clone.'

If intact DNA could be extracted from the cave lions then, in theory,

they could be brought back from extinction.

Korean biologist Hwang Woo-suk is taking tissue samples from the cubs.

Russian and Korean scientists are already working on cloning

ancient mammoths.

And as far fetched as this Jurassic dream sounds,

it might just be possible.

You see, they don't need pristine DNA to try and bring back

the cave lion, or, in this case, the mammoth.

Let's imagine that these parts of this jigsaw represents the good

mammoth DNA that they have.

The problem is...they've only got half a mammoth.

But their plan is to combine it with modern-day elephant DNA,

and what they end up with is a sort of hybrid embryo,

not an exact mammoth clone, but, perhaps,

something pretty close to it.

Even if scientists manage to create a viable embryo,

that's just the first step.

I think what people forget with cloning is that

you need a host animal.

And you need many, many replicates in order to get any sort of success.

So dozens, to potentially hundreds, of surrogate mothers.

Of course, if you look at modern lion populations,

they are plummeting. Just in the last few decades,

the lion populations have been cut almost in half.

So the amount of resources that would go into cloning the cave lion,

I think, could be much better spent on saving the lions

that are around today.

The possibility of cloning animals like cave lions and mammoths is

undeniably exciting.

But it's my duty to tell you that, at the moment,

a real-life Jurassic Park is still some way off.

We now travel to Florida,

where intruders are lurking in the undergrowth.

Miami.

Glamorous. Cool.

Playground of the rich and beautiful.

But a recent invasion is distressing local residents.

Oh, my God. I will never go out.

I will not let my kids go outside and play.

We didn't know what they were in the beginning.

They would start climbing up the trees and just seemed to stay there.

We began to see...hundreds.

Properties are being overrun by alien creatures.

I found one the size of my hand.

So what's the cause of all of this anxiety?

They are big. There are slimy

and a lot of people think they're downright disgusting.

Snails.

Large snails.

They're everywhere.

I know what you're thinking,

have the residents of Miami gone completely crazy?

I mean, every garden has slugs and snails, doesn't it?

Well, it might. But not snails like this one.

You see, this is a giant African land snail.

They can grow to up to 20 centimetres.

They can live for up to nine years.

These are monster snails.

And they are causing panic because

they don't just munch on a few garden plants.

They'll eat over 500 different crops.

They'll even devour people's homes.

Yes, really.

They're eating the concrete.

Because they're getting calcium out of that to help build

their shells stronger and bigger.

But what's most worrying is that in Florida,

they may carry a type of meningitis

that can be passed on to humans via their slime.

So these snails are a menace to human health and to the economy.

But where have they all come from?

Well, they are native to Africa.

No-one is completely sure how they first came to Florida,

but people have been caught smuggling them into the country.

A lady coming back from Nigeria last year

had 12 of them hidden under her dress.

A man coming back from the Philippines,

and he had one giant African snail in each one of his suit pockets.

However they arrived,

with plenty of lush vegetation and no natural predators,

the invading snail population has boomed.

Meet Harry the snail.

Or maybe Harriet the snail,

You see, it's difficult to ascribe a name to a snail,

because they are hermaphrodite.

They have both male and female reproductive apparatus.

This is a real benefit to them.

They don't have to go through that rigmarole of finding and then

charming a mate. They can simply get on with reproduction.

And they do. They can produce up to 1,000 eggs a year.

I mean, you do the maths.

These things are unstoppable.

So the risk of disease and downright destruction

means that local authorities are under pressure

to eradicate these slimy intruders.

We created a giant African land snail incident command.

We're doing a lot of outreach in schools, at events,

we do billboards,

radio ads and television ads.

The authorities rely on people ringing in with their sightings.

I started seeing signs on the back of trucks which said,

"Call the state of Florida."

As soon as I saw this meningitis...

..that scared me to death.

They came several times a week,

and they would pick up hundreds of them and put them in plastic bags.

And, you know, take them away.

The snail squad seem to be getting on top of the slow-mo swarm.

We've collected over 162,000 giant African land snails.

The idea is get the population down. And we've accomplished that.

But if these snails can lay 100 eggs at a time,

to get on top of the problem,

the authorities are going to need to find every single last one of them.

And until recently, that's been an almost impossible task.

But now, the authorities have a secret weapon.

Meet Sierra.

Come on, let's go.

We use canines because they can get to places where humans can't.

They can smell that snail and go after it and alert us that there are

giant African snails there.

Yeah! Good girl, babe.

You found it.

Good girl.

Good girl.

In Shannon's garden, the snail squad's efforts seem to be working.

It's been amazingly successful because for months,

I have not seen a snail.

But Mark and his team must remain vigilant.

Just the other day we found a 4.8 incher, which is an adult,

which means that there are children, or neonates

that are out there in the wild. We have to keep looking for them.

So the snail squad's efforts

and their search for these marauding molluscs

is set to continue.

And Sierra's sniffing services are going to be needed for a while yet.

Coming up...

A strange glowing slime.

And alien objects that fell from the sky.

But first, we head to the holiday resort of Fethiye

on the Turkish coast.

On the 9th of July 2015,

dive instructor Lutfu Tanriover jumped into the

calm blue waters of the Mediterranean,

something he'd done hundreds of times before.

I have been diving the area for eight years.

And at least once a week we are going to that dive site.

Little did he know what he'd find under the waves this time.

A blob of baffling proportions.

It was three, four metres wide.

And drifting about 22 metres in the middle of the water.

It was a very, very big bubble.

We were all fascinated by it because nobody had ever seen

something like that before.

I decided to call it The Thing.

Lutfu posted this footage of The Thing online,

where it grabbed the attention of marine biologist Steve Haddock.

So what did he think this bewildering blob could be?

When you see something like that,

there's only a few things that it might potentially be.

One of the things is a pyrosome.

This is a colony of organisms that can form

either a small tube or, actually, one species can form very,

very large tubes that divers can actually swim inside of.

But the thing that Lutfu filmed was a ball.

Not a tube.

So if it wasn't a colony of individual creatures,

what was this awe-inspiring orb?

And where had it come from?

The secret to the blob's source lay inside the sphere.

You see, initially, it looked translucent.

See-through. But then, under closer inspection,

Lutfu could see something inside.

When you go next to it, we put the torches in it,

and then we saw with the torches, we have seen so many particles in it.

These particles provided a vital clue.

You see, this isn't a single giant blob at all.

But millions of tiny individual spheres.

Squid eggs.

Instead of having them individually,

they're like little snacks for other organisms to live on,

they embed them in a giant gelatinous mass.

It's a strategy that certain species of squid use in the open ocean

where there are lots of hungry mouths around.

Predators could come from any direction,

and you have very few ways to hide or secure your eggs.

But if you put them in this mass,

it's large enough, it excludes all the predators

that are smaller than that.

This enormous egg mass is the squid's way of maximising

its offspring's chances of survival.

Blobs like this are rarely seen,

they last just a few days before breaking up.

Then each baby squid will face the world alone.

But there's one puzzle left.

So how does a relatively small squid produce something so huge?

Well, its eggs start off quite small.

But they expand massively in sea water.

It's a bit like frog spawn on steroids.

So this vast blob of jelly is the secret to a squid's success.

Protecting its precious eggs from predators.

Whilst this bizarre ball appeared underwater...

..our next mystery was spotted underground.

In March 2016,

Anthony Roberts was exploring this old slate mine in North Wales.

Scoping out new areas for guided tours.

His normal route in and out was flooded,

so he used the emergency exit tunnels instead.

On the way out, something stopped him in his tracks.

A very strange, very bright luminous green material.

It kept glowing.

This glimmering stuff has been found in dark nooks and crannies

around the globe.

'Wow!'

In Cornwall...

Germany...

-'Holy

-BLEEP,

-look at that down there.

'It is, it's glowing.'

And even New York state.

So what on earth could be producing this eerie green glow?

Well, some rocks have the ability to fluoresce,

the minerals within them can absorb light and then re-emit it.

Like glow-in-the-dark stickers.

True, but could this glowing green goo actually be alive?

In Africa, there is a fungus that lights up the forest floor.

It uses the luminous enzymes to breakdown leaf litter.

The locals call it chimpanzee fire.

But there was something completely unfathomable about the green goo

that Anthony found in Wales.

It had the disturbing ability to vanish before his eyes.

It wasn't until I

took a few steps closer,

looked back at it from a slightly different direction and realised

it's completely disappeared.

I couldn't see it at all.

So what was this glistening substance that glowed one moment

and was gone the next?

In the past, people believed it was the treasure of goblins.

Probably hundreds of years,

the stories about goblins hiding their gold in caves

and all sorts of dark places.

People walking past dark caves and such places see this glow of

emeralds in the back and they go in and say,

"This is the treasure, we're going to go in..."

And you go in and grab a bit and you come out, and of course,

it's not there. It's completely gone.

So, obviously, it's goblins, what else could it be?

In fact, these aren't sparkling gems hidden by mythical creatures.

But the answer is almost as magical.

It's a very clever trick by a moss

that lives in these special circumstances.

A moss called goblin gold.

But this is no ordinary moss.

It's developed some very special cells that allow it to live

where there's almost no light.

So how does it work?

The front of each cell

is curved like a lens,

this focuses light rays and boosts the amount of light reaching the

chloroplasts - those parts of the plant that produce energy

through photosynthesis.

The reason it glows is that some of the light is reflected back out

through that lens.

And this is the key to the moss's mysterious disappearance.

Those reflected light rays can only be seen from one particular angle.

And Anthony happened to stop in just the right place.

If I'd been one step higher or one step lower,

I wouldn't have noticed it.

Imagine that.

Lurking out there in the dark, all across the UK,

there's green gold just waiting to be discovered.

Fantastic.

For our final dose of weirdness, we head to southern Spain.

Normally, Calasparra is a small, sleepy town.

But in November 2015, a local farmer found something out of this world.

A peculiar, alien object appeared out of nowhere.

-TRANSLATION:

-I saw a black ball about 60 centimetres across

lying close to the bottom of the bank,

and a big dent where it hit the ground.

When I saw it, I called the police straightaway.

They told me not to touch it.

The police cautiously collected the huge hairy ball

and took it away for analysis.

And this wasn't a one-off.

That month, two more of these eerie orbs turned up in the region.

And around the globe, there were reports of more weird objects

suddenly appearing. These odd balls turned up in Vietnam.

Another was discovered in Brazil.

But where had they all come from?

Back in Spain, there was a clue.

-TRANSLATION:

-Witnesses in the town said they saw strange objects,

like a cluster of fire, which then dispersed and fell.

They told me there were between four and six unidentified flying objects.

Burning UFOs falling from space.

Understandably, the mayor was very concerned.

We were worried that it might happen again, falling on a primary school,

someone's home, or a playground.

So what could explain these menacing missiles that tumbled to Earth?

Whoa!

Well, our skies are the scene of some strange sights.

One possibility is that they were some sort of mysterious meteorite.

This one caused confusion when it landed in Kenya.

'Residents of the Ol Donyo Sabuk area hear a loud noise

'from the sky above. But there's no aircraft in sight.

'Instead, a strange object, whose appearance left many puzzled.'

And, you know, falling meteors are more common than you might think.

Every day, the Earth is bombarded with thousands of pieces of rock

that come from outer space.

Now, as they enter the atmosphere,

a tremendous friction is generated and they burst into flames.

But if they survive that re-entry, then they become meteorites.

Irregularly shaped, really heavy pieces of rock.

But these space balls clearly weren't made of stone.

So if they weren't meteorites, what were these alien orbs?

At first, the scientist tasked with analysing the space balls was

absolutely flummoxed.

What a strange artefact. What a strange object.

I've never seen anything

similar before.

Juan Antonio tested every bit of the ball.

We found out

the cover of the balls was made of carbon fibre.

We discovered that

some parts of the balls were made of a special stainless steel,

and the metal of the main body

was made of titanium.

Right, so let's just get this straight.

Fireballs, made of carbon fibre and titanium,

are battering us from beyond our planet?

So are these cannonballs a sign of intelligent life?

Well, yes.

You see, they are from outer space, but we put them there.

These balls are fuel tanks, yes.

Fuel tanks for powering rockets.

'One small step for man.

'One giant leap for mankind.'

Since we began exploring space in the 1960s,

nearly 7,000 satellites have been sent into orbit.

And the metal balls found in Calasparra,

Vietnam and Brazil

are the remains of the small fuel tanks that are used

to manoeuvre them. So, if they're supposed to be up in space,

how did these fuel tanks end up in Spain?

Well, sometimes satellites may break down or collide

and the debris can fall back to Earth,

or de-orbit.

In a given month, 10 or 20 objects will de-orbit,

that means they'll burn up in the atmosphere.

When we have control over a de-orbit, we nearly always aim for the

middle of the Pacific Ocean because it's a very big, uninhabited area.

The problem is, when certain larger bits of debris de-orbit,

larger pieces, fuel tanks etc,

we have no control over where they'll land.

We really won't know until very late in the de-orbit process.

Whilst most debris burns up,

robust parts like fuel tanks may survive re-entry.

Realistically, space junk poses little risk of injury.

It's much more dangerous hurtling around our planet.

A paint fleck will have the same kinetic energy as a rifle bullet,

and poses a real danger to spacecraft and asteroids.

There are now millions of bits of debris circling the Earth.

Some as big as a bus.

And any collisions with the satellites we rely upon

could jeopardise our whole way of life.

The internet may go down because we rely on space-based communications

more than ever in our connected society.

A lot of the banking industry and finance industry relies on

very accurate timing for high-frequency trading.

If we lost those timing signals, there could be financial chaos.

But don't worry, a global meltdown is highly unlikely.

Space debris is very carefully monitored so that satellites

can be moved out of harm's way.

So, those strange Spanish balls weren't a sign of an alien attack.

They were a symbol of the ever-increasing mass of space junk

that's circling our planet.

So, while Spain fell under attack by balls from space...

..an equally strange sphere was found underwater...

..and a mythical moss was uncovered underground.

So there. Just goes to prove that although the weird and the wonderful

can turn up in every corner of the globe,

the extraordinary is just as likely to appear on your doorstep.