Episode 5 Nature's Weirdest Events

We live in a very weird world.

And the more we discover about our planet, the stranger it gets.

Every day, new stories reach us, stories that surprise us...

What is that?

..shock us...

-Whoa! That is so cool.

-Oh, my God!

..and sometimes, even scare us.

Argh!

Oh, my God.

We've scoured the globe to bring you the most curious creatures...

..the most extraordinary people...

I can stick almost anything to my skin without no glue.

..and the most bizarre behaviour.

Using eyewitness accounts and expert opinion to explore a weird world

of unexplained underwater blobs,

flying goats

and glow-in-the-dark fish.

We examine the evidence, test the theories,

to work out what on earth is going on.

In this episode - discover what made a monster wave

appear out of nowhere.

Oh, she's going.

How vampires suddenly appeared in America's Great Lakes.

There's nothing that can be done to stop these.

And your way of life is in danger as well.

And whether great white sharks really enjoy a bit of head-banging.

And for our first dip into the world of weirdness,

we head in to the seaside.

Australia, 2015.

A group of friends decide to pack their swimming gear and head to some

rock pools on the picturesque coast 50km south of Sydney.

It was quite a nice day, probably high 20s, very clear,

sunny, warm day.

Nothing out of the ordinary, so it wasn't wild weather or anything like

that, so it was quite a nice day to go for a walk and then a swim.

Sun, warm seas and calm, crystal clear water.

What could possibly go wrong?

We put our things down and decided that we'd go in one at a time,

so Mika went in first.

We were watching, Alex and I were watching him in the distance.

And then,

all of a sudden, we saw a really,

really big wave coming from the background...

Oh, get out!

..which completely shocked us and we were standing there

screaming out to Mika.

Before we knew it,

he and countless other people were being dragged along the rocks.

I have never seen anything like that first hand and the force of it...

The water reached us and we were metres and metres inland.

I'd say it was probably two or three times higher than what I would have

considered a big wave previously.

The wave had taken everyone by surprise.

And as the injured clambered their way back to the shore,

the questions started flying.

Everyone wanted to know where this freak wave had come from.

And how could something like this appear from nowhere.

Most of the waves that we see are either caused by swell or by wind

blowing on the surface of the oceans.

It's a bit like when I blow on this water, making the ripples.

And of course, the stronger the wind, the bigger the waves.

But here's the weird thing -

on that day that Lisa and her friends

decided to take a dip in the rock pools, there was no wind.

It was perfectly calm.

And weather can't change on a whim.

On a calm day, all the waves would be small.

And on a windy day, all the waves would be big.

Not just one of them.

So, if wind alone can't explain a single giant wave,

did the blame lie with another force of nature altogether?

When earthquakes happen near or under the sea,

it triggers the mother of all monster waves - called a tsunami.

In deep water, they're almost imperceptible.

But a tsunami can cross entire oceans

at speeds of up to 600mph.

When they hit the shore, they slow down,

allowing the fast-moving water behind to catch up and in this way,

a huge wave can appear out of the blue.

So, was this wave a tsunami?

Well, no, it wasn't.

You see, tsunamis are typically formed by seismic activity.

They involve multiple waves and affect many miles of coastline.

This wave was altogether different.

It only affected a tiny part of the coast and it came and went very quickly.

So, was it an anomaly, just a freak?

Is that possible?

Rogue waves, they're also called freak waves, extreme waves,

giant waves. There's lots of different terminology for them

and essentially, they are waves that appear within a sea state

unexpectedly, substantially taller than any of the surrounding waves.

They are quite hard to predict.

Rogue waves do quite often appear from nowhere.

There's different causes that can make them appear,

so they can occur in any sea state, essentially.

So, the wave at the Rock Falls wasn't unique.

Giant waves can appear anywhere.

Understanding how could help prevent a disaster, but then,

understanding anything called a rogue or a freak is complicated.

Hmm, yes.

But why is it so complicated?

Well, firstly, it's because we are dealing with a liquid and when you

apply a force to a liquid, it changes shape,

just like when I drop this marble in here.

And at the point of the force touching the liquid,

you can see the shape changing as those ripples radiate away.

But how about if I apply multiple forces at the same time?

Then what we've got is, effectively, chaos,

with the ripples radiating from each one of those marbles,

but also what we have is an enhanced probability that some of those

ripples will meet...

..to form waves, which are double the height of his single ripple.

And basically, that's how we get rogue waves.

Only the world isn't a fish tank.

Our oceans are massive and cover 70% of the planet.

Instead of lots of marbles, they have storms,

all happening independently and separated by vast distances.

Each storm creates waves that can travel for miles.

When two of these waves meet, they can form a bigger wave,

but there's more.

Surging currents and an undulating sea floor also play a part.

When all of these elements come together...

..a rogue wave can form

and that's what happened at the rock pools that day.

Scientists know what ingredients are needed to make a rogue wave,

but they just can't yet predict them.

To work out the recipe, they need to analyse vast amounts of data,

but the hope is that one day maths will provide the answer.

In the meantime, Lisa has developed a new respect for the sea.

It's definitely changed my relationship to the water.

I thought I was quite confident swimmer

and quite confident around the open ocean,

but it's definitely changed the way I'll interact with

the water and be wary of where I go to swim.

Our oceans are phenomenal places.

The sheer size and power can be intimidating.

But, that said,

I wouldn't let a rogue wave put you off from taking a dip in the sea.

After all, these are rare events.

The clue is in the name.

With weather, it's always best to expect the unexpected.

But sometimes, it can become so weird that it defies imagination.

And that's what happened in the USA on Lake Michigan in May 2014.

PhD Student Andrew Ballard has always used any free time

as an excuse to go fishing with his dad.

So, we got up really early and we drove here

and we launched in a river just down the road, called Platte River.

There's a funny saying in Michigan they say,

"If you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes

"and something better will come along."

But with blue skies on the day in question, there was no need to wait.

We motored out into the lake and we'd been fishing for a few hours

and it was slow. The weather was nice, though.

It was calm, there was not much wind.

The weather wasn't calling for any storms or anything,

so we didn't expect anything to happen.

But we looked out to the west over the lake and we just thought it was

a sort of cloud formation coming in or, you know,

some weather front coming in.

Something truly bizarre had happened to the weather.

You see, what started out as a beautiful early summer morning

was very rapidly obliterated.

So, it wasn't until it was really close,

we realised it wasn't just normal clouds.

It was this, kind of, crazy, bizarre fog.

"Crazy! Bizarre!"

And hundreds of feet tall.

A towering edifice of fog was looming over the flabbergasted

fishermen.

And it was about to swallow them whole.

You see sandstorms over the desert

and that is kind of exactly what it looked like.

In all their years out fishing,

they'd encountered fog many times before,

but it had never looked like this.

The effect was mesmerising.

I was shooting the video and my dad was just staring at it,

because we were just in general awe of it.

It stretched as far as you could see, up and down the coast.

The fishermen were about to be engulfed by a tsunami of fog

that stretched the entire length of the lake.

But it wasn't a unique case.

The same freaky phenomenon has previously spooked residents of a

town on the shore of Lake Huron.

Looks like a tsunami's coming beside beach, dude.

And, in San Francisco.

It's swallowing me up!

It's swallowing me!

Even as far away as Taiwan.

So, what was responsible for this monolithic murk?

And why had it appeared on an otherwise

perfect day on Lake Michigan?

The phenomenon that people have described as a fog tsunami is like

an enormous wave, but is made out of cloud.

It can be seen travelling across the water,

like an inundation, really.

At the beginning of summer,

the water in Lake Michigan

can be cold still,

whilst the land is being warmed up by the increased sunlight.

If the water is cold enough,

then when air blows onto it from the land,

it can be cooled down to a sufficient degree

that the moisture in the air turns into the droplets,

which we see as fog.

Fog appears when tiny water droplets form in the air

and it can manifest itself in many ways.

But Andrew had never seen anything as formidable

as a fog tsunami before.

So, what had given this particular fog its precipitous shape?

When low air that is cold is advancing,

you find that it can develop this very abrupt front edge,

like the front bumper of a bumper car.

This is because the cold air stays

and sinks low to the surface and as it pushes the air ahead of it,

it does so like a fist, really.

A foggy fist of doom, perhaps.

Well, no, not really.

We couldn't see into it at all.

It was really thick and completely opaque.

Right before it engulfed us, we could feel a bit of cold mist,

and right as it engulfed us,

the temperature dropped pretty dramatically and it was misty.

It didn't feel like rain, but you just felt

like you were in the middle of a rain cloud, I guess.

Clouds can often spoil a day out, but for Andrew and his dad,

it was quite the opposite.

It was beautiful and amazing

and if it happened every time I went out fishing, I'd be all right.

It would be inconvenient, but, you know, it would be pretty fun.

So, fog can be strange, surprising,

even surreal. At times irritating, or even dangerous.

But on this occasion, for Andrew and his father,

it was a truly remarkable spectacle.

From stories of weird and wonderful weather,

we now head off to meet some of nature's ultimate survivors.

These are North America's Great Lakes.

It looks placid here,

but there's something sinister lurking beneath the surface.

The Great Lakes fish are under attack from an animal that's

scraping away their flesh to feed on the blood.

Millions of fish have already died, which in turn,

has caused panic in the fishing community.

You'd see warnings from fishermen, say,

out on Lake Michigan telling the people at Lake Superior,

"Man, look at what happened to us down here."

I hate to say it, but there's nothing that can be done to stop

these and your way of life is in danger as well.

People were determined to find out what was killing the fish.

And what they discovered caused alarm.

They found a bloodsucker

that's been around since the time of the dinosaurs.

A fish, albeit a very weird one, called a sea lamprey.

So, this is a sea lamprey, it looks like an eel.

They're not eels actually, they're their own family.

A lamprey has a mouth that's suited to nothing better than feeding.

It's a suction cup, so it's as strong as a suction cup.

The mouth is ringed with sharp teeth and the middle of the mouth is a

file-like tongue that flicks its way through the scales and skin of a

fish, so that the lamprey is able to feed on the blood and body fluids of

that fish. It'll go through about 40 pounds of fish during that parasitic

phase, before it moves into a stream to spawn once and die.

But why was a prehistoric predator suddenly inflicting its death hickey

on the Great Lakes' fish?

Sea lampreys are normally found here,

down the Atlantic coast of North America.

So, how on earth did they end up all the way inland over here?

Well, incredibly, the answer lies with one of America's

most famous landmarks.

The Niagara Falls are an impassable natural obstacle.

And they are the only thing stopping lampreys

getting beyond Lake Ontario.

Until we stepped in.

In the 1920s, engineers opened the Welland Canal,

linking Lake Ontario to Lake Erie.

On the one hand, it was a great success -

allowing ships to bypass the Niagara Falls, but on the other,

it was a disaster, which opened the floodgates for lampreys.

Lamprey made it past Niagara Falls in about 1920

and made it all the way to Lake Superior by about 1939.

Only 20 years after the new canal was opened,

the lamprey had successfully invaded the entire Great Lakes basin.

It was a perfect storm for invasion.

They had an almost unlimited food supply, because there was abundant,

succulent, tasty fish for the lamprey in the Lakes

and there is nothing preying upon lamprey

or keeping the lamprey in check.

It was a free, open buffet for the sea lamprey.

Plenty of food, perfect spawning grounds, no natural predators.

The lampreys had slithered their way into paradise.

Yes! Or, no.

You see, for the people of the Great Lakes, these things were killers.

A menace that had to be dealt with.

So, whilst the rest of the world were gearing up for the Cold War,

these folks were involved in a fishy fracas.

And to show you how bad it got - prior to the lamprey invasion,

the harvest of fish in Lake Michigan

and Huron was about 20 million pounds annually.

After the lamprey invasion,

that fell to only a few hundred thousand pounds

and that happened over the course of a relatively

short amount of time.

The lampreys were guzzling fish

faster than a sea lion at a sushi bar.

They were that bad.

They were taking five times the amount of fish that humans

were harvesting.

It was make or break time.

They had to find a way to bring this destructive predator under control.

So, they threw everything at it.

Starting with barriers and traps.

They had to prevent the lampreys reaching

or leaving their spawning grounds.

When the traps on their own failed, they tried adding electricity.

Unfortunately, some of those early attempts at lamprey control

were quite... They were abject failures, actually.

And in fact, some of the electrical barriers were very rudimentary,

not much different, some say, than just throwing your toaster

in the river and zapping whatever happens to be in there.

So, the scientists switched to chemical warfare

and developed a weapon that

could kill lamprey without harming any other wildlife.

A chemical called Lamprecide was the biggest breakthrough in the war

against the lampreys yet.

But the scientists couldn't rest on their laurels.

At any point, the lampreys could develop a resistance to it.

So, they'd won a battle, but to win the war,

they'd have to exploit the lampreys' natural senses.

The sea lamprey has a very refined sense of smell. In fact,

most of their brain is for olfactory purposes.

We call them swimming noses, because they're, basically,

they have a very refined sense of smell.

The scientists found that female lampreys

are attracted to males by smell.

So, they isolated the chemical responsible.

Known as a pheromone,

it was male lamprey cologne and it drove lady lampreys wild.

This pheromone could be used to hoodwink the females

into going into traps on the promise of a bit of hanky-panky.

But there was even better news.

You see, the scientist had managed to isolate the polar opposite

to this attractant.

A naturally occurring chemical called a necromone,

a sort of eau de death,

and the lampreys will do absolutely everything

to avoid this death smell.

Using these natural chemicals,

scientists hope to create a push and pull effect,

using necromones to push lamprey away from places

they don't want them to be, like streams,

with great spawning habitat, and pheromones to pull them into traps.

That is the future of lamprey control, we think,

in the Great Lakes basin.

The use of these natural attractants that lamprey give off

and we use it against them in their spawning phase.

By turning their own senses against them,

scientists finally had this slippery customer under control.

We've gone from about two million lamprey in the Great Lakes

to only a few hundred thousand

and that's a significant drop in the lamprey numbers.

It certainly is.

But you have to give respect where it's due.

This brilliant parasite,

with its efficient if disturbing means of survival,

has been giving human beings the run-around

for almost 100 years.

Since 1957, we've probably spent about 800 million or 900 million

to control lamprey. But contrast that to the fact

that the Great Lakes' fishery is worth 7 billion every year to

the people of the US and Canada, and you can see it's a small price

that we pay to have the fishery that we have.

Without the sea lamprey control programme,

we have no fishery to speak of.

Those lampreys almost ruined the Great Lakes fishery.

I've got to say, they got us out of a bit of a jam.

You see, there's a long-held tradition in the UK

that on the occasion of their jubilee,

the reigning monarch is given a lamprey pie,

except that here, lampreys are an endangered animal.

But thankfully, the Canadians sent some over.

And on the 60th anniversary of her reaching the throne,

Queen Elizabeth was thus presented with a lamprey pie.

History does not recount whether she ate it or not.

Our next event takes place in the marshlands of the Negev desert

in Israel, where a battle of a different kind is raging.

Something here has an unhealthy appetite for toads and frogs -

and not just their legs.

Half-eaten amphibians are cropping up all over the place.

But what's causing the slaughter?

Well, a bizarre clue was discovered by a team of entomologists in 2005.

What we found first were several toad specimens

that were carrying larvae on their bodies.

And because no-one had seen this before,

at least in Israel,

we didn't know what they are, so we took them to the lab.

At first, we thought that this was completely incidental,

that they were just larvae accidentally attached to the toads

and we were sure that they would just drop off after a few hours.

Gil and his team decided to keep the amphibians under observation

and they didn't have to wait long

before they made a macabre discovery.

The researchers couldn't believe their eyes.

The larvae weren't just hitching a ride,

they were attacking their amphibian hosts.

Only after we kept the toads and the larvae in the lab for a while,

we noticed that the larvae kill the frogs.

Frog after frog fell foul to their surprising assassin.

It was clear that this was no accident of fate.

When we thought that they are actually feeding on the toads,

and they just didn't drop off, we said,

"OK, this is something interesting. We should check it out."

Things just didn't add up.

Anything that's small and moving is normally fair game to an amphibian.

The beetle larvae should be an easy meal,

so how has this grisly grub turned the tables?

Gil and his team had to find out.

So, we went back to the field to collect more adults and more frogs

carrying larvae to bring them back into the lab.

Eventually, the larvae will complete their life cycle

or complete the developmental stage.

They will pupate and become beetles and we wanted to know what

these beetles were.

So, would this bizarre larvae emerge from its pupae as a grotesque adult

beetle? Well, actually, no.

It hatches out as a rather plain ground beetle.

It's always the quiet ones, isn't it?

This unassuming arthropod goes by the name of epomis circumscriptus.

But why had such ordinary-looking beetles

produced such diabolical babies?

Well, Gil has a theory.

We think that it evolved from some sort of counterattack,

as some sort of defence.

And throughout time,

these larvae learned to utilise amphibians as food

and started feeding on them and eventually,

they just stopped feeding on everything else

and fed exclusively on amphibians.

The larvae weren't just fighting back any more,

they were actively inviting the attack

and in a truly remarkable way.

It uses very minute behaviour,

very minute movements to lure amphibians towards it.

It moves its antennae and mandibles in a repeated cycle

that entices the amphibians to approach and even to attack.

By acting like a tasty snack,

the epomis larvae had managed to turn the amphibian's

own hunting instincts against them.

And then it uses its double-hook mandibles to attach

to the amphibian's body, to lock onto the skin.

Once it is attached,

it starts feeding on the amphibian's body fluids.

And what's absolutely extraordinary is that a single greedy grub can

chomp its way through nine frogs before it is ready to pupate.

A dead frog looks like...

Well, it doesn't look like a frog at all.

It looks like a pile of bones,

like someone just ate all the fleshy parts of the frog, the eyes,

some of the skin and you get this almost perfect skeleton of bones.

Sometimes it's a complete skeleton, sometimes it's just a pile of bones,

with no shape at all.

It's easy for us to see the frogs and toads as the victims here.

But you've got to remember that

during the course of their lifetimes, they eat thousands of

insects without ever thinking about it.

And the epomis beetle is the only species

we've seen that completely reverses the predator prey role.

So, it's unique and extremely weird.

For our next story, we head north to the Arctic Ocean,

where there's weirdness in abundance.

Living amongst the sea ice are some of our planet's strangest animals.

And perhaps oddest of all is the Greenland shark.

At up to six metres long,

Greenland sharks rival great whites in terms of size.

But in comparison, very little is known about them.

They live at amazing depths,

often below the level that light can penetrate.

So, not only are they hard to find,

it's also a dangerous place to study them.

But sometimes, these sharks are accidentally caught by fishermen.

So, a team of marine biologists

decided to make the most of a bad situation.

In 2010, they set off in Denmark to investigate.

Over the next three years,

they would study every shark that they could get their hands on.

Samples were frozen, so they could be examined later, back in the lab.

The team didn't know it yet,

but one of their discoveries would change the face of biology.

No-one knew how long these remarkable animals live.

Because sharks have a skeleton made of cartilage rather than bone,

the usual method of carbon dating doesn't work.

The biologists had to find another way of ageing them

and they found the answer they were looking for in a remarkable place.

The shark's eye contains proteins formed when it was an embryo.

These can be carbon dated,

so a sample was sent back to the lab and this was the chance to finally

age these mysterious animals.

When the results were analysed,

the oldest shark was shown to be somewhere between 272

and 512-years-old. Now,

even if we plumped for somewhere in the middle of that range,

that means there could be a shark living today

that was born on the same day as Isaac Newton,

that lived through the Great Fire of London,

the English Civil War.

There could be a shark out there that remembers England winning the

World Cup!

A shark hundreds of years old is extraordinary in itself.

But this miraculous life-span is even more impressive

when you realise what these deep sea survivors are up against.

I would say they're living on the edge the whole time,

in terms of tolerating the extremes of the cold,

the extremes of pressure that they inhabit and also,

actually finding the food that they need

just for their general life and routines.

So, it's literally a life of searching for food

in a very hostile environment.

Surviving in the cold and dark is impressive enough,

but there's another bizarre twist to this tale.

If you're searching for food in an environment like this,

it would pay to have pretty good eyesight and I've got to tell you

that when Greenland sharks are born they do have

a perfectly respectable set of peepers.

In fact, they've got larger eyes than most other species of shark,

but as they grow up, something very weird happens.

One of the amazing points of the Greenland shark,

a very unique characteristic that we don't see

in any other shark species,

is a parasitic copepod that is embedded into the eyes

of this particular species and this is extremely common,

particularly in the mid to high Arctic.

All of the Greenland sharks that you'll encounter

have this particular parasite that's embedded into the eye.

Copepods are tiny crustaceans.

Most are drifters and spend their lives hanging out in the plankton.

But one, called Ommatokoita, has decided to settle down

on the Greenland shark's eyeball.

The parasitic copepod actually anchors right inside the central

part of the eye.

It's got an anchor system, which is called a bulbar, that locks into

the eye and the thought is that the parasite actually feeds off the

surface of the eye itself.

So, how does a blind shark survive in these Arctic conditions

for hundreds of years? Well,

it appears that it might benefit from the misfortune of others.

We assume the Greenland shark is a scavenger and it is thought that it

obtains most of the larger prey items from dead animals

that have fallen to the sea floor.

And therefore, if you're going to feed in that particular way,

you obviously need an extraordinarily good

sense of smell to be able to navigate around

and locate those food falls.

Although the Greenland shark has large eyes and they're potentially

adapted in some way for these very low light levels,

I think that the Greenland shark is not majorly dependent

on vision as a cue to locate prey.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Greenland shark.

What an animal, what an animal.

Not only can it lose its vision and live on for hundreds of years,

it's probably the oldest living vertebrate on planet Earth.

It has to be nature's greatest survivor.

We've seen how animals can adapt and survive,

even in the most extreme situations.

But next up, we meet a man who has to cope

with his own rather surreal senses.

Englishman James Wannerton doesn't just see the world differently

to most of us, he tastes it.

What happens is I get one of my senses stimulated, my hearing,

and that immediately gets translated into a taste for me.

It's a real mouth thing as well, it's not, not an association.

It's actually a mouth thing. It's as if I'm actually eating something.

Yes, James can taste words.

And what's more, he's had this peculiar ability since childhood.

I used to go on the tube train with my mum and I used to read off the

names of the stations as we passed through them

and each of the stations had a unique

and distinct taste and texture.

We used to travel on the Central line which was my tastiest line,

it was lovely. Not all these tastes are nice,

there were a few stations that were pretty horrible.

Bond Street is one. It's got the taste and texture of

something similar to hair spray.

Tangy.

It's horrible.

Most people's senses work independently,

so why is James' sense of taste triggered by the sound of a word?

Could it be something to do with the one organ that has to interpret

everything that we see, hear, taste, touch and smell?

Imagine that this is my brain.

It allows me to get around and make sense of the world and each part of

that brain is ascribed a specific task

and you need all of those parts for it to function properly.

Let's imagine that the lemon is damaged in an accident,

then I may not be able to recognise myself in a mirror.

And if the apple becomes diseased,

I then think that my left hand belongs to someone else.

Now these are not amusing anecdotes,

these are neurological conditions

that have been recorded by doctors and what they tell us is that when

the brain is damaged, things get taken away.

But in James' case it's not about being taken away,

it's that he's got extra perceptions.

So, is it a case that James' brain, effectively,

has more fruit not less?

To the best of our knowledge, there seemed to be perhaps extra or

strengthened connections between the area of his brain that processes

words and the area that processes tastes.

And there are neurons firing from the word portion of his brain to the

taste portion of his brain

and that causes him to have this extra perception.

So, James' brain doesn't have extra fruit,

just extra connections between the fruit and this allows some of his

senses to talk to each other.

It's like an eye dropper of taste, you know, just drops.

Just drip-drops, one after the other...

-HE IMITATES EYE DROPS FALLING

-..for every single sound I hear.

This fantastic neurological phenomenon is called synaesthesia.

The vast majority of the synaesthetic tastes

that I experience are from childhood. A lot of them are sweets,

things like wine gums and sweets you can't buy any more.

So, does James' childhood offer a clue to where his curious condition

came from?

So, the general idea is that perhaps synaesthetes have some

genetic difference that causes either extra connections

or a lack of pruning of connections.

So, when we're born, we have lots of neural connections

and throughout time, those neural connections get pruned down

to the ones that are meaningful for us.

In every newborn baby's brain,

represented by this bunch of bananas,

the senses are better connected.

But we don't need all of these connections to understand the world,

so gradually, one by one, they are severed.

The difference, however, with James' brain is that

one of these connections remains intact,

the one between the piece that processes words

and the piece that processes tastes.

And that is mind-boggling.

So, what if some brilliant brain surgeon discovered a way of snipping

James' extra neural connections now,

freeing him from these strange synaesthetic sensations forever?

Would he do it?

I couldn't imagine life without it.

And I think most synaesthetes would say the same.

Fantastic. And although this might read as faulty wiring,

in my opinion, this is as close as a human can come

to having a proper superpower,

so I couldn't resist asking James what my name tasted like.

Do you know what he said?

Soggy crisps.

Soggy crisps!

So much for the superpower.

We continue our strange journey through the senses in Scotland,

where the residents of Ayrshire have something very weird

right on their doorstep.

Something that seems to defy the laws of physics.

It's a road called the Electric Brae.

Ever since it was built, people have been drawn to this road.

Not for the fresh air and scenery, but because it defies gravity.

Even the quick-witted youth of the day are completely bamboozled by it.

-LAUGHTER

-Holy

-BLEEP!

And for good reason. After all, how can a car roll uphill without power?

That has to be impossible.

Surely it does,

I mean, you don't have to be Isaac Newton to know a thing or two

about gravity.

Gravity pulls everything back down towards Earth.

So, when we want to go up, we have to use kinetic energy,

muscles, springs, engines and stuff to help us conquer gravity

for a short while.

But on the Electric Brae,

cars can roll uphill with the engine off.

And it's not the only road like this.

These inexplicable inclines are found all over the world.

Those that have experienced this phenomenon say

it's like being drawn towards a magnet.

So, these hills have been dubbed magnetic hills.

So, could magnetism provide an explanation?

Basically, we're all living on a massive magnet.

At the centre of the Earth is a solid iron core,

about two thirds the size of the moon

and surrounding that is molten metal,

which is constantly moving and this movement generates electricity,

which in turn generates a magnetic field around the Earth.

Known as the magnetosphere,

it surrounds the entire planet and it's so huge it can be detected from

40,000 miles away in space.

So, if the Earth's magnetic field can be felt in space,

then surely it's got to be capable of pulling a car on

the surface of the planet up hill,

hasn't it?

Well, let's just see.

This tiny magnet is powerful enough to pull this toy car up the slope.

And of course, a little magnet, like this,

is not going to be anywhere near as powerful as the massive magnet

that is planet Earth, is it?

Well, actually, yes.

I've got to tell you that this is 300 times more powerful

than the Earth's magnetic field.

So, unless this can pull a full-size car up the hill,

we can forget about magnetism.

So, there must be some other force at work,

after all, seeing is believing, isn't it?

Vision scientists over the past 100 years or so

have really come to recognise that seeing is a very active process.

It's not just passively sitting back and letting the world impinge itself

on your eyeballs. You're all the time reconstructing

and forming guesses and hypotheses about what's out there.

So, to that extent, seeing isn't believing -

seeing is your brain's confabulation,

the story you're telling yourself about what's out there.

In other words, vision isn't just something we only do with our eyes.

Light enters the eye, but the image it forms on our retina is both

two-dimensional and upside down.

So, why doesn't our world look like a wonky poster?

Well, that's because our brain has taken this feeble 2-D image and

re-converted it into a wonderfully complex 3-D world.

And what's even more amazing is that it does all of this

in a fraction of a second.

I think it would be quite challenging for most computer visual

systems to do as good a job with the information we have available.

So, how does our brain process so much information so quickly?

We do know in general,

the visual system and the brain in general tends to use heuristics,

rules of thumb.

In other words, our brain takes short cuts by making assumptions.

So, when we stand on the Electric Brae and look around,

our brain assumes we're standing upright.

It also assumes that the trees and road signs are vertical.

It assumes that things look smaller the further away they are.

And that the edges of a road get closer the further down

it we look.

Now, these assumptions normally work,

but the Electric Brae doesn't play by the rules.

Everything here is on a slope

and no two gradients are the same.

Our brain is trying to interpret complex geometry

in an oddly tilted world.

So, can it sometimes get it wrong?

Because of the fact that our brains are having to reconstruct a 3-D

world from very inadequate two-dimensional information,

they do occasionally get it wrong and make mistakes and will perceive

something which isn't really the case.

So, this car looks like it's rolling uphill,

but only in relation to the surrounding landscape.

Just like this ball looks like it's rolling uphill.

But only in relation to the frame surrounding it.

It's only when we see the wider perspective

that we realise this isn't a case of gravity gone mad at all.

It is in fact a glitch in our perception.

In other words, this strange phenomenon that's been entertaining

day-trippers here for generations is just a weird

and wonderful optical illusion.

So, when we're fooled by optical illusions,

it's down to our brain getting things wrong.

But I am going to stick up for our brain, because it almost

entirely gets things right.

That's why we're so surprised when we see something

that simply can't be true.

For our next sensational story,

we head to the coast of south-west Australia.

This is a favourite spot for shark lovers from all over the world.

And there is no bigger draw than a great white.

But the traditional method of baiting them in with a bag of fish

body parts can put sharks in a bit of a frenzy.

And with water sports enthusiasts all along the coast,

the last thing the authorities want to do here is put sharks

in any kind of frenzy.

So, when they stopped issuing licences to bait sharks,

one tour operator had to get creative.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

When we started shark cage diving,

initially we weren't allowed to use blood and bait, so we looked for

alternatives around other senses that could attract sharks

and music or acoustics was just an obvious thing to try.

We may think it's rather quiet underwater,

but in fact lots of marine animals use sound to communicate.

But using music to attract sharks,

where on earth you begin?

So, when we first trialled this

we just, we grabbed the speaker off one of my mates and we went down,

we put it in the water, connected it to the iPod,

it was my iPod and we just started at A.

Now, I'm a country Aussie kid,

I only have one type of music and it's usually Aussie rock,

so the first album on the list was AC/DC - Back In Black.

When we turned it on, we had sharks within a minute

and they hung around for 20 minutes.

And the sharks were coming up and just rubbing their face on

the speaker and we were just like, "This is the coolest thing ever."

Come on, come on.

Even if we do away with the stereotypes of the long greasy hair,

the patch-covered denim jackets and the head-banging,

I just can't see sharks as heavy metal fans.

So, was Matt's experiment a bit of a freak, a one-off,

or do these animals truly have an appreciation of music?

He was about to find out.

Within days of the story hitting social media,

Matt was inundated with requests to try other music.

We started going through the playlist and what we saw is that it

wasn't just AC/DC that attracts sharks,

there were other songs as well.

We got to one particular shark, Bernadette I think her name was,

that every time we played Talking Heads - Sax And Violins

she would breach out of the water.

The only time we'd see this shark is when that song was playing and we

started to think that maybe sharks had individual preferences.

Matt now had proof that his experiment worked.

The one big question remaining was why?

A lot of species of sharks, like white sharks,

that live in open ocean, or in the pelagic environment,

because of the low rate of encounter of prey, potential prey,

you would expect them to react and to investigate any kind of stimulus.

So, if there is a sound or a smell that they encounter,

because they are curious animals,

they are likely to go and check out what is producing that sound,

as it could potentially be a prey item.

The sharks appeared to enjoy a wide musical repertoire,

but the tracks that worked best had something in common -

a driving bassline.

Low-frequency sounds travel a long way underwater

and it's just possible that sharks can mistake them

for the death throes of an injured fish.

That's because they don't just hear sound, they feel it.

You see, in sharks,

hearing and vibration detection are fundamentally linked.

A fluid-filled tube call the lateral line extends along each flank.

This tube is in direct contact with the water,

via tiny holes in the skin.

When sound causes the water to vibrate,

it moves tiny hairs inside the lateral line

and this tells the shark which direction it came from.

Rock and roll, it does have the largest success probably,

because of the lower down frequency vibrations, the bass beat.

And even the distortion.

It might have something to do with replication of a feeding behaviour,

we don't know, but when a shark comes back to the same song,

time after time, knowing that there's no food available,

what is the attraction? Maybe they just think it's cool.

Sitting underwater,

listening to your favourite song by Metallica and having a shark just

cruise past, looks like he's rocking out to the beat,

letting his hair down and just kicking back with the tunes.

Shark music.

I absolutely love it, because it gives us the opportunity

to redefine the great white as something which isn't a purely

psychopathic fish and it gives people the ability to engage with

this animal in a relatively nonintrusive way.

It's genius. Utter genius.

There's just one thing, I so wish they'd been into The Ramones.

From a man with a finger-licking lexicon...

Tastes horrible.

..via a topsy-turvy hill, to a shark with an appetite for music,

we've seen how the senses can perplex

and please us in equal measure.

From frogs to fish to beetles to humans, weirdness has no boundaries.

It comes in all shapes and sizes.

Next time on Nature's Weirdest Events...

Weird washed-up blobs...

..spiders with unfathomable feet...

..and bizarre lakes the colour of bubble gum.