Scutegera Deadly 60 Bites

'On Deadly 60 I've had loads of incredible animal encounters.

'Here's just one of my many favourites.

'This is Deadly 60...Bites!

'This is Gomantong Cave in Borneo,

'with some totally vast caverns.'

Wow!

What a place!

The air is just thick with swifts.

This has to be one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen.

Up in the roof of the cave

with the bats and the birds circling around you,

it's kind of like paradise.

But all those birds and two million bats create an awful lot of poo.

And that falls down here, on the cave floor.

So, if up there's heaven, then down is a kind of hell.

But there are some deadly creatures that absolutely love it.

It smells incredibly strong. And in fact anyone that

works in this cave for too long has to wear protective clothing,

which explains why my crew

are all dressed like weird Oompa-loompas.

'The crew have been working down here much longer than me.

'That's why they're wearing the suits and I'm not.'

And this big hill

that I'm walking up here isn't actually a hill at all.

See, all those creatures up there

obviously have to go to the toilet sometime.

And over hundreds of years, it's built up into this gigantic

pile of what's called guano.

'Yup, if you haven't already guessed it,

'I'm standing on the world's largest pile of poo.

'And it stinks!'

If you look over the other side,

you can see the ground seems to be moving.

It's almost like there's thousands of little jewels.

The reason the floor appears to be moving

is that it's absolutely covered with cockroaches.

I have never seen anything so disgusting in my entire life.

Every single square inch of ground is covered in these creatures.

Now cockroaches are absolutely amazing animals.

They are some of the world's greatest survivors.

Cockroaches, it's said, can live for over a week without their heads.

They really are some of the greatest developed insects in the world.

But at the same time they're also absolutely hideous.

Here in this cave

all of this wonderful dung is perfect food for them.

And something else here

is even better food for cockroaches.

Occasionally some of the bats and birds don't make it.

And they fall down to the cave floor and become food for the cockroaches.

These here are actually flesh-eating bugs.

This possibly is one of the nastiest places on the planet.

But there's another creature here

which actually eats these cockroaches for breakfast.

And it's them that we're here to find.

'But to find this cockroach killer,

'I'm going to have to descend even further into the darkness

'of the cave system below.

'This place is definitely not for the faint-hearted.

'And it looks like my next critter has already had its breakfast.'

Of all of the horrors that live

in this absolutely nightmarish place,

down here is perhaps the most frightening.

And it's the animal that I'm suggesting for the Deadly 60.

Oh, crumbs! I have to say I absolutely hate them.

There you go. Ah! Ha! Ha!

That one just ran over my hand.

-OK, right. I'm going to be more gutsy this time.

-Careful.

There's one other side of that rock.

This is scutigera or the long-legged centipede.

I think there's another one on the other side of the rock as well,

so I'm being very careful about how I handle this.

It is quite venomous.

One of the guys living in the area was bitten

by one of these centipedes not so long ago

and spent a week in hospital

so I'm taking care not to get bitten.

They actually have like most centipedes...

Ah! It just ran over my arm.

Sounds obvious, but one of the main challenges of living in a cave,

is the dark and the fact that you can't actually see anything.

Scutigera still manages to be an incredible hunter

by using its long legs. Ah!

You can see as it moves, it'll just stop

and tap some of those legs over the rock's surface.

What it's doing is using each and every one of those feet

to feel everything about the surface it's moving on.

Building up a real mental picture of its environment,

and if there's anything there that it might be able to eat.

'It can grow as long as my forearm, has a mightily venomous bite,

'and with those long legs, there's nothing down here

'that can escape it.'

And nothing that's more guaranteed to give you nightmares.

So scutigera is going on the Deadly 60.

And I'm going somewhere else.

A truly terrifying cave predator.

Venomous, creepily quick and one of the most frightening creatures

I've seen on the Deadly 60.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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