Florida Deadly 60

My name's Steve Backshall. Wooh!

And this is my search for the Deadly 60.

That's not just animals that are deadly to me,

but animals that are deadly in their own world.

My crew and I are travelling the planet.

And you're coming with me!

Every step of the way.

WHISPERED: Deadly!

Deadly is in Florida, in the south-east of the US of A.

Despite being a well populated state, it has plenty of wild places

and much of that is swamp.

The swamplands of Florida have something very special about them.

There's a really mystery to them, they're slightly sinister as well.

You kind of expect that there's going to be some kind of monster

lurking in these dark waters and of course, this being Deadly 60,

there are monsters here.

The question is, which one are we going to find?

When you talk about swamps, I guess people tend to think of nasty,

stinking boggy places that are just alive with nasty mosquitoes

and other things that bite and sting,

but to me, this is as serene, as beautiful,

as perfect an environment as you could ever hope to find.

It's just a wonderful place to go looking for wildlife.

After hours trudging through the squelchy waters,

Simon the soundie nearly steps on our first prospect.

Whoa, I've got something, got something!

OK, OK, OK!

Ah, yes, fantastic, it's a beauty!

Well spotted, Simon!

And it's in a beautiful position.

Look at that!

It's the cottonmouth, one of the most venomous snakes in Florida.

They're also known as water moccasins,

as they spend their lives in or near water,

taking advantage of all the prey that lives in the swamp.

They're vipers, and like all members of the viper family,

are well-camouflaged, patient,

fast-striking

and possess fiery venom that can stop their prey dead.

Now, its first instinct is to head for water

because this is extremely unusual amongst the vipers

in that it spends almost all of its time in or very close to water.

The scientific name of this snake is piscivora,

which means fish eater,

and it is a stunning, stunning snake.

Look at that, little strike there, opening its mouth,

showing off the white interior that gives it its name, the cottonmouth.

It is a viper, and vipers,

generally speaking, tend to feed on warm-blooded prey,

things like birds and rodents,

so this animal is highly, highly unusual

in the fact that it goes for fish and frogs.

When they come to strike,

they swing forward and stab into their prey,

injecting venom which actually

affects the blood and the circulatory system.

It's fast acting, it's potent.

I certainly wouldn't want to get bitten.

And they're just a snake that really typifies this environment.

It could not be more at home than in amongst all of these plants,

just swimming when it needs to,

crawling onto dry land when it needs to,

and hunting anything that it finds around the water's edge

and in the water itself.

The cottonmouth or water moccasin is the classic snake of the swamps.

But I'm not ready to leave this sublime habitat just yet.

These murky waters are home to many other predatory beasts.

Ooh, that's deeper than I imagined.

Let's see what we can find.

It's always exciting wandering through a swamp like this.

In reality, if there are alligators or snakes around here,

they'll sense me coming and probably make a break for it

before I'm anywhere near them.

But not always.

It does make things kind of, well, kind of spicy.

Being up to your waist in gloomy waters filled with potent predators

certainly heightens the senses.

I've spent some of the most exhilarating days of my life

in places like this.

In order to enhance my chances,

we left out some baited traps overnight

in the hope that they'd lure in some lethal beasts.

Let's see what we've got.

No, no success from that one.

No.

Oh! Lots of catfish!

Well, it's a shame I'm not fishing for my dinner.

Oh, that is a good-sized catfish.

You see these long sensory barbells

for tapping around in the darkness,

finding its food,

its great long whiskers

extending out everywhere.

It's kind of a charismatic-looking fish, that.

Well, if I was fishing, that would be a really, really good haul.

But that's not what I'm looking for.

A couple more traps to check.

Ooh, look at that!

A tiny, itty-bitty little terrapin.

We are getting a wonderful cross-section

of the life found around here.

Look at that.

It actually had a little bit of a snap at me.

It's certainly got ideas above its station.

Even at this size, I think it would probably hurt quite a lot

if you got bitten by that.

Kind of cute, but a little bit diddy to be making it onto my Deadly 60.

There's one particular swampland oddity I want to show you,

but we've only got one trap left and there's been no sign of it.

Looks like it might be back to the drawing board.

This is quite creepy cos you,

you can only just feel around with your toes for what's below.

Now, what have we got in here?

Oh, my goodness!

Success!

HE LAUGHS

Let's see if I can transfer it to the bucket.

In it goes.

I'm just going to wait for him to settle a little bit,

and then handle him very, very gently

because apparently, these things have quite a fierce bite

and I don't particularly want to get nailed.

Ooh!

It's really silky feeling.

You can see already that I'm getting lots of goo and slime

on my fingers.

This...

Ah! No!

That is one of the most difficult animals to handle

I've ever seen.

-HE LAUGHS

-OK.

This is amphiuma.

It's a salamander and it has,

I guess, in every way,

the same body form that you would expect to see in an eel.

The body is long, dark, cylindrical and very, very slimy.

But actually, it's an amphibian

and much more closely related to newts, frogs and toads.

We do like odd animals on the Deadly 60

and you don't get much odder than this.

You can see the tiny remnants of limbs, both front and back.

It has got four legs, although they don't do very much.

And it's pretty sure that perhaps, in a few thousand years,

these legs will have atrophied away to nothing at all.

It may look pretty weird writhing through my hands like this,

but at night time, this turns into a remarkable,

incredibly active hunter.

It'll go out in search of things like crayfish and small fish

and snap them down with great force and a formidable bite strength.

The mouth is lined on both jaws with sharp, small, pointed teeth

and then it wrenches backwards using its whole body strength

to tear away at anything that's attacking it.

I certainly don't want to get bitten.

There's a line of dots running down the length of its body,

which is much like the lateral line you find in fish.

And that can sense the movement of animals around it.

It's functioning like a complete sixth sense for this animal

to zone in on its prey.

I think it's strangely wonderful!

And the amphiuma is going on my list!

If I can keep a hold of it!

These opportunistic hunters eat anything they can catch.

They have a bone crushing bite

and a super sixth sense to detect their prey.

It's the amphiuma. It's weird, it's wonderful,

it's... Deadly!

Leaving the swamps, we head for the dry pine woodlands

that cover much of Florida.

We're on the hunt for one of America's top predators.

The snake we're looking for is the most iconic and feared

in this part of the world.

In the spring, they're not massively active

and very hard to find. So luckily, we've got professional help.

Bruce Means has been studying snakes longer than I've been alive.

He uses transmitters to track their movements,

so we may just have a chance of finding one.

The beeping from this system here means that we have a snake

somewhere nearby. Let's go see if we can find it.

Let's do it. We need to be careful!

50 species of snake can be found in Florida,

but only six of them are venomous.

We met one of those, the cottonmouth, in the swamps.

But out here in the drier pine woods lives a truly regal reptile.

It's highly venomous, has some of the longest fangs of any snake...

..and delivers a massive amount of venom with each bite.

It's the largest rattlesnake on the planet - the Eastern diamondback.

This is Bruce's research area.

And as a snake lover, he does all he can to make it snake-friendly.

If you really want to attract reptiles to the place where you live

you can't do better than putting out some old timber.

I don't believe it! We have a snake, flat snake!

Where'd it go, where'd it go?

-There!

-He's coming to you! I got him!

There he is! Well done!

It's a racer.

Extremely glossy. Looks like it's just shed its skin.

And it's in absolutely glorious condition.

How alert it is! How keen it is to move off!

I can feel in my hands, it's very, very warm.

It's been lying underneath these slabs of tin,

gaining warmth and it's absolutely full of beans.

Look at that! The tongue going crazy on the air!

It's trying to take shelter in Richard's camera at the moment!

This is one of the fastest snakes you will ever see on the ground.

They move with just extraordinary pace.

They've got a very glossy underside, so very little friction as it moves across the ground.

But it can still grip with those belly scales

and move with sinuous movements of its body, driving itself forward.

Probably faster than I can run.

This snake feeds on small rodents, things that we consider pests.

This snake is actually extremely beneficial to us human beings.

And also, really rather beautiful.

I reckon this is going to be a good snake day!

Snake life is all about temperature.

If it's warm enough for one species to be around, there may be others.

Despite having the rattlesnakes tagged with radio transmitters,

it's still proving exceptionally hard to find them.

It's frustrating that there is a snake nearby, but we can't see it.

They are phenomenally well-camouflaged animals.

The diamondback coloration that gives them their name

helps them to blend in perfectly with this kind of vegetation.

Knowing we could step on one at any second, we're all a bit jumpy.

Argh, oh!

HE LAUGHS

You scared the living daylights out of me!

He just trod on a log and it jumped up in front of me!

HE LAUGHS

-Ah, ah.

-All right, I'm going to turn this off.

I've seen a snake, now y'all have to find it.

-Oh, my goodness!

-Good for you!

-That's enormous!

-Good man!

-That's absolutely huge!

Oh, my goodness, that is the biggest rattlesnake I have ever seen.

Wow!

The Eastern diamondback is in fact the largest venomous snake

found in North America.

OK, what Simon, the sound recordist, is hearing now...

..is, to my mind, THE sound of North America.

It's the warning rattle of this extraordinary snake.

I kind of feel, even if you've never seen a rattlesnake before,

you'd know that that means trouble.

And this is obviously the way this snake has of scaring away

something that might be a threat.

And it's just the most fabulous sound.

As we approached, the snake was stretched out, basking,

soaking up the sun's warmth.

Now, it's drawn itself back into a much more defensive position.

It's clearly ready to strike if it needs to, here.

The head's drawn back into a wonderful S-shape which gives it

room to strike out. And the tail is held up in the air,

and being shaken around.

And the reason it makes that sound is that there are dried up cusps

which develop each time the snake sheds its skin,

and forms that fabulous rattle.

It's the snake's last warning. A means of frightening away

anything threatening it can't eat.

Wow!

You can hear, as I've got closer to it,

the intensity of the rattle has just gone up.

The muscles that vibrate that tail

could well be the fastest moving of any vertebrate.

It almost creates a buzz, like an insect's wings.

For me, encountering an Eastern diamondback rattlesnake

in the wild is one of the great wildlife experiences of the Americas.

There is something else to show you about this snake,

but I need to get it into a much more controlled situation.

These animals have remarkably sophisticated teeth.

Just hidden underneath these flaps of skin here,

those there are its fangs, there, just being exposed.

They're absolutely enormous. Very, very thin and sharp

and they're hollow as well,

so the venom will trickle down the inside of those fangs,

you can see it just there, kind of yellow,

and be injected into its prey.

When the snake's mouth is closed, those fangs fold back

along the roof of the mouth, like that and then as it strikes,

it opens its mouth, just like it's doing now,

swings them forward and stabs them into its prey.

The strike is so fast that if you blinked, you'd miss it.

It gushes venom down hollow hypodermic fangs

that destroy blood cells and tissues, getting to work instantly.

If left alone, they won't bite humans, but a rat or a rabbit

would be a corpse within minutes.

The Eastern diamondback rattlesnake,

with its hinged, hypodermic needle fangs,

and that wonderful warning rattle,

one of the most impressive snakes in the whole world,

and definitely going on the Deadly 60.

The largest rattlesnake in the world, with a fast strike

and highly toxic venom.

And that rattle lets other animals know to stay well away.

The Eastern diamondback rattlesnake. Small furry mammals, beware.

Deadly!

So we started this show in the water and that's where we'll end up,

but this time at the coast.

We're travelling to the south of the Sunshine State, the Florida Keys.

The Keys have around 1,700 islands, surrounded by warm, clear waters,

and are home to everyone's favourite marine marvel.

The animal we hope to find today is one of the most familiar,

and best-loved in the whole world. The bottle-nosed dolphin.

Despite their friendly appearance,

this is an animal that is a calculated hunter

and what we hope to see today is a hunting co-ordinated strategy

that occurs nowhere else on earth.

Dolphins are up there

with the most intelligent animals to feature on Deadly 60.

Some of them even protect their noses with sponges

when nosing in the seabed for fish.

Around the world, they've developed ingenious methods

to catch their prey, relying on communication.

This allows them to work efficiently as a team,

deliberately stranding fish that they can then devour.

But in this part of Florida,

they've learnt something even more inspired.

It's called mudringing.

The dolphins stir up mud from the shallow seabed with their tails,

to create rings of murk.

The fish feel hemmed in,

panic and try to jump to freedom,

but only leap straight into the dolphins' waiting mouths.

These are the only bottlenose dolphins

that have been documented catching fish this way.

We don't just want to see dolphins,

but to watch mudringing at work.

It is absolutely perfect for mudringing.

We're looking out -

there's small islands covered with mangroves, loads of bays, inlets,

channels with nice shallow water

and lots of their chosen food fish, which is mullet.

The sky is completely blue, the seas are totally flat...

so far, things are looking good.

Dolphin expert Laura Engleby was the first person to document

this remarkable team strategy.

So, who better to have taking us out into the bay?

And already, it's a dolphin day.

This is perfect.

We have a small group ahead of us.

One of them is a mother with a young calf.

What we have to do now is assess what's going on with this group.

A dolphin's day will go through a whole different range of activities,

from feeding, to socialising, to moving, to hunting.

At the moment, it looks as though they're just playing around

and in fact heading straight towards our boat, probably to check us out.

Oh!

Doesn't matter who you are,

you can be the world's most hardened naturalist,

but, still, it puts a great big grin on your face being close to one.

As our boat moves,

it creates a pressure wave ahead of it

and the dolphins are almost surfing it.

It's called bow wave riding and it's only when they get this close

that you get any sense of the scale of the animals

and how each one is certainly bigger than I am.

And they clearly just enjoy playing around,

in front of the boat.

Life as a dolphin must be so much fun!

Look at that! The youngster, probably only a few months old,

clasped right by its mother's side.

Obviously, that's for protection, but also it helps

in that it can actually get some kind of drive

from being alongside its mother.

The wake that she creates will carry it along.

This is wonderful!

Wow!

Wonderful as this is, ideally, we'd like the dolphins

to stop paying quite so much attention to us

and start thinking about feeding a bit.

This lot are too busy mucking about to get to hunting.

If we are going to see mudringing in action,

we'll have to find a more hungry dolphin pod.

These paradise lagoons hold hidden dangers.

We could be in trouble.

It's all getting a little bit hairy at the moment.

We're finding ourselves in very, very shallow water

and there is a real danger of us becoming grounded.

If we got stranded here,

it would mean dragging the boat miles through waist-deep mud.

That, or a call to the Coastguard.

So, when the waters finally get deeper,

we all breathe a sigh of relief

and we've got dolphins.

There's probably, I reckon,

eight or nine dolphins all coming together

over quite shallow water ahead of us.

They're moving with purpose

and it's entirely possible that they're about to start mudringing.

Oh, there's another two coming in!

Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes. There, there, there!

And it's about to happen right in front of us!

Oh, my goodness!

It's happening!

Yes, there you go!

The dolphins are in full predatory mode, working together,

circling the fish, trapping them in their mud ring.

Hey! Good catch!

See that? Fantastic!

To our left, another small group is going to work on a shoal of mullet.

Conditions here are clearly perfect. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

They're going absolutely crazy now!

Oh! Wow!

This is extraordinary!

Dolphins at the surface with their mouths open.

Just waiting to catch the mullet that are herded towards them.

This is all about increasing their efficiency.

By working together as a group, they're managing to get more mullet.

They're coordinating and communicating,

using sound, using ultrasonic clips

that are mostly too high for human ears to appreciate.

All these animals have their own roles that have been assigned

and they're just working like a kind of regiment, really.

It's just fantastic to watch.

You can see on the surface of the water,

where the sand's been churned up

where that one dolphin has gone around and created a barricade

of sandy water. And the mullet leap to try and escape from it,

straight into the waiting jaws of all his pals.

You see these dolphins hunting in conditions like these,

you can really appreciate

quite what an extraordinary method of catching fish this is.

The water quality here is absolutely lousy,

there's almost no visibility.

They use sound to echo-locate and communicate.

Zero visibility is irrelevant to them.

This intelligence, innovation and teamwork

are what make the bottlenose dolphins the perfect predator.

Magical, mudringing marvels.

Coordinated, cooperative, intelligent,

bottlenose dolphins are on the list.

With bigger brains than human beings,

co-operating and communicating

and always learning new methods of overwhelming prey.

Being a fish must be a miserable life,

especially when you've got this lot on your case.

-Bottlenose dolphins.

-Deadly!

Join me next time as I continue my search

for the Deadly 60.

I've got my first glowing gremlin in the dark. Fantastic!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd