Superpower Deadly 60

My name's Steve Backshall.

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.

(Deadly!)

This Deadly 60 is all about animal superheroes,

each with their own special powers.

Speed,

vision,

smell,

hearing,

touch

and senses we humans don't even possess.

Highly honed super powers.

Imagine having hearing so acute you could hear the footsteps of a mouse

or pinpoint a spider in its web or having such a highly developed nose

you could smell your next meal from 40 miles away.

But there's nothing mystical about these talents.

They can all be explained through science, so we've come to

Manchester Museum to put nature's miracles under the microscope.

Museums are incredibly important places

for the study of natural history.

Inside these cases are wonders and oddities from all over the world

and I can do a complete tour of the planet in a matter of minutes here.

I can see everything from the very smallest creatures that have

ever lived to the largest, like this mighty sperm whale.

'We're here at the museum to get beneath the fur

'and the feathers and find out the facts.'

Below me is a labyrinth of passages,

leading to endless hidden store rooms.

There are tens of thousands of specimens here, endless rooms,

boxes and drawers, filled with hidden wonders.

This is the skeleton of a cheetah

and obviously the cheetah's superpower is its incredible speed.

The cheetah can run from 0-60 miles per hour

in under 3 seconds,

accelerating faster than a Ferrari.

But how does it do this?

Well, we can tell so much about the function of an animal

from its skeleton and the fastest land animal has a bone structure

built for a high-velocity life.

I think the most interesting thing about it

really is how lightweight the bones are.

So lifting up this forelimb here, it almost feels

more like the bones of a bird than a cat.

They're incredibly lightweight, more lightweight for its size than

any other species of cat and obviously that means that this

animal has less weight to drag around with it.

And less weight equals more speed.

But that isn't the only secret to their superpower.

Lightness can certainly help with pace

but that alone doesn't explain the cheetah's superlative swiftness.

You can also see that this shoulder joint here is incredibly

flexible and the flexibility in these limbs and also in the

spine here means it can travel a huge distance with every step.

Flexibility at the hip and shoulder joints combine with a spine

that flexes like a bow before springing back with elastic force.

At full whack, the cheetah covers 7 metres with every bound.

Slow motion film footage has proved that a sprinting cheetah

spends more than half their time fully airborne.

Now this also is very, very interesting, the skull,

and it's tiny,

it's absolutely minute.

It has a massive nasal cavity here for sucking in huge

amounts of oxygen to help it keep running for longer.

'In South Africa, I had the opportunity to get unusually close

'to this fleet-footed feline

'and see a little of what makes them the Prince of Pace.'

You can see here the body shape of the cheetah.

Very small head, small ears, it's very, very aerodynamic.

It's not like a lion that has a really, really heavy, hefty skull.

The cheetah has to bring down quite small prey quickly

and very efficiently.

The cheetah's life is dominated by its high velocity

hunting method.

Unlike other felines, their claws do not retract

but are always extended for better grip.

The tail functions like a counterweight,

balancing them in tight turns.

It's no wonder that the cheetah can count speed

as its superpower.

So not quite faster than a speeding bullet,

but they certainly shift, which makes them true animal superheroes.

For many other animals,

their highly developed senses are taken to the status of a superpower.

Senses that enable them to discern their prey.

One animal superpower that we as human beings are definitely

lacking in is the sense of smell and perhaps the mammal that takes

the sense of smell to the ultimate extreme is the bear.

The bears are the largest land carnivores,

with bags of brute force, bulk and brawn.

But their superpower is surprisingly subtle.

That nose is home to one of the most acute senses of smell on earth.

With our puny sense of smell we wander around oblivious to the fact

that the air we breathe is alive with microscopic molecules of scent.

A bear, however, is hundreds,

perhaps thousands of times more proficient with pong

and is ceaselessly processing all these stinky signals.

These grizzlies may look like they're

ambling along aimlessly but as that nose drops to the snow,

it's just found out all it needs to know, purely through smell.

So these skulls here belong to a variety of different

kinds of bears.

We've got brown bear at the front,

but this is a skull of the polar bear, the mightiest land carnivore.

Being such a huge mammal, the polar bear relies on big prey,

fat-rich animals such as ringed and bearded seals

and even whales, gorging vast amounts of meat at one sitting.

The largest polar bear ever recorded weighed over

a tonne, as heavy and as long as a compact car.

Despite their size,

they can outpace the world's fastest man with ease.

But it's their sense of smell that's so special.

They must perceive the world in a whole different way to us,

like the air's painted with invisible scents and aromas,

telling of food, potential mates or rivals to be avoided.

The polar bear's skull is quite dog-like.

It has the same amount of teeth as you'll find

in a dog's skull and it has an enormous amount of the skull

given over to its sense of smell.

So for comparison, this is a cast of a human skull.

That little hole there is the nasal cavity.

Well, if I was to take a line down the centre of this skull here

I'd get this.

That's a cross-section of a polar bear's skull.

This little hole here is where the brain sits

and this massive area here is the nasal cavity.

Inside there is this twisted structure,

those are called turbinates,

and that increases the surface area of the inside of the nose.

That massive, complex nasal system is linked to tangles of nerves,

carrying back information to the brain.

The part of the brain that processes these smells is also

abnormally large and well-developed.

A polar bear can detect a seal that's hidden a metre below the ice

from over a mile away.

So this animal is, more than any other, dominated by smells,

so much so that polar bears have been seen walking 20,

perhaps 40 miles in a dead straight line towards a seal carcass

that there's no way they could have seen.

The only way they could have known it was there was by smelling it

from 20 or even 40 miles away.

This is an animal that takes the sense of smell

to the status of a superpower and certainly puts our own to shame.

Manchester Museum is home to 4.5 million objects.

But it's not just about long-dead specimens.

There are plenty of live animals here too and the next one

will help me illustrate our next super sense - eyesight.

Vision is the most important sense for us human beings.

But even our primary sense is pretty weak

when compared with our animal counterparts.

Geckos have great night sight and may be able to perceive colour

even when it gets dark.

Hippos can see even when they're swimming underwater,

and birds of prey like buzzards can spot the tiniest of movements

from a careless bunny from over a mile away.

There are many groups of animals that have incredibly

highly developed eyesight, but some of the most unusual,

certainly the most charismatic, belong to the chameleons.

These lizards are legendary for their colour-changing abilities

and their blink-and-you'll-miss-it quick tongue.

The tongue can be longer than its body, has a sticky tip

that can envelop an insect, and it can fire out in 1/125th of a second.

Argh!

But before that tongue can fire, the chameleon needs to locate a target.

And it does that with bizarre but brilliant eyesight,

so good it qualifies as a super sense.

This is a panther chameleon from Madagascar

and at the moment he's unusually mobile.

For the majority of time these animals stand still,

blending in with their background, waiting for prey to come close by.

The only thing that's really moving are those eyes.

Because those eyes move independently of one another,

one eye can look forwards while another eye looks backwards.

It gives them an unprecedented field of vision.

Each eye can twist around to span 180 degrees.

With each functioning independently,

it gives the chameleon near 360 degrees of vision.

It means the lizard can stand still

and its eyes do all the work of finding its prey.

To show you what it must be like to see like a chameleon,

I've got a Deadly 60 camera trick.

Let's imagine for the purpose of this experiment

that these two miniature cameras are eyes.

For most animals, those are pretty well set.

There's a certain amount of movement inside the socket

but nothing like what you see on a chameleon.

In a chameleon, I can have both eyes pointing forwards

and then one eye can turn straight upwards and look at the ceiling.

Perhaps go off to the side.

I can even look directly behind me.

And these eyes can be constantly scanning,

on the lookout for a potential meal.

There's my crew there in front of me

while the other eye is looking way off to the side.

But the crucial thing is

when these two eyes come back together,

because then they create an image

that essentially overlaps and it's now in three dimensions.

This is called binocular vision.

In this sphere of vision there is greater perception of depth,

greater perception of movement.

This is the part of vision that's essential for any predator.

Before a chameleon hunts, you'll always see it

bring both of its eyes together and focus directly on its prey.

Chameleons nail their victims nine times out of ten.

It can choose between 360-degree field of view

or highly focused binocular vision -

finding its prey with wandering eyeballs then locking in on it,

judging distance and movement - the perfect combination.

Once those two eyes are concentrated into the forward position

and the chameleon is aligned, they rarely, if ever, miss.

Bam! Absolutely sensational.

He is one messy eater.

So far, our animal superheroes have shown us

supreme special powers, and all revealed by their biology -

their skeletons, eyes and freakishly sensitive sense of smell.

But even the most brutal of predators can have a tender side.

In fact, many build up a picture of a hidden world

using nothing other than touch.

As human beings, we really feel the environment around us using touch,

and we actually underestimate quite how potent that can be.

I mean, you're always sensing the texture, the temperature,

perhaps the sharpness of objects.

We do that is by having hundreds or even thousands of nerve endings

close to the surface of the skin in our most sensitive areas.

That can be the soles of our feet,

the palms of our hands, perhaps our upper lips.

But some animals have actually done this to such a degree

that it's become a super sense, by developing whiskers,

like on this Californian sea lion.

Each whisker is connected to so many nerve endings

that they're far more sensitive than any cat could ever dream for.

The whiskers are connected to

bundles of exquisitely responsive nerve endings.

The tiniest movements excite them,

sending messages pinging to the brain.

This thermal image shows how hot they are,

kept active with warm blood even in a world of ice.

Living in extreme environments, they need an extreme super sense.

In fact, this can sense fish not just by actually touching

the animal itself, but by actually feeling the turbulence

or the wake that's left behind as a fish is swimming away.

During studies in Germany, researchers fitted a seal

with a mask and headphones to restrict its senses.

The aim was to find out what information it could pick up

using only its whiskers.

This superimposed white line shows the invisible wake

left by a small submarine,

much like the hidden trail left by a swimming fish.

Even with its other senses obscured, the seal followed the submarine

from the tiny turbulence it left behind.

Tracking down a long-gone fish by the mere memory of its movements -

without doubt a seal's winning whiskers are super-powered.

In the icy gloom of the Canadian seas,

we knew that underwater visibility was going to be an issue.

But not for the Stellar sea lions we were there to find.

They knew exactly where we were

and came thundering out of the pea-soup seas with genuine menace.

Oh!

He is gigantic! This is spectacular!

Well, I'm going to sit here on the bottom.

Oh, that's a big male Stellar sea lion

and a very frightening encounter as soon as we hit the bottom.

'We human beings rely so much on sight

'that when visibility's as bad as this, you instantly feel vulnerable.

'The Stellar sea lions, though, could pick up everything

'they needed to know about us purely through their whiskers.'

It's thought that some seals can actually detect a swimming fish

from as much as 100 metres away...

..and sensing that fish up to 35 seconds after it's swum past.

Their super sense enables them to put their superior

twisting, turning, swimming skills to ultimate lethal effect.

Our next superpower also involves sensing vibrations

that are invisible to us.

It's hyper-powered hearing - the ability to perceive sound

by detecting vibrations through the ears.

There you go, there you go.

Isn't that beautiful?

Amongst the birds, the group that perhaps have

the most highly defined superpowers are the owls.

This is a great grey owl and it has

some of the most extraordinary hearing found on any species.

The reason for that is that the great grey owl

lives in the northern hemisphere in places where there tends to be

a lot of snow, and their prey is very often hidden completely

by that boundary of white thick snow.

So eyesight is of no use whatsoever. Instead, it needs to be able to

pick up on the tiny scuttling sounds made as those animals scurry around.

The thing that's most instantly evident is this

extraordinary facial disc.

It's the largest found on any owl and it's made up of

very stiff feathers which divert sound back towards the ears,

which are hidden here, beneath these softer feathers.

The face of the great grey owl acts very much like a satellite dish,

channelling even the faintest of sounds towards the owl's ears.

This is enough for this animal to pinpoint anything scuttling around,

even if it's totally hidden, even if it can't see it.

As some of the animals they're hunting also hear pretty well,

the owl has a special mechanism that means death comes from above,

with no sound at all.

So, these wings here have, along the leading edge,

special feathers which baffle the movement of wind over the wings.

The great grey owl flies in towards its prey

in almost total silence, and then can punch down through snow

that can be solid enough to hold a human being's weight,

and catch the vole that's moving around beneath it.

Which means that a lemming

scuttling around in a subterranean corridor of snow is still not safe.

However, there's one animal that takes hearing to a whole new level.

Even hyper-hearing owls are outdone by our next nocturnal beast.

For starters they can fly which, for a mammal,

is already pretty special.

So the next group of creatures are airborne animals

that do the majority of their hunting or foraging by night.

But unlike the owls, they're not birds at all.

In fact they're mammals, the only mammals that can truly fly -

they're bats.

And their primary superpower is called echo-location -

locating objects using echoes.

And in the Gomantong caves in Borneo, we saw this first hand.

Living in this part of the world, you would not want to be an insect.

Every one of these bats is equipped with an echo-location system.

It's very much like the sonar on a submarine,

you've probably seen it in movies.

You hear a sound - "bop" - which disappears off into the distance

and it bounces back off objects that are in front of it.

In a bat, that click can reverberate off the smallest of insects,

even something as small as a midge.

The sound pattern that comes back tells the bat

exactly where it is and then, bam, the bat catches the insect.

We human beings actually have the ability to perceive a certain amount

of our environment using sound,

it's just nothing like as highly developed

as the sophisticated super sense of bats.

As a way of figuring this out for yourself,

try closing your eyes and bringing your hand towards you.

Keep on talking as you do so and you should be able to hear,

from the change in tone as the sound bounces back to you,

that you've got an object in front of you.

That's kind of how the bat's echo-location works.

Any superhero would be proud with an ability so acute.

Bouncing invisible sound waves off the world around them,

they can detect the presence of distant insects,

as well as discerning their size, their speed,

even predicting where they might move to.

For a bat, it's all about constantly updating

an image of the world around you, using those ultrasonic clicks.

Seeing with sound is a sonic superpower

that means that bats can hunt in total darkness,

munching perhaps 3,000 mosquitoes in one night,

or snatching a spider clean off its web.

So we humans are put to shame in terms of sight...

sound...

..and smell.

But it gets worse because we're yet to deal with

one of the groups of animals that have the most different superpowers.

They've been around for an estimated 500 million years -

..the sharks.

With two-thirds of their brain dedicated to smell,

sharks can detect one drop of blood in 1 million drops of water.

They can hear seals from 250 metres away,

and even see in the dark better than cats.

So, far from a mindless killer, the shark is one of the most

highly adapted and perceptive of all predators.

But they possess one sixth sense superpower

that I personally think is pretty much unbeatable.

What that is is their ability to sense the weak electrical fields

that are given off by their prey.

This ability is called electro-reception.

It's the shark's power to detect the electrical signals

that are given off by every living creature.

And you can see that most evidently in this animal.

This is a baby hammerhead shark.

All over the snout of sharks

are little pores called ampullae of Lorenzini.

Those are filled with a special kind of jelly

which picks up the tiniest electrical fields.

I've actually seen great hammerheads underwater

and it was an awful lot bigger than this little one here.

Simon, Simon, Simon!

This is one of the most awesome creatures in the sea.

I don't believe it. It's a great hammerhead.

This is absolutely incredible.

It's come right up to us, right up in front of the cameraman.

Oh, my god, I don't believe it! I do not believe it!

That is out of this world!

As that shark got in close to us and came right up to the camera,

it actually shook its head towards the camera.

I don't know if that was a threat display of some kind

or if it was trying to sort out what was going on

with the electrical impulses coming from the camera itself,

but there's no doubt hammerheads use that super sense to find their prey.

It works in a very similar way to a metal detector.

Metal detectors can detect the very tiny electro-magnetic signals

that are given off by conductive metals.

Somewhere in this sand is a coin and I'm going to try and find it

in the same way that a hammerhead would try and find prey

buried beneath the sand.

The hammerhead would move along the bottom...

..doing circuits...

..until it picks up a very weak field.

The animals it's feeding on can't help but give off those fields,

even if they're lying perfectly still.

Just the beating of their heart is enough to create a field

that the hammerhead can sense.

When it does sense that, its senses will fire off,

telling it to target in on its food.

The hammerhead's electro-reception is so effective

that it's comparable to us

detecting a household battery from half a mile away.

BEEPING

It's right there. OK, I've got a beep.

Once the hammerhead has had one signal - there it is...

..it'll usually circle around and around,

using its flexible neck to find the epicentre of the signal.

BEEPING

It's right there.

And then it'll go in for the kill.

And there it is.

In this case, a two pence piece.

In the shark's case, lunch.

A fish can hide itself completely.

It can be still, silent, scentless, it doesn't matter.

The shark's special superpower will still find it

and when it does, there's only going to be one winner.

We tend to think of ourselves

as being the most highly-evolved species on earth.

But, as we've clearly seen, we're surrounded by animal superheroes

with special abilities beyond our wildest dreams.

Predators have superpowers and they always have.

Join me next time as I continue my search for the Deadly 60.

Yes, I see it, it's enormous!

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

(Deadly!)