Super Swarms Wild & Weird

# Marauding mice and walls of ice

# And sharks on a golfing spree!

# Cicada swarms and martian storms

# And fish walking out of the sea!

-# Really?!

-Elks in trees and foaming seas

-# And giant mayfly mobs!

-Huh?!

# Zombie snails and friendly whales

-# And completely frozen frogs!

-You what?!

# They're wild and weird Wild and weird

# Really, really wild And really, really weird

# They're wild and weird Wild and weird

# They're really, really wild

# They're really, really wild and weird! #

Today, it's Super Swarms,

including the mouse plague that took Australian farmers by storm...

'They're in my boots!'

..monarch butterflies in their millions on their Mexican migration,

and a locust swarm of Biblical proportions.

Treehouse is all ready for you, Naomi. Just as you requested.

You'll be as snug as a bug in a rug.

Whoo!

-Goodness me, it's roasting in here!

-Oh, yeah.

It's nice, isn't it?

No, it's like a sauna!

Well, yeah. I've turned the boiler up, just like you asked.

-I didn't ask you to do that.

-Yeah, you did.

You said, "Meet me on the sofa and make sure it's warm."

No, I said, "Meet me on the sofa and make sure it's SWARMS."

You know, swarms on the TV.

Oh...

I'm a bit embarrassed now, actually.

-Yeah, I might go put some clothes on.

-Yeah. Hurry back.

-Will do.

Uh...Tim!

You'll be needing this.

Stop looking!

Saw you laugh, then.

For our first super swarm, we head to Australia.

'Picture the scene.

'It's 1993 on a farm in southern Australia,

'and a desperate farmer

'has got something of a mouse problem on her hands.'

'Yeah, no kidding.'

They're in my boots!

'It gets worse. Check out what she does now...'

'She doesn't go in, does she?'

Oh, yuck!

'No! No! Don't go inside!'

Why would you go inside?

She has to go in, her pigs are in there.

'And the mice are so desperate for food

'they're literally trying to eat her pigs alive.'

'Fast-forward to 2011

'and it wasn't much better...'

New crops have been devoured

across South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia

in the worst mouse plague in almost two decades.

-'Meet sheep farmer Ian.'

-'Hello, Ian.'

'As well as feeding all his sheep,

'he found he was inadvertently feeding millions of tiny mouths,

'thanks to his massive storage barn of grain.'

Whoa, whoa. Hang on a minute. Let's just go back a bit...

'Yeah, look.

'He's left his barn doors wide open! It's no wonder he's got mice.'

-Finished?

-Yeah.

I was just stating the obvious.

Oh!

We've tried poisoning them,

we've tried all sorts to try and cut their numbers.

Over here, quick!

'No way!'

'Way.'

Nothing works.

OK, here are the stats.

A mouse eats up to a third of its body weight every day,

that's about eight grams.

Multiply that by the estimated half-a-million-plus mice

which are living on Ian's farm, and they could consume...

Whoa, whoa! Don't tell me, don't tell me. Seeing if I'm still sharp up top.

Right, 500,000 mice...

The grain, well, they can consume eight grams a day.

That's what you said. So, 500,000...

OK, yes. Ha-ha!

-Lots of it.

-Thanks, Tim. I don't know what I would do without you.

Or Greg, for that matter.

WHISPERS: Who's Greg?

He's been studying Australia's mouse plagues,

and he's noticed something pretty unusual.

He goes out of focus before he talks?

The strange things about house mice is that,

although they've got almost a global distribution now,

the only places where they cause these massive mouse plagues

appear to be in Australia and in Western China.

-I tell you what the Aussies need.

-What?

-Couple of good old-fashioned mice-munching predators.

-Precisely.

And that's the problem.

In Australia, mice have few natural predators

and the local kangaroos and koalas are no competition whatsoever.

-So, when conditions are right, nothing can stop them.

-Hmm.

Except for one man I know...

PHONE RINGS Bear with me.

Hello, mate. It's Tim.

-How you doing, PP?

-Who's PP?

Pied Piper.

Listen, bit of a problem in Oz - you available?

Ah. Really?

-That's a shame. Still in Hamelin.

-Aw.

-Yeah.

All right, mate, not to worry.

Yeah. Cheers, then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Those rats, they'll be the death of him.

-Are you ready for our next super swarm?

-Yeah! Go on.

-Where are we off to?

-Mexico.

Mexico!

Hold there one second.

CLOCK TICKS

Sorry about this.

Yeah. All right.

I am ready. Arriba!

'In early October 2011,

'the Denning family were hiking through woodland in central Mexico

'when they became part of one of the most extraordinary events

'in the natural world.'

Look at them all! Do you see that, guys?

-'A multitude of monarch butterflies.'

-Wow!

'A vision in orange, carpeting small stands of pines.'

'I bet he's thinking how awesome that is.'

This is awesome.

'Ha-ha! Told you.'

Hard to believe just days before these trees would have been bare.

So, where have all these swathes of butterflies come from,

I hear you ask?

I didn't ask, but, yeah, I'd like to know.

And why are they here?

Again, I didn't ask,

but I am pretty curious now.

If only there was - I don't know -

a butterfly expert to help fill in all the blanks...

-There is! Richard Fox.

-Brilliant.

He's spent years studying the intricacies of butterfly behaviour.

Basically, it's too cold in the wintertime

across most of the United States,

and certainly in Canada, for these butterflies to survive.

So they've got to move or die.

Ah!

So the monarchs are quite literally flying for their lives

away from the cold North, where they usually live.

Yep, and it's a seriously long-haul flight.

Starting in Canada, these butterflies cover over 2,000 miles

and fly for anything up to 10 weeks to reach these winter roosts.

That is INSANE.

They must have a MASSIVE brain.

-They have a brain the size of a pinhead.

-Well, that's his opinion.

And yet they're able to navigate across a continent.

Which is remarkable when you think about it,

-because you have got a brain the size of an orange...

-Thank you.

-..and yet you can't find your way to the shower.

-Yes, I can!

HE SNIFFS HIMSELF

And they're not flying blind.

Monarchs come equipped with some serious in-built sat nav.

In their brains they have a compass,

which uses sunshine as a way of working out north and south.

And in their antennae, their feelers,

they have a clock

which enables them to take account

for the passage of the sun across the sky.

As they travel further south,

monarchs from all over the United States are funnelled together

by the Gulf Coast and the Rocky Mountains.

In a good year, I reckon that could be the best part

of a million monarchs.

In a good year it might be 150 million monarchs.

Erm...OK. Move on.

With so many butterflies,

it literally becomes an orange explosion.

Speaking of orange explosions...

DYNAMITE BOOMS

I will not be trying that again. Hang on... What?

Do you want to go back to Australia for our final super swarm?

Yeah, let's do that.

In 2010, the country was hit by a plague

which was both uncontrollable and unstoppable.

LAUGHTER

Ow, ow, ow, ow!

Hang on one second...

Never, ever go to Australia.

Yeah. Sorry about that. OK.

Oww!

At this primary school near the outback town of Mildura,

the kids were enjoying their playtime when the swarm hit.

There were millions.

Billions.

Quite a lot of them.

It just felt disgusting.

Mostly all the girls were just going, "Ah!"

See, on their own, they don't look too scary, do they?

HE SCREAMS

It's just like that lad said. You big wuss!

Why would you do that?

But whilst the locusts were causing chaos in the town,

it was altogether more serious out amongst the farms.

Here, the locusts were not just an inconvenience,

they were a devastating force.

Professor Simpson is one of the world's leading experts on locusts,

and knows all about their destructive power.

They eat, each day, about their own body weight in food.

And in the interest of scientific experiments,

-that would be like you eating all of these doughnuts.

-What's that?

I've got to eat all these doughnuts?! Ha! Anything for you.

Mmm.

Oh.

It's a big one. Mm!

And when you multiply that single locust

by hundreds of millions, or billions,

you can get the sort of devastation that we've seen.

But what's really weird about locusts

is that they all start life as a harmless little grasshopper.

One who shuns company and prefers a solitary life.

Aww! All alone.

So what could possibly change them from a shy singleton

into a voracious, gregarious plague insect?

I bet the prof knows.

When they get brought together by food and their environment,

they flip from being shy, solitary animals

into being actively aggregating, potentially swarm-forming creatures.

The prof had a theory

that it was something to do with

being in close contact with other locusts,

and so they set about testing this theory in a rather unusual way.

You know, I'd imagine

that with an epidemic of this proportion on their hands,

the experts are working around the clock

to come with some real hi-tech solution to all this.

So we sat for many, many hours in hot rooms,

tickling locusts on different body parts with a paintbrush...

Brilliant. Great to see the world's best minds on the case there.

-Yeah, I wonder what that revealed.

-Yeah. Ugh!

And we found that touch alone

can cause a locust to switch, very quickly,

into the swarming form.

After five weeks, their wings are finally ready,

so now the locusts can take to the air

and, for the farmers, this is the start of the real nightmare.

These airborne swarms have become unstoppable eating machines.

Finished?

Yeah. I can't move, let alone sprout wings and fly.

Meanwhile, back at Sydney University,

-Professor Simpson has made a remarkable discovery.

-Yeah.

Let me guess, his antics with a paintbrush revealed

that, in fact, each locust was trying to eat the one in front of it.

-Correct!

-Really?

They're on a forced march, if you like.

To avoid being somebody else's lunch,

they're chasing the lunch in front of them.

Pretty crazy, huh?

Australia's 2010 locust plague

lasted 12 long months.

And the food bill?

2 billion!

-Which reminds me, you need to pay me for all those doughnuts.

-What?!

-And you need to work them all off. Come on, get up, give me 10.

-Oh, OK.

Ah! One.

Ooh! Two.

-See you next time.

-Oooh, three.

I don't feel very well. Ugh!

# Wild and weird, wild and weird

# Really, really wild and really, really weird

# They're wild and weird Wild and weird

# They're really, really wild and really, really wild and weird. #

Wild and weird!