Animal Oddities 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. #

It's animal oddities as frogs and toads

demonstrate some unusual parental care.

Here they come, here they come!

The two-headed snake that doesn't know which way to turn...

..and the army ants on a march to the death.

Naomi! Naomi, come quick!

There's something really wrong with the telly!

Where are you?

In here!

In where?

In here, in the TV!

You're in the TV?

-Yeah.

-How did you get in there?

I don't know!

I was playing around with the remote control, pressing a few buttons,

and then I got sucked into the box and now I can't get out!

OK, well...

Let me press a few buttons. Hold on.

Is that better?

Je ne sais pas. Oh, non!

C'est terrible!

Ah, madame!

Well, that's no good. That's you in another language.

Er... What about

this?

Calm down! I'm trying to help here.

Erm... That any good?

I don't... Ooh! Ah!

I'm out of sync! Now my voice is out of sync!

Please, come on! Help me!

Last one...

Ooh!

Thanks for that. That was really odd.

Yeah, almost on a par with our first animal oddity.

Check out this bizarre and quite possibly gruesome

behaviour that was caught on camera.

Here they come! Here they come!

Get 'em! Oh, my God. Look at her.

That one's trying to poke its head out.

Eugh! Are those aliens erupting from its back?

Not exactly.

This is the Surinam toad,

and those are her babies.

Babies? Hold it there.

Why would she want to turn her back into a skin-crawling care facility?

Well, press play.

Dr Ian Stephen from the Zoological Society Of London

might just be able to shed some light on this.

The problem with amphibian eggs is that they're

highly nutritious bundles of food, so lots of things like to eat them.

So things such as snakes, fish, birds

and invertebrates all find them incredibly tasty.

They eat the toads eggs!

Why?

Why is nature so cruel?

HE SOBS

CHEERING

Ah, thank you. Thank you. I'm here all week.

Oh, please. Oh, too kind.

Thank you. Thank you.

And so what better way to keep them safe than by quite literally

keeping them as close to you as possible until they hatch?

When the female spawns, the male takes the eggs themselves

and presses them on to the female's back.

This might be 200, 250 eggs.

200! 250?

What difference does an extra 50 eggs pressed into your back make

when there's already 200 there?

Huh, nature's just weird.

What's incredible is that a layer of skin then develops over those eggs.

About 70 days later,

tiny little fully-formed froglets actually emerge from the

female's back, almost like something from a scene of an alien film.

Eugh!

Ew!

They're coming out now. They're coming out.

-They're coming out.

-Look, you can see its foot.

Freedom!

That was a weird toad.

Mm. Frogs are weirder.

-No way!

-Mm.

The only way a frog could out-weird that toad was

if it was to eat its eggs and then develop the babies in its mouth.

You're kidding me, right?

The Darwin's frog takes reproduction to the next level.

They actually take their eggs inside their bodies.

The female frog lays their eggs in sort of damp leaf litter.

The male then takes up the eggs four to five days later

and actually takes the eggs themselves into its vocal sac,

and that's where the eggs then go on to develop into tadpoles.

About 70 days later...

70 days!

Mm-mm?

Yep.

..the male quite literally coughs up the tiny little froglets.

And, yes, they are complete,

fully-formed frogs coming out of his mouth.

Now, obviously the vocal sacs aren't huge,

so we're only looking at about 15 to 20 in total.

Oh, only 15 to 20 baby frogs

in there

for 70 days.

Yeah, it certainly puts a whole new slant on the expression

"frog in your throat".

-Yeah.

-I think we need an antidote to all this oddness.

-Fox on a trampoline?

-Ooh!

Well, I'm not saying that isn't odd,

but it's not going to put you off your tea.

Any idea why they're doing this?

-Do you like bouncing?

-Yeah.

Fun, isn't it? Same for the fox!

Fox...

-Right, break over.

-OK.

-OK, you've heard of a snake.

-Yeah.

Well, have you heard of a two-headed snake?

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

A two-headed snake?

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

Yes. A two-headed snake.

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

Yeah, I have. Yeah.

Her name is Medusa,

and she's a two-headed albino Honduran milk snake.

That's her owner, Ben Siegel.

I've been keeping snakes since I was six, so about 34 years,

and never quite seen one like her before.

We love her. She's really special to us.

She's perfect, other than...

..The two heads!

Where's the music gone?

Er, I think we're kind of past the...

DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS

..phase now.

-Oh, all right. Question!

-Go on.

-The whole two heads thing.

-Yeah.

What's going on there?

Well...

..Ben was telling me that it happens

when the snake embryo is developing in the egg.

The same thing can happen with human embryos

if they split into identical twins.

A glitch in the separation process means it grinds to a halt.

In this case, the result is conjoined snake twins, each with a head,

but as this X-ray shows, the head joins a single spine

and they share the rest of their body.

Not surprisingly,

such an unusual design sets the snake several challenges.

Like how does it decide which way to go?

Well...

..this is how a normal snake moves through the world.

With no limbs,

they kind of propel themselves along with a slithering motion.

Snakes can only travel quickly for short bursts

but, if a predator appears,

they need to make a split-second decision to find cover.

This is a problem for a two-headed snake

because each head has an independently-thinking brain,

so it's always in two minds about which way to go.

So getting around is a bit of a problem.

What happens when they want to eat?

Let's ask Ben. He's been feeding Medusa's two heads for years.

When we feed her, we take her and put her in an empty, clean,

open tub and one of our employees actually takes

two food items at the same time and tries to lure one head to one side

and the other head to the other side,

trying to introduce the food at exactly the same time

so they both grab it.

And oftentimes we'll actually,

when one head swallows it down quickly,

we'll give it another food item, so that ideally you want them

to both finish at the same time,

and then actually after we feed her we have to take her

and wash her heads off with water and soap

so that she doesn't smell like her food,

because then both heads will try to attack each other

just from the smell of the food on the head.

Do you know what? I don't know what all the fuss is about.

-This is actually really easy.

-Yeah, it's quite comfy actually.

Yeah! Hey, I'm going to get some snacks before the next clip.

-Yeah, and I need the toilet.

-OK.

-Agh!

-Ooh!

-Ooh, hang on. Argh!

-Hang on. Wait.

Wait, no. Hey, stop. Hang on, let's think about this.

I tell you what, I'll go to the toilet, you get the snacks.

-I'll get the snacks, yeah.

-Perfect.

-Hang on, wait.

-Can you get out of the way, though?

-No, you're in my way.

-Do you know what? This isn't actually that easy, is it?

-No.

-Should we sit down and watch the next clip?

-Mm. Good idea.

OK. Here's Anne with an animal oddity at her dad's school.

My dad, who's a teacher,

came home from school on the first day of term

after the Easter holidays

and he'd been taking a school assembly on that day

and the pupils did notice lots of birds

flying back and forth behind him during assembly,

and after they all left he sat quietly

and tried to work out what was going on, noticed that

the window had been left open, so the robins

must have come in during the Easter break and made their nest there.

The robins were quite used to having lots of noise

and pupils about and didn't seem fazed by it at all,

and as long as I stayed still while I was filming,

they were quite happy to fly in and out and feed their chicks

right in front of me, which is a lovely thing to see.

They even carried on while school assembly was going on, which is how

I got the shot of the robin sitting on the nest during school assembly.

Although the robins had actually made their nest out of real moss

and twigs and leaves and things,

the whole of the rest of the arrangement was all plastic.

I bet those chicks graduated with

flying colours!

Continuing the theme of animal oddities,

check out what Kayla Brown came across whilst travelling in Peru!

Army ants, marching round and round in a constant circle.

Oh, that's good. So what happened?

Kayla watched them spiralling for hours.

-They'd get dizzy, though?

-Oh, that's not the worst of it.

Suddenly, one by one, the ants began to collapse and die.

-An ant death spiral?

-Mm.

Yeah, I can't decide if that's cool.

I mean, it sounds cool, doesn't it?

But they all die, don't they? And that's bad.

Oh, why?

-Why?

-Oh, don't start that again.

Ants, as you know, work as a unit, following each other's scent,

also known as pheromone.

It's most likely that our spiralling ants were out foraging

when they got separated from the rest of their party.

With the main pheromone trail lost, the ants began to panic

and follow each other's pheromones.

This confused game of follow-my-leader forced them

into a never-ending circle.

And because ants aren't programmed to think like individuals,

they didn't save themselves.

Instead, the circle became tighter and faster

until the ants simply died of exhaustion.

Whoo!

I am exhausted.

What, after all your overacting?

No! After all the odd creatures we've seen today.

Ah, but there is one really odd creature that we can still

look at on the TV.

-Really?

-Mm-hm.

-What's that, then?

No, no, no, no, no!

This is the strangest creature on the planet.

Oh, come on. Please! Very funny.

Come on, get me out.

Watch how he tries to communicate with the outside world.

Come on. This isn't...

But sadly, no-one understands him.

Yeah, that's very clever.

Fine. If you won't get me out, I'm getting myself out.

Ooh, I wonder what this red button at the top does.

No, no, no, no, no! Don't press the standby button!

Ah, peace at last.

Foxes on a trampoline one more time?

Why not?

Hee-hee! It is fun! See you next time!

Bye! Whoo-hoo!

Bye!