Taking to the Air Life in the Undergrowth

A summer evening on the Koros river in central Europe.

Its waters are mirror-smooth

but, on this particular day of the year, all that is about to change.

Giant mayflies, Europe's largest,

are starting to rise to the surface and struggle out of the skins in which they lived as larvae.

At first they come in ones and twos.

Soon there will be millions.

For two years, they have lived underwater.

Now they must fly to find a mate.

This should be the climax of their lives.

The first to appear are quickly taken by predators.

But soon the swarms are so huge that neither fish nor birds can make any impact on them.

The first mayflies to emerge in this mass hatching on this river in Hungary are all males.

As soon as they free themselves from their larval skins on the surface,

they take off and seek safety in the banks and there they hang in trees and bushes,

or indeed on my finger. The reason they have to rest like this

is because they still have to make one final moult.

Their wings that were transparent now have a handsome blue tinge

and the elegant filaments at the end of their abdomens are even longer than before.

They are looking for mates... but they have a problem.

They can't feed for they have neither mouth nor stomach.

They have to fuel their flight entirely from the reserves of fat

that they built up when they were larvae feeding in the river.

But that fat will only last them for about half an hour of flight time.

So the race to mate now becomes a frantic one.

The females begin to rise to the surface and the males fly up and down the river searching for them.

As soon as they find one, they all pounce on her, competing to be the one to fertilise her eggs.

But the struggle of doing so saps their limited energy.

Before long they begin to run out of fuel

and, though they flutter despairingly,

they can't maintain themselves in the air.

Win or lose, their lives are almost over

and dead bodies start to litter the surface of the water.

But the females are still in the air.

They are flying upstream, judging the depth of the river

and the currents in it, to find a place where they can lay their eggs

so that they will float downriver to the same sort of place where the adults themselves lived as larvae.

The ancestral mayflies were among the first creatures of any kind

to take to the air about 320 million years ago.

For them, as for their living descendants,

flight was a brief but invaluable way of finding a mate and expanding their breeding territories.

The river has also been the home of another kind of insect with an equally ancient ancestry

and it too is beginning to emerge from the water.

Bigger and more ferocious than the mayfly larvae, it has been feeding on tadpoles and even small fish.

But that phase of its life is over.

Now each one has to haul itself out of the water and into the air.

On the top of its thorax, it carries a bulging back-pack.

It hunches itself and its outer skin splits.

A very different creature begins to appear.

White threads are drawn out of its flanks.

They are the linings of thin tubes that penetrate deep into its body -

air tubes that enable the insect to breathe now that it is out of water.

It gulps air...

inflating its body, forcing fluid into the bundle on its back.

Its wings begin to unfurl.

Ten minutes later...

the wings open.

They will never close again.

Next, the huge muscles within its thorax must be exercised to prepare them for action.

And it's away.

Dragonflies, like mayflies, belong to the most ancient group of insects that flew over the land

and here in the museum in Harvard there are fossils of them that are 150 million years old.

They are almost identical with species that are still flying today.

However they are by no means the oldest.

We know that there were other dragonflies even earlier,

225 million years ago,

that were flying through the swamps.

We don't have complete specimens of any of those

but there are some tantalising and amazing fragments.

And here is one.

This marvellously preserved wing

has very much the same pattern of veins supporting panels of membranes as living species.

The thing that makes it different

is its size.

From base to tip, it measures 12 inches, 30 centimetres.

Little imagination is needed to replace the membrane that must have been there.

This insect must have had a wing-span as big as a seagull's.

Vibrating THESE wings

preparing for flight must have been a formidable business.

A creature this size must have been at least ten times heavier than the largest insect flying today.

How did it manage to get into the air?

One suggestion is that in those far-off times there was much more oxygen in the air

and that would have given the extra power needed to beat these huge wings.

But it is a fair guess that this ancient pioneer of the skies

flew with much the same technique as dragonflies do today.

Living dragonflies can reach speeds of nearly 40 miles an hour

and fly several miles in their search for new territory.

They are all aerial hunters, relying on their supreme aeronautical skills

to snatch their prey from the sky.

Their great agility in the air comes from being able to beat

each of their two pairs of wings quite independently.

You can see clearly that they do this...

when the camera slows down the action 400 times.

This one is coming in to its perch.

Perfect control is essential to make all the tiny adjustments needed

for an accurate pinpoint touchdown.

All dragonflies, when they perch, hold their wings outstretched.

But they have close relations, damselflies,

and they perch with their wings closed above their backs.

Mosquitoes stand little chance when damsels go hunting.

But flight for damsels, as for dragonflies and mayflies,

is primarily the means to find a mate and to breed

and to do that they, like the others, need water.

Flight is itself an important element in their courtship.

These blue males must first establish a territory for themselves above open water

and that involves aerial jousts that can last for hours.

Mature females,

whose wings in this species are not blue but golden brown,

are attracted to those males who control good places for egg-laying.

But the males must nonetheless display the correct wing signals.

This one, patrolling his territory, is using a special flight,

flaunting his handsome wings, inviting females to join him.

A female signals her willingness to consider doing so with a flick of her wings.

So now he treats her to his full display.

The female's tail-up posture is apparently a signal

that declares that she is not yet sufficiently impressed.

Now, it seems, he's got it right -

her tail is pointing downwards.

He grabs the back of her neck with the claspers at the end of his abdomen.

She brings her abdomen forward to reach a chamber under his thorax where he stores his sperm.

His first action, though, is to scour out her genital tract

to remove any sperm that might be there from a previous mating.

Only when he's done that will he inject his own sperm.

And now he must show her the best places in his territory for laying eggs.

He flies up and down, with his tail curled, and lands on a suitable piece of vegetation.

The female settles down to lay, cutting slits in the plant stems

with her ovipositor and inserting an egg into each one.

She may lay as many as 30.

And all the time, the male keeps guard lest rival males should try to mate with her.

In other damsel species, the males make sure

that no other male can reach their partners by keeping hold of them throughout the whole process.

The young that hatch from the eggs of these insects, the larvae,

look very unlike their parents.

This is a dragonfly larva.

It is in this form that dragonflies spend most of their lives.

The larvae of both dragonfly and damselfly are savage predators.

They will even feed on their own kind if they get the chance.

This particular larva has a special problem. It's a cascade damsel

and it has to snatch prey that is swept past it by the rushing water.

Cascade damsels are very rare and live around just a few Central American waterfalls,

like this one in the mountains of Costa Rica.

The adult male has to perform his courtship flight under very difficult conditions indeed.

Somehow, he is able to fly even when he is dripping wet and he shows off to the females

by actually flying through the cascades of water.

To be a good breeding territory, the vertical rock surface has to be covered

by just the right amount of water.

Too deep, and prey may be out of reach,

too shallow and the larvae could be picked off by birds.

A female will only mate with a male if she approves of his choice of territory.

And this one, it seems, does.

This is it, and she carefully fixes her eggs to the rocks.

But not all damsels need great areas of open water for breeding.

In the rainforest of Central America,

like this one here in Costa Rica, there is a damselfly

that has managed to break the link with open expanses of water like rivers and ponds.

It's also one of the most spectacular members of the entire family.

The helicopter damselfly, the largest in the world with a wing-span of up to 20 centimetres.

The males tend to frequent sunlit patches where the females can see them easily

and they have a special lazy flapping way of flying that is, in itself, an invitation.

But although helicopter damsels can live away from rivers and streams,

the females nonetheless require a little water in which to lay their eggs...

and there is just enough

in this little hollow here.

And with luck she will come down.

And into the water they go.

But these eggs have water-tight casings, so they can be laid in air.

They're butterfly eggs. The link with water has been broken.

Butterflies fly in a very different way from dragonflies.

They overlap their two pairs of wings so that they flap as a single pair.

They can't fly as fast or as aerobatically as dragonflies

but they nonetheless are tireless in their search for the particular food that will suit their young.

And, in the case of the cabbage white, that's cabbage.

Now on the surface of this cabbage leaf

there is a patch of tiny little pillbox shaped eggs.

And when they hatch, the baby caterpillars will emerge and make an instant meal of the greenery.

And they are already stirring.

But the first dish on the menu is not vegetables.

It's the shells of their own egg capsules,

protein rich and far too nourishing to be wasted.

That first course, however, doesn't last long.

Now for the main dish - cabbage leaves.

When cabbage plants are damaged, their leaves release a smell

and that quite often attracts the attention of a rather different insect.

It's a tiny wasp called cotesia.

She too is trying to make sure that her young have food immediately available,

but they like living flesh.

So she injects her eggs into the butterfly's caterpillars.

She does this with such surgical precision that her victims are not mortally injured

and they continue feeding as if nothing had happened to them.

But now much of what the caterpillars so laboriously gather

goes to nourish the wasp grubs that are developing within them.

As the caterpillars grow, they shed their skins.

They do so five times until, ultimately,

they are 800 times heavier than they were when they first hatched.

This fully-grown caterpillar must now find shelter.

A strand of silk trails behind it,

silk with which it ties itself to a twig.

And here, over a couple of days, it changes into a chrysalis.

Those caterpillars that were injected by the cotesia wasp don't get that chance.

The grubs within them are now emerging.

They too spin silk which hardens to form a cocoon beneath the caterpillar's empty skin.

Inside, the wasp grubs are transforming themselves

and two weeks later, out come the adult wasps.

A different future awaits the chrysalis.

Within its shell and over a similar two weeks,

the caterpillar's body has been broken down and reassembled

and now the adult is ready to emerge.

Its wings, like those of a newly-emerged dragonfly, need pumping up with liquid.

The creature that was once an egg, then a caterpillar, then a chrysalis has attained its final incarnation.

So another generation of cabbage whites set off to find good places for their young.

With their fragile-looking wings and apparently erratic flight,

butterflies might not seem to be the most powerful of flyers,

but in fact they are extremely accomplished aeronauts

and they can fly hundreds of miles if necessary to find the food they need.

Some butterflies use the power of flight for another purpose -

to escape bad weather.

These lush sub-tropical valleys in southern Taiwan

are warm and green all year round and in winter, they are filled by literally millions of butterflies.

They have all come from the north of this great island, 500 miles away, for there the cold weather

has killed off the plants on which they fed during the summer.

In the mornings they take off from their roosts

and head for the forest canopy, to warm themselves in the rays of the rising sun.

They have to conserve as much energy as they can,

so instead of using their stores of fat to warm themselves, they absorb the sun's heat.

There are four species of crow butterflies here as well as two species of blue tiger butterflies...

and all find enough food to sustain themselves in these warm and fertile valleys.

Butterflies feed on liquid, nectar and the juices of rotting fruit

and to suck it up they have, instead of jaws,

an extraordinarily long but extremely thin tube.

In a newly-emerged butterfly this tube is in two pieces,

for it is in fact a highly modified pair of mouthparts.

Each half has its own muscles and nerve supply so that the whole unit is fully movable and controllable.

As the young butterfly prepares for adult life, these two sections

are zipped together to form a tube like a miniature drinking straw.

A special fluid cements the two halves together.

The tube is largely made of a material called resilin which,

when distorted, springs back to its original shape,

in this case a spiral like a watch spring.

When the muscles within it contract, it straightens into a long probe

that the butterfly can then insert deep into a flower.

Butterflies and moths have the largest of all insect wings

and their great size means that they can be used very effectively

as billboards on which to display patterns proclaiming the species of their owner.

The patterns are produced by tiny scales that cover the wings like tiles on a roof.

Some have a microscopic structure

that refracts the light and gives the wing a brilliant iridescent shimmer.

Others contain chemical pigments.

With these lovely advertisements, a male butterfly displays to females and warns off rivals.

Vivid patterns and bright colours are used to a much lesser degree by moths,

for many are only active at night when colours are not easily seen.

Moths also feed primarily on nectar which they suck up in the same way that butterflies do.

But one moth manages to tap a food source no butterfly has yet exploited.

Lantern bugs feed by drilling into the bark of a tree with their proboscis and sucking out the sap.

This contains a little protein, which the bug wants,

but a lot of sugar, most of which it doesn't want.

So it squirts out the sweet excess and to make sure that this doesn't attract ants that might attack it,

it fires the droplets well away from the tree trunk

with a tiny spring-loaded spatula at the end of its abdomen.

One enterprising species of moth regularly sits behind the bug all night

with the curled tip of its proboscis delicately placed in the stream of droplets.

As sugar water accumulates, so the moth sucks it up.

Most moths, however, feed by the rather more laborious method of flying from flower to flower.

A few, the busiest,

do so not only at night but during the day as well.

These are the hawk moths and there are several species of them

gathering nectar from this buddleia bush in the south of France.

This hawk moth can fly very fast indeed when it wants to

but it can also hover, as it's doing now, to sip nectar

from each of these small flowers. Beating its wings as fast as this,

takes a great deal of energy

so these hawk moths have to spend much of their day

going from flower to flower sipping the nectar

which is so rich in the carbohydrates they need to power their flight.

They have huge forward-pointing eyes that enable them to aim their proboscis with such accuracy

that it slips into the exact centre of each tiny flower.

With so many minute flowers so closely bunched together,

it would be easy for the moth to visit some twice.

But that would waste energy and if we mark each flower as the moth drinks from it,

it's clear that the moth, somehow or other, never does this.

Hummingbird hawk moths have no difficulty in hovering.

Bee hawks however, have heavier bodies

and they sometimes use their legs to help support themselves as they work.

Their need to keep drinking is so pressing that a female will continue to do that

even when the male with whom she is mating seems to be trying to fly in the opposite direction.

The buddleia plant may be a particular favourite of hawk moths

but it is, of course, a foreigner, introduced into our gardens from China in the 19th century.

The hawk moth's original supplies of nectar came from the flowers of the meadows.

And they still feed there, alongside many other insects.

This is a carpenter bee.

Bees also have two pairs of wings but they are hooked together

so, like those of butterflies, they operate as one.

Bumblebees have particularly large and heavy bodies and flight, for them, can be a real effort.

That is particularly so in spring when the mornings are cold

and queen bumblebees are just emerging from their winter sleep.

It is still only a few degrees above freezing, but a queen needs to get started early to look for food.

The thick furry hairs on her body help to conserve what heat she manages to generate.

At the moment she is only a few degrees warmer than the surrounding vegetation,

as a thermal camera clearly shows.

Her body is only marginally more pink than the blue leaves and moss around her.

But she has a special way of warming up for flight.

She can put her wings out of gear so that, without moving them,

she can rev up the wing muscles inside

and that raises the temperature within her thorax

by 20 degrees centigrade or more

as the expanding yellow image on the thermal camera indicates.

Her body temperature is now over 30 degrees centigrade.

At last, she has a chance of lift-off.

She will now be able to visit the spring flowers while it is still too cold for others to do so.

The long trumpets of the daffodils retain heat very well and they are still warm

even after their hot-bodied visitors have left.

Flies, back in their distant evolutionary past,

also had two pairs of wings, but their back pair have been reduced

to simple knob-ended rods.

These are particularly long on crane flies.

They are part of a fly's flight instrumentation.

Microscopic sensors on their upper and lower surfaces tell their owner

about the air currents around its body and so help in flight control.

They start up even before take-off.

Flies are such accomplished flyers that they can land upside-down on a ceiling

or, in this case, the underside of a twig.

Only when you slow down a fly's flight, here by 100 times,

can you fully appreciate what superb aerial control they have.

Some species, like these long-legged flies, flaunt their wings in courtship, just as damselflies do.

These dance flies are voracious hunters

and it is particularly important for them that they perform their dance correctly.

If one doesn't get it right, its partner might well eat it.

This performance, however, seems to have been up to standard.

For hoverflies,

arguably the most accomplished of all insect aviators,

immaculate aerial control is what makes a male attractive to a female.

A male lays claim to a mating territory by trying to stay

in exactly the same position in space for as long as possible.

That is not easy when there are others all around you, trying to do precisely the same thing.

It might seem that he is absolutely motionless,

but in fact he is having to make continual changes to adjust for slight currents in the air.

It is an amazing piece of acrobatics,

far better than anything that we can do in a helicopter.

And it is all done in order to impress the female,

to show her that he is superb at holding his territory.

Having to chase away rivals that come too close is an exhausting business

and when you are trying to maintain your hold on a particular point in mid-air,

even a small midge has to be chased away.

After a morning spent doing this, a male hoverfly may have lost as much as a third of his body weight.

Little wonder that he takes a break at mid-day in order to rest and refuel.

He dabs up nectar with mouth-parts that are shaped like a pad.

Having refilled his fuel tank, the male returns to his territory for the afternoon's session of hovering,

in the hope of attracting yet another female and mating with her.

Once again, with his superb eyesight,

he is ready to spot anything that might whiz by him at high speed that could be a female.

And I might just be able to fool him with a pea-shooter.

Although there may seem to be an extraordinarily large number of different flies in the world,

it is actually the beetles that are the most varied of all insect groups.

There are 300,000 species of them.

Most find their food by crawling and burrowing on the ground and to prevent their wings

from being damaged in the process, they have turned the front pair into protective shields.

Some, like weevils, keep their wing-covers permanently closed and before take-off

push their functional wings out of special slits.

Ladybirds, like most other beetles, raise their wing covers

and hold them clear of the hind wings throughout their flight.

The result could hardly be called aerodynamic and consequently their flight is rather lumbering.

Blister beetles are scarcely any better.

When a flight is over, the hind wings have to be packed away beneath the covers -

a process that can be so complex that it demands all the skills of a Japanese master of origami.

With flight playing a relatively small part in their lives, many beetles have grown very large.

This one, the titan beetle that lives in the forests of the Amazon,

is almost certainly the biggest of all insects.

I have to handle him with considerable care

because these huge mandibles at the front are powerful enough, it's said,

to be able to cut straight through a pencil.

He can fly, but he can't get into the air from the ground.

He's too heavy to do that, so he has to climb trees and launch himself into the air that way.

That is why he has got such powerful legs, armed with sharp claws.

The titan is now known to be the biggest of all beetles.

The champion is seven inches long from the tip of its mandibles to the tip of its abdomen.

The larva of this great monster has not yet been found

but it must be at least twice as big as the beetle, a really huge grub.

Beetles and many other insects spend so much of their lives as flightless larvae

that it would be more accurate to think of them as creatures of the earth rather than the sky.

Flight for them, as it is for the mayflies,

is a relatively brief episode at the end of their lives.

These cicadas in the eastern United States, spend 17 whole years below ground,

sucking sap from tree roots.

And then, within a few days, a whole population emerges.

There may be millions of them in a single acre of land.

They clamber up the trees whose roots have provided them with sap for all of those 17 years.

And here they change into their adult costume.

Now they have the wings they need to search for a partner.

Empty larval cases cover the tree trunks and the ground beneath.

And above, in the branches, the millions have started to sing.

The noise is ear-splitting.

HIGH-PITCHED SCREECHING

After 17 years of living underground,

the cicadas are now approaching the climax of their lives.

And for the males, that means this.

The call is his way of attracting a female.

The females reply with a quite different sound.

A click made by flicking her wings.

That's what the males are listening out for.

I can imitate the female's wing flick with a snap of my fingers...

and that causes them to follow me anywhere,

because they are so determined to find a female.

Now I can bring you back?

How about coming this way?

Oh! The noise is awful.

Come this way.

Yes, I can hear you.

Quite right.

At last, a male finds his partner

and as he does so, his call alters.

He is indicating to her that, after 17 years,

the time has come to get down to business.

How do these cicadas all emerge simultaneously after 17 long years?

Well, we know they can appreciate changes in the content of tree sap,

so they are able to detect the passing of a year.

But how do they count up to 17?

We have no idea.

But even if we did, this surely would remain

one of the most astonishing, amazing events in the insect world

and it will all be over in a couple of weeks for another 17 years.

In the next programme of Life In The Undergrowth,

we tell the story of a substance that completely revolutionised the lives of invertebrates - silk.

Many different creatures use this wonderful material,

but you can't tell the story of silk without the silk masters - spiders.

And for some people that's a bit of a problem.

A lot of us find spiders really rather upsetting.

Why that should be is not clear to me.

Perhaps it's because they've got eight legs

and move in a most unpredictable way, and what's more move very fast.

But whatever the reason is, a lot of people do hate spiders.

But if you can once overcome that dislike

then you look at the animal as an animal with problems to solve -

how to find its mate, how to find food,

how it constructs these elaborate webs,

which must be among the most extraordinary constructions in the whole of the animal world.

Once you can do that, you see how absolutely astonishing they are.

And that was the key challenge for the next episode -

to see beyond our fear and uncover the fascinating way in which spiders use silk.

And where better to start than with the Australian redback.

This is one of the world's most notorious spider.

Do you get many redback bites?

-Somewhere between 500 and 1,000 bites every year.

-But you don't die from it?

-Well, people have died,

-but this is a slow-acting venom. It might take five days for someone to die from it.

-So you've got time?

'Warwick Angus is an expert on redback webs, and he's convinced

'that if you treat these spiders with respect there's no need to fear them.'

They're not aggressive, they're the opposite, they're defensive. But they're so placid.

There she is, showing no signs of aggression. But that's her home,

and if we pick up the plant pot, we're destroying her home and she can't talk...she can only bite!

Encouraged by Warrick,

I can put my caution aside and focus on the complex web

she has built under the plant pot, which we were there to film.

You might think it's just a cobweb, but in fact it's a very subtle construction. There is a dome...

over the top part and, from the dome, there are a lot of vertical threads which go down to the ground.

An ant crawling along the bottom of this decking,

if it touches one of these vertical strands, the strand breaks

and whips up the ant and then the spider can catch it.

When you can see all this, you gain a whole new appreciation for this creature.

And there's an encouraging twist to Warrick's story.

What made you first get involved in spiders?

I mean, spiders are your life now.

-I used to be arachnophobic.

-Really? You mean you actually hated spiders?

I couldn't go in the room if there was a spider. I had to run outside, I couldn't handle it.

But once I started to try and get over the fear,

that fear led to a fascination, that fascination just grew and grew.

From arachnophobe to expert. There's hope for us all.

And it doesn't end there.

In Malaysia, cameraman Gavin Thurston is looking for another spider which we wanted to film -

the trapdoor spider.

He's had a similar discovery about the expert he's working with - Stephen Hogg.

Just an interesting point Stephen was just telling me.

Stephen's our spider expert, but he's actually afraid of spiders!

Well, since childhood I'm terrified of them!

It makes my heart beat, they terrify me.

And just like Warrick and his Redbacks, Stephen's fear of spiders has somehow led to a fascination.

..Will walk along the lines of silk.

The spider detects this and lunges out and grabs its prey.

That night, Stephen and Gavin return to film this nocturnal spider in its burrow

with the help of a chip on the tip camera -

a remote controlled probe with a tiny camera and light on the end.

As Gavin carefully feeds the probe into the spider's burrow, Stephen can watch from a distance.

Unlike Warwick he hasn't quite got over his arachnophobia.

That's it...hold it. That's good.

Though that's hardly surprising when you get a close look at this spider - hairy legs, huge fangs.

But with this probe, he can see beyond all that.

And for the very first time, we can film the detail of this spider's remarkable trap.

An ingenious silk collar connected to the external tripwires keep the spider's feet

constantly in touch with the outside world, ready to pounce.

Another night, another spider. This time, not quite so scary -

the bolas spider.

It's also nocturnal...

and is very sensitive to light.

So we have to approach it very carefully under red light at first.

Then when it is comfortable with our cameras, we wait...

Here's its prey.

Once it's locked onto the moth, it won't mind the light.

Its weapon -

a single strand of silk with a drop of glue on the end.

The more we look at spiders, the more fascinating they become.

You can't help your jaw sagging just a little and saying,

my goodness how absolutely extraordinary that they can behave

in this complicated and seemingly intelligent way,

when they are the size they are with the number of brain cells they must have tucked away

in a little tiny invisible point in the middle of that head.

Amazing.

But to really understand spiders, you have to completely immerse yourself in their world.

Tim Shepherd spent a total of 200 hours filming a spider that you can commonly find in your garden -

a wolf spider.

They really are little. Their leg span is probably the width of your little finger nail.

When you start to see them under really big macro lenses,

you go into a completely different world

and you start to, after a while,

begin to get a feel of what it might be like to be a spider

and to walk past a piece of moss that's actually like a tree trunk.

It's nearly impossible to film a spider this small in the wild

but, because it's so tiny,

Tim can easily create a complete habitat for it in a studio

in which it will be quite at home.

Filming these wolf spiders has revealed

a whole array of behaviour

from the superb little courtship behaviours that the males do,

through to the female making this incredible little egg pouch -

it's a structure that's intricate and beautiful -

and then she carries it around and looks after the babies when they hatch.

So she's got this wonderful maternal care to her character.

So all these different things help to make spiders much more interesting

than a big scary creature that's about to bite you.

But that's not to say that some spiders aren't big and scary.

In Australia, Warrick is proof that no-one's immune from arachnophobia,

and he's determined to convince everyone that it's something well worth getting over,

with Incy Wincy, his big, hairy and venomous bird eating spider.

Go on, David, have a cuddle.

-Oh...

-OTHERS LAUGH

If there are many reasons to dislike spiders,

then Incy Wincy encapsulates all of them.

However, knowing that she was no threat to me as long as I was no threat to her, reassured me.

We had an understanding.

Just two creatures trying to solve life's problems.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd