Episode 6 Nature's Weirdest Events

We live in a very weird world.

And the more we discover about our planet, the stranger it gets.

Every day, new stories reach us, stories that surprise us...

What is that?

..shock us...

-Whoa!

-Oh!

-That is so cool.

..sometimes even scare us...

SCREAMING

Oh, my God!

We've scoured the globe to bring you the most curious creatures...

..the most extraordinary people...

I can stick almost anything to my skin without no glue.

..and the most bizarre behaviour...

..using eyewitness accounts and expert opinion

to explore a weird world of unexplained underwater blobs,

flying goats,

and glow-in-the-dark fish.

We examine the evidence,

test the theories,

to work out what on earth is going on.

Coming up in this episode - weird washed-up blobs,

spiders with unfathomable feet

and bizarre lakes the colour of bubble gum.

But first,

to the murky depths of the Gulf of Mexico...

..and a very odd underwater encounter.

2012, and contractors were checking that all was shipshape on their oil

rigs, when an unearthly object came into view on one of their remote

underwater cameras.

Some operators were left scratching their heads as to exactly

what they had just seen.

This particular day, it was a normal day at the office,

we do our normal routines, doing our normal inspections down there.

We were approximately a third of the way back up to the surface and

we encountered an anomaly.

It really created quite a bit of panic.

It is the oddest thing we've ever seen.

It was a unique creature.

Brian and his team were completely baffled.

What was this blob?

Was it alive or dead, had it ever been living?

Was it animal, or something otherworldly?

Well, faced with a real-life mystery unfolding,

they did the decent thing - posted the footage online to see if

someone, somewhere knew what it was.

The most odd description we got, or accusation,

was that it was actually CGI, which was an actual computer

animated graphic that was overlaid onto the screen.

There were hypotheses that it was a whale placenta left over from a baby

whale being born.

People said it was Osama Bin Laden's ghost.

They said it was a trash bag,

all kinds of conspiracy theory hypotheses floating around about this organism.

So we wanted to get a chance to look at it a little bit closer

and figure out what it is.

What they saw was that this thing appeared to be moving independently

through the water.

Slowly changing, shifting in its shape as it made some progress.

And then, when it got closer to them,

they could see that it had this patterning,

these sorts of hexagonal marks which were expanding and contracting as it

continued to move through the water.

Dead weird. Dead weird indeed.

As the object moved, the footage revealed appendages,

maybe even organs, on the outside of it.

To Steve's trained eye,

this anomaly had all the hallmarks of a familiar,

but very unusual creature.

It was a very rare, very strange jellyfish.

Now, jellyfish are very curious creatures,

with their dome-shaped bodies and delicate tentacles.

That translucent skin revealing their bizarre inner anatomy.

And it was this jellyfish's inner workings that allowed Steve to

finally identify which species it was.

That jelly has a few features that are very distinctive and one of them

is this mesh of canals that goes around the body.

So they're the distribution network that it can send digestive material

and provide energy to the rest of the organism.

So, by looking at the structure of those canals,

you're able to narrow down which species of jelly this might be.

The final clue was the location.

This jellyfish was swimming almost a mile underwater.

Combining all the evidence,

Steve knew that he was looking at something very unusual indeed.

So the organism that we figured out that it was is this jelly called

Deepstaria. It was first discovered in 1967

from the submersible Deep Star, and so that's where it got its name.

We find them almost a mile down in the ocean,

we've seen them about 30 times in the last 25 years.

But hang on, our jellyfish doesn't exactly look like it's picture,

does it?

The very unnatural pose that the video has captured,

I think added a lot to the confusion that people had when they first saw

the animal.

It can be disturbed by the slightest motion of the water,

so when you bring this submarine down, you back up,

you try to stay off it, you try to stay with it,

you're sending it swirling around through the water,

and in the case of the video that went around on the internet,

the organism actually turned completely inside out,

so that its mouth and everything

that would normally be up inside of it is now outside.

Don't worry. As the jellyfish descended back into the deep

and away from the swirling currents caused by the ROV,

it would've been able to turn itself outside in again.

So, it took a month of social media,

hundreds of guesses and finally a man called Haddock to figure out

what this blob was and it wasn't a blob at all.

It was a species of jellyfish, albeit one that was inside out.

Coming up next, an ocean oddity that caused an even bigger stir.

March 2016.

Hordes of tourists packed Bonfil Beach in Mexico.

But as the morning tide retreated...

..they discovered a monstrous looking creature.

Sprawled in the sand was a very strange,

lifeless four metre blob of disgusting-looking rotten flesh.

SPEAKING SPANISH:

Beach-goers were understandably baffled.

They poked at it, wondering what on earth the blob could be.

It was a curious shape and appeared

to have tentacles trailing behind it.

So they guessed that the blob was some sort of giant squid.

The images and video of the decomposing creature went viral,

and like the jellyfish before, its identity stumped everyone.

A very strange blob indeed.

But do you know what was even weirder?

The fact that we'd seen something very similar to this before.

A long time before.

In 1896, the remains of a giant unrecognisable carcass

was washed up on the coastline of Anastasia Island in Florida.

The authorities were quickly called,

and one of the first men to arrive on the scene was a Dr DeWitt Webb.

Whilst press took pictures and spun headlines

of the Agustine Sea monster,

Webb concluded that the blob was

in fact the remains of a gargantuan octopus.

A tissue sample from the creature was sent to the Smithsonian

Museum, logged and labelled as Octopus Giganteus Verrill.

It sat in a jar on a shelf for decades, simply gathering dust.

So, case closed.

The blob that washed up in 2016 was the carcass of a species of giant

octopus. Or was it?

Because there's another twist in the tentacle of this tale and it comes

from a pretty unlikely but romantic source -

one of my favourite childhood TV shows.

Back in 1980,

the classic British TV series Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World reopened

the curious case of the St Augustine Monster.

Did a giant octopus as big as Piccadilly Circus

come ashore on this beach?

Webb's octopus would actually stretch, tip to tip,

from here to the red car up the beach.

The public's imagination was reignited,

forcing scientists to go back

and re-examine the original museum sample.

Over the next three decades,

the strange flesh was tested and scrutinised,

and as technology progressed,

scientists were able to get closer to solving the mystery.

Finally, DNA tests confirmed that the tissue was not from a giant

mysterious octopus at all,

but from a mammal.

So, could our washed up Mexican blob also be from mammalian remains?

Fireman called to the scene had the unenviable task of shifting

the rotten flesh, and whilst prodding and poking at the carcass

they found something hard.

They found bones.

Now this was key to understanding exactly what this creature was.

The true identity of this Mexican monster?

It was a sperm whale.

But how could this sad glutinous blob

come from such a majestic ocean leviathan?

I mean, a full-grown sperm whale can reach 20 metres in length,

but the washed-up blob was only a quarter of that size.

So what had happened to the rest of the body?

We get lots of reports like this in the UK. Every year we get a handful

of bits and pieces that wash up, or float up,

or just drift onto shore and almost

inevitably they're decomposed remains of whales.

So this whole idea of whale fall,

when their body dies and then sinks to the seabed,

it creates this oasis of food in an otherwise desert-like environment.

So on the surface you might get sharks feeding on them

and at depth you get a whole range

of other specialised forms that feed on these animals.

It rots, the bones fall away,

the musculature and the internal organs fall away

and you're left with a bag of blubber that floats to the surface

because it's positively buoyant and that ends up stranding,

and then the public and the media get very excited about the remains

of this sea monster that's washed ashore.

HE SPEAKS SPANISH

By the looks of the video, you can quite clearly see the remnants

of two sockets in part of the materials,

so it's clearly the remains of a sperm whale head.

So those holes that look a bit like suckers on a tentacle,

well, in reality, they're the sockets for the whale's giant teeth.

A real red herring in this conundrum of mixed-up monsters.

So, a case of mistaken identity.

A blob that we initially thought was a giant octopus did in fact turn

out to be a sea monster, albeit one that we already know about,

the sperm whale, that secret leviathan of the deep,

reduced, in this case,

well, to a rather sad end.

So, a gloopy mass that baffled scientists for years.

But next up, a living creature whose behaviour is so weird that the

scientific community simply couldn't take it seriously.

The animal in question is an octopus.

With their alien looks and even weirder behaviour,

these cephalopods are full of surprises...

..like the ability to solve problems...

..launch land-based attacks...

There's an octopus eating a crab!

..sneak out of aquariums...

He's going, man, he's going for it.

..and even escape from a boat full of sailors.

He's just working his way through.

But in the depths of the University of California in Berkeley,

hidden down a maze of corridors under tight security

is an octopus yet to be scientifically named.

And this one

is breaking all the rules.

Certainly almost everything we've seen is different than what we would

expect from species of octopus that have been studied.

There was a young marine biologist

named Arcadio Rodaniche,

who was working on cephalopod behaviour.

I think Arcadio was being fairly secretive about this project

because it was a fairly spectacular octopus that he'd found.

Within his top-secret swimming pool, which doubled as a lab,

Rodaniche was keeping specimens of the larger Pacific striped octopus,

or LPSO for short.

Bizarrely named, it's actually very small.

This diminutive cephalopod was barely known to science,

and through his studies, Rodaniche discovered that this octopus behaved

very strangely indeed.

He said that there was predatory behaviour

which was extremely unusual.

Rodaniche described the octopus hunting in the most peculiar manner.

Normally, octopus hunt for food either by hiding and grabbing or

they root around in underwater crevices,

pulling out their victims with a vice-like grip.

But Rodaniche had allegedly witnessed the LPSO luring its prey

into submission with what can only be described as a tickle.

This was a brand-new discovery, extraordinary behaviour.

Well, so in extraordinary, in fact,

that when Rodaniche told the rest of

the world's octopus experts about it, they simply didn't believe him.

When the abstract was published,

there were only a couple of drawings that he had done,

there were no photographs available,

and to my knowledge nobody had seen one alive.

The cephalopod biologists did not react particularly well to it

because everything he said about

the behaviour and biology of this octopus was unusual.

Poor Rodaniche would never publish

another paper about any species of octopus as long as he lived

and for a decade and a half,

the extraordinary behaviour of the LPSO was just a distant memory.

For everyone that was, except for Roy.

In 2008, Roy was finally able to acquire

a group of these elusive octopus.

And, of course, the first thing he wanted to see was if that tickling

behaviour could be true.

As they're trying to catch a shrimp,

they would stalk it and creep forward.

As they do so, they'll extend one of their first pair of arms up and out

over the top of the shrimp,

come down on the far side, tap it

and that will cause the shrimp to tail foot and escape,

right into the arms of the octopus.

It's a bit like tapping a mate on the shoulder

and then ducking other way.

Truly ingenious, but an octopus?

Well, it's the only species that's ever been seen using this technique.

It's a complete one-off.

Unfortunately, this story has a bittersweet ending.

You see, sadly, Rodaniche passed away in March 2016,

but he did live long enough to see Roy and his team confirm that all of

his observations were correct.

And at the moment, the larger Pacific striped octopus doesn't have

a scientific name, although I'm sure we can all hazard

a guess as to who it might be named after.

Our oceans really are awash with the weird.

From jellyfish, to sea blobs and even a sneaky octopus.

But coming next, extraordinary love stories.

From lonely birds to tiny spiders.

But first to Nagoya in Japan.

2016, a new superstar has grabbed public attention.

Crowds started flocking to catch a glimpse

of their favourite celebrity.

His name is Shabani.

And, yes, he's a gorilla, a western lowland gorilla to be precise.

And what a specimen.

From the moment Shabani reached maturity,

visitor numbers at the zoo spiked.

But staff soon began noticing something very strange.

Yes, the vast majority of this new influx were women.

So, we're going to go check him out

and hope that the gorilla checks us out.

He's just chilling and watching. This is my new boyfriend.

Sorry, guys, I'm not single any more.

Clearly something very weird was going on in Nagoya.

Female visitors were flocking to the zoo,

not to fuel any biological interest in any of the animals that were

living there, but because,

well,

because they...fancied the gorilla.

So alluring is Shabani's charm

that he's captured the imagination of thousands of fans,

his rise to fame being fuelled largely by Twitter and social media.

And when news crews flocked to the park,

the story of the famous, handsome gorilla spread across the globe.

So one thing I did when somebody pointed out to me the phenomenon

of Shabani was to ask some of my friends about him and it is quite

striking that everybody I spoke to, men and women, said, yes,

that is a particularly good-looking gorilla.

And when we talked about what the reasons were,

many people pointed out that you can see how muscly he is,

he looks like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of gorillas.

Shabani really is in the prime of his life.

He's the silverback.

That greying hair down his back is not a sign of old age,

but rather a sign of his dominance...

..a visual marker that signals to others his status, prowess and,

most importantly for the females,

a signal that he is the alpha male, the one to breed with.

As a generalisation, we can say that female primates like large,

strong animals, males, and the reasons for that are

that those males will have won competitions over the time and to

win those competitions they have to be particularly good quality mates.

It takes good genes to build a very large male gorilla.

But with other male gorillas just as big and possibly just as handsome,

why has Shabani captured the public's attention

more so than others?

Well, it's all in his eyes.

So what makes Shabani's eyes particularly similar to human eyes

is that he has white around the iris.

All humans have it, but it's unusual in primates and other animals and

Shabani also has it.

So it's very easy to see which direction he is looking in and when

you look at the pictures of Shabani that you can find on the internet,

he's often looking out of the side of his eye.

So if you flirt with somebody,

you look directly at them and then you look away.

The Americans call it side-eye

and this is a very human communicative behaviour.

And I think that's probably one of the reasons why humans are finding

Shabani so attractive - he looks like he's flirting.

Now the whites of our eyes are called sclera.

Scientists have studied the amount present in western lowland gorillas.

They're normally dark brown.

In fact, scientists discovered that just 7% of these gorillas have this

higher degree of white, which gives them this familiar human gaze.

But Shabani is not just a handsome face.

He also has a softer side.

He's an excellent and gentle father.

Having sired two infants of his own,

he can often be seen playing with his offspring

and younger members of the group.

We're blurring the lines between species,

which can make us feel uncomfortable,

but actually humans are primates too,

we're very closely related to gorillas.

What female humans are looking for in a male partner

may have similarities to what gorillas look for in a male partner.

Shabani ticks all the boxes that

humans are looking for in an attractive male.

The fact he's a gorilla becomes irrelevant because we're looking for

very similar things.

OK, he is handsome, he is strong, he is the caring father,

and for all of these swooning Japanese women,

he is the perfect man...

ape, ape. And, of course,

they are quite closely related to us but I've got to say,

when it comes to human nature's weirdest events, for me,

this one really takes the banana.

Next up, how about some romance on an altogether more macro scale?

Now, after a camping trip,

we've all returned home to shake out the tent and most likely hang it up

to dry.

But when Jurgen Otto from Sydney, Australia shook out his tent,

it wasn't an errant sock that came tumbling out.

It was something much more intriguing.

Something he'd never seen before.

In my garage, I was unpacking all the camping gear,

ready to store it away

and all of a sudden I noticed there was a spider on it.

It looked familiar, I'd seen something similar,

but then I looked closer and

actually noticed there was something unusual about it.

Now a spider falling from a tent wouldn't be that big a deal to most

of us, but this spider had fallen into the hands of someone

with a real arachnid addiction.

Jurgen took the interloper into his specially built spider room.

He quickly identified his new specimen as a jumping spider,

aptly named, as they jump on their prey rather than spinning a web.

Now these small spiders come in all shapes and sizes,

but the one thing they all have in common are those four huge forward

facing eyes, affording them the best vision in the arachnid world.

But that's not what had caught Jurgen's attention.

It was its feet.

Yes, protruding from two of its legs were small feathery paddles.

That's when I really got excited about this and thought, yeah,

it isn't something normal, this isn't a spider I'd seen before,

this is something special.

So, were these freakish feet a one-off,

or did these peculiar paddles have a purpose?

Jurgen headed back out on a spider hunt.

I searched for six hours,

I asked people in the campground whether they'd seen a spider and

that's obviously a waste of time

because people just don't look for these things.

Eventually, I remembered

that we stopped at a particular walking track.

I decided to have a look there and, bingo, I found it there,

kept looking for more individuals, which I then found,

collected them and then took them home.

With plenty of specimens to study at his leisure,

Jurgen wanted to discover what these unusual appendages were for.

How do they use them?

And why is it that only the males have them?

Now a tiny spider with a fluffy foot may not interest you very much,

but if you're a spider fan like me, this was a remarkable discovery.

But what was this strange appendage and what was it used for?

Well, Jurgen put the spiders through a boot camp of tests.

We thought about the possibility

that these paddles are used for gliding or giving them kind of lift

and that would have been exciting because that would have been

the first flying spider.

Sadly this wasn't to be the case.

These spiders stayed firmly fixed to the ground.

Neither were they weapons.

When Jurgen introduced two males, no duelling took place.

Maybe this is something they use for jumping on water surfaces.

So my experiment was immersing one of the spiders in water,

but that just quickly showed me that these weren't at all useful for that

kind of thing because the spider was sort of half drowning

and I had to rescue it.

Drawing blanks,

Jurgen finally decided to introduce a furry-footed male to a female.

The male

was first signalling to the female

with his front legs,

but then something weird happened.

The male disappeared underneath a leaf.

He stretched out this leg that has the paddle at the end,

just over the edge so the female could see it

and he then moved it side to side

like a ghostly hand coming up behind the leaf

and showing it to the female.

There goes the paddle,

she spies it and he dodges.

There it goes again.

Jurgen watched as the male used his paddle to attract

the female's attention.

A strange game of peekaboo, made all the more dangerous when you realise

that the female is larger than the male and could eat him if

unimpressed by his advances.

So why would he antagonise her with his furry foot?

All became clear when Jurgen put a new lady into the tank.

So instead of attacking the male's paddle foot,

the females stood still,

they became motionless.

And that seemed to be the sign or the signal for the male that this

female was willing to mate.

The male is testing the female,

he's looking for a female that doesn't attack him.

We know these females are a little bit larger than males so males don't

want to risk trying to mate with them when these females aren't ready

cos they could end up as a meal.

How absolutely remarkable.

This plucky little spider is using his paddles as white flags,

signalling to the female his benign intentions,

or of course testing to see if she's hungry enough to eat him,

but this seductive behaviour

is not the only thing that's unique about the spider,

no, this tiny romantic Romeo is a completely new species.

Finding a new species is amazing.

But how far would you go to save one from extinction?

This is Tex.

And that's her boyfriend George.

And if it wasn't for these two,

the whooping cranes of North America

may be a long-forgotten species.

This is the strange story of how this unlikely couple brought these

birds back from the edge of extinction.

Whooping cranes are named after

the whooping sound they make when they call.

CRANE SCREECHES

Standing at around 150 centimetres tall,

these leggy birds are found

throughout central and eastern North America as well as parts of Canada.

They were pushed to near extinction by illegal hunting and habitat loss.

And by the early 1940s, there were only 20 or so alive.

Saving this species would soon take over this bird lover's life.

I first met Tex in 1968 when I was a graduate student.

Tex was born in San Antonio Zoo in Texas.

She was so precious that keepers hand-reared her

to guarantee her survival.

It was here that Tex met George and their unusual love story began.

She was the only offspring,

so we reasoned that because she represented such a portion of the

gene pool of the whooping crane that it would be important to try to

get a chick or chicks from her.

There was only one problem.

Tex thought that she was human.

You see, she'd been hand-reared in captivity and therefore accidentally

imprinted, so she really did think that she was a human being.

And this had some disastrous consequences.

Every time she was paired up with a real male whooping crane,

she steadfastly refused to mate with him.

So George hatched an idea - a very, very unusual idea.

George decided that he would become the male whooping crane that Tex had

always been looking for.

Come on, Texie.

TEX WHOOPS

'Getting Tex to breed, the first thing was to establish a bond.'

WHOOPING CONTINUES

Come on.

I actually moved my home to her barn.

Now moving in with a bird may sound like madness,

but getting a chick from Tex - a bird, and George - a human,

wouldn't be easy.

George needed to commit to a full and unusual relationship.

Just being there actually is a very important part of the relationship,

it's not that you're doing anything, it's just that you're there.

But just being there wasn't enough.

George had to take part in a very elaborate mating ritual.

Come on.

Come on.

I would go out and dance with her when she gave this particular call

that she wanted someone to dance with her.

Now as fun as leaping about with a crane looks,

there is actually a biological reason behind the moves.

You see, whooping cranes used dance to affirm their relationship.

The elaborate leaping up and down and head bobbing shows that they're

both committed to each other.

And crucially it's this that

triggers the female to start ovulating.

Come on.

Amazingly, George's dancing skills paid off

and Tex began to build a nest -

a signal that she was ready to breed.

She always built her nest right beside the door of the shack,

which was very convenient for me.

So with the nest built and Tex clearly ready,

it was time for George and his team to get her pregnant.

As George stood in front of Tex to distract her,

two assistants approached from behind and inseminated her.

WHOOPING

After all that hard work,

the chick sadly didn't make it,

dying as it emerged from the egg,

but on their second attempt, hey presto, all that courting,

dancing and sleeping in a barn finally paid off.

Finally, we got an egg and it was

fertile and then we had a beautiful bird.

The chick was named Gee Whiz and his arrival was vital for saving

this endangered species.

Decades later, the legacy of Tex and Gee Whiz lives on in a successful

breeding programme.

Thanks to George and his team,

to date there are now over 600 individual whooping cranes with many

thriving and breeding in the wild.

CRANE WHOOPS

I know some people might think it's a bit odd,

weird even, to choose to live your life as a bird.

But not me, I'm full of admiration,

I think it's fantastic that he put so much endeavour into this

extraordinary effort to keep an endangered species alive.

We've heard some of the world's strangest love stories.

But coming up next,

lakes the colour of bubble gum and surreal snowy formations.

Have you ever seen anything like that before?

Never.

Our first story comes from Europe.

For most of the year, German ponds look like this.

Nothing out of the ordinary there.

But, for a few weeks each year, something truly bizarre happens.

The pools are invaded

by bright blue frogs in their thousands.

If you walk your dog every day in the pond area

and then one day there are blue frogs sitting in that pond,

it can be really surprising.

Maybe a bit disturbing like, who's putting the colour in the pond,

what's happening here?

Well, here's the weird thing,

these astonishing amphibians haven't been tampered with.

There's no foul play here, no dye.

These frogs are naturally this curious colour,

but if they only appear for a couple of weeks every year,

where have they come from?

There are some forums where people said,

"Oh, my God, I saw a blue frog,

"I think it should be poisonous,

"somebody must have brought it from the tropics,

"probably it's one of these frogs

"they use for the arrows and don't touch it."

Now, you can find frogs in almost every corner of the globe and they

come in all sorts of weird and wonderful shapes, sizes and colours.

But bright colours are usually associated

with more tropical climates.

Take the dart frogs of South America -

resplendent in stripes, blotches and bold colourations.

But a German pond isn't exactly, well, tropical.

Have these blue frogs lost their way?

What on earth is going on?

Well, to explain this bizarre event,

we need to tear our eyes away from the brilliant blue frogs and focus

on the boring brown ones.

You see, the brown frogs are the females of the same species.

The blue ones are the males, so presumably they're turning blue to

attract their mates.

Well, actually no.

For a long time it was believed that the blue colour and intensity of the

blue colour was a sign for fitness and for the ability to reproduce.

But the truth is much weirder than that.

Like any pond in spring, mating is the number one priority.

So desperate are the males to find a female, they'll quite literally jump

on anything that moves.

I mean, look at poor Mr Toad,

he's not even the right sex or species and he's been pounced on.

And if they'll go for a toad, then it's fair to assume that

these males will try it on with each other.

Not ideal. No.

What the males need is a way to warn each other off.

The bluish colour is a signal for...

mostly for other males to tell them,

"Hey, I'm a male, don't spend your energy, don't spend your time,

"I'm not mating with you

"so spend your energy to find a female and avoid me."

So when the brown females arrive and the amphibian action really heats

up, this visual indicator ensures that the males only grasp a female

and not each other.

And, when the mating season is over, and the hormones have subsided,

the males lose their blue.

It's almost impossible to tell them apart from the females.

It's an extraordinary strategy but one question remains.

Just how do they undergo this drastic temporary transformation?

Well, many cold-blooded animals have the ability to change colour.

Specialised cells called chromatophores

enable them to perform these trans-colour tricks.

But exactly how do they work?

Chromatophores come in three main varieties,

there are the whites, violets and blues,

the reds and yellows and then the darker cells that create the black

pigments or melanin.

These darker cells sit just under the surface of the frog's skin

and when the pigments are disbursed,

it appears its normal drab brown colour.

But when seasonal triggers alter the frogs hormones,

the darker pigments contract to the centre of the cell allowing those

vivid whites, violets and blues to shine through.

Remarkable, a normally dull and drab frog

that turns a brilliant and bright shade of blue

simply by nature triggering a change within its body.

But that's not the only quirk of this seasonal adaptation.

The frogs can see in the ultraviolet or UV spectrum,

which means these frogs don't even look blue to one another.

No, they appear a bright shade of purple -

a true ultraviolet.

In conclusion, I think whoever named the brown moor frog missed out

on a bit of a trick, perhaps they should have called it

"the brown but occasionally intense dazzling blue

"but purple if you're a male moor frog" frog.

I'll get back to you with a scientific name.

Now, if you thought those frogs were a lurid colour,

coming up next is a natural wonder that's an even more striking hue.

Lakes and rivers usually run with clear waters but occasionally the

natural world displays something altogether much more colourful.

This remote lake is the colour of bright bubble gum pink.

This is Lake Hillier,

a 600 metre long lagoon off

the remote coast of South Western Australia.

Whilst its bright pink hue may look beautiful,

the lake is truly inhospitable and few people have ever ventured onto

its psychedelic shoreline.

The reason behind its vivid colour

has remained a mystery for hundreds of years.

But all that changed in February 2015 when a team of researchers and

biologists set out to unravel the mystery behind its curious colour

and accidentally stumbled across a secret hidden within its depths.

So it was really exciting to get the opportunity to visit the lake and be

a part of working out why it's pink.

This is the first time the lake's been studied on a genetic level

so our study is the first time

we've looked at the DNA of what's in the lake.

Now if you set foot on this strange lake,

the first thing you notice is its bizarre salt crusted shoreline.

As Ken and his team walked on it,

it crunched and cracked under their feet.

You see, when seawater enters the lagoon,

either during storms or via sea mists,

the water eventually evaporates

leaving behind a concentrated saline soup that is ten times saltier

than the sea that it sits next to.

Ken wanted to know if anything could survive

in this super salty solution.

There aren't any animals or birds that are really feeding on the lake.

The environment isn't suitable for large life.

Ken's first water samples from the lake confirmed that one suspected

organism was present.

But was it the cause of the curious colour?

The pink salt lakes were thought to be that colour

because of an algae in them.

The algae is called Dunaliella salina.

Now colourful algal blooms can crop up in water bodies at any time...

..transforming entire lakes and pools within days.

So could a huge bloom be the source

of Lake Hillier's perpetually pink hue?

When you take a bottle of the water and put it on your shelf, you end up

with this red ring around the bottle because the algae have swum out to

one side to try to harvest and capture more light.

So we know the red algae is in the lake,

but even once it's moved across

to the corner of the bottle you've harvested,

the rest of the water is still pink and that shows us that it is not the

algae that's really causing that pink colour.

So if this pink hue isn't made by the algae,

what could be producing this magnificent colour?

Looking deeper into the DNA of this lurid lake,

Ken and his team discovered further organisms.

They discovered bacteria.

So the organisms in the lake produce a pigment called bacterioruberin.

And that is a pinkish red,

light-harvesting pigment and because that pigment is spread

evenly throughout the cell,

the lake has that colour.

In a similar way that plants use green chlorophyll

to photosynthesise sunlight,

the bacteria are also using a pink pigment to harvest the sun's energy.

But if a pink super salty lake wasn't weird enough,

Ken and his team made one more startling discovery.

So we have been able to isolate an organism from the lake

that may be a new genus of bacteria.

If it's confirmed, this is very big news,

it may be bacteria to most but this hidden organism is completely

different to all other known bacteria,

having branched off from its ancestors

to take its own evolutionary path.

It's wonderful to think that we might be able to discover and name

a whole new branch of the tree of life.

So a potential new addition to life on Earth and the curious and

colourful case of the pink lake is solved.

Finally to England where a winter white out

caused a very weird event indeed.

December 2010 -

England was blanketed by a beautiful powdery covering of snow.

But this soon turned into one of the coldest and harshest winters on

record, leading to some extreme weather conditions.

-NEWSREADER:

-'The big chill spreads further across Britain,

'there are thousands of breakdowns on the roads

'and hundreds of schools closed.'

But whilst the rest of the country was gripped by snowmageddon,

two dog walkers in Yeovil, Somerset,

stumbled across something they'd never seen before.

It was a beautiful crystal clear morning so we decided to bring the

dogs out for a walk and we could see what looked like a lot of snowmen.

They were like giant hay bales almost.

There were lots of varying sizes and shapes -

some that were a couple of foot high and some smaller ones.

They were everywhere.

They were right the way across the crown of this hill.

Ron and Aileen were totally baffled by these balls or rolls of snow and

by the number of them that had cropped up so suddenly overnight.

But these bizarre formations were not an isolated event.

They've also appeared in fields

across the wintry Midwest of America.

Have you ever seen anything

like that before?

Never.

Looks like snow cylinders instead of snowballs or something.

This is just something else, can you see it all right?

But surely, there's no great mystery here?

This is just the work of local kids,

revellers, perhaps a bit of high jinks.

It doesn't look like something that human beings would do.

Because we tend to push too hard.

So the snow tends to be more compacted

when we're building our snowmen.

I suppose if somebody really wanted to make one, it would be possible

but it wouldn't be very easy.

We thought maybe the kids had been up here early making snowballs and

obviously they hadn't because there was no footprints or anything.

Nobody could have done that,

I mean, it's like crop circles in the winter, really.

So if people are not sneaking into the fields at night,

mischievously making these mysterious rolls of snow,

how on earth are they formed?

These bizarre tubular phenomena are called snow rollers.

So exactly how are they made?

It's quite an unusual thing.

You require a number of different phenomena

to happen one after the other.

First, you need a nice,

thick covering of snow with a top layer just at zero degrees,

so that ice crystals form

and begin to become sticky.

The snow underneath then becomes much colder,

allowing an icy skin to form on top due to the different temperatures.

If the wind gets up,

then this sticky top layer can be blown upwards,

causing it to peel off the colder

and more powdery snow underneath.

Rising, arching and falling over itself,

the snow roller begins to form,

eventually becoming too large for the wind to roll any further.

They're often hollow because the weak inner layers

which form first are easily blown away,

with these fragile formations

collapsing at the slightest change of temperature or gust of wind.

So with snow rollers forming in snowy conditions,

you'd think they'd be cropping up in places that are permanently covered

in snow.

Funnily enough, if you look at over most of Antarctica or Greenland,

you can't get them. It's too cold.

The snow is almost like sand.

So it's places where temperatures are around about zero where you're

more likely to get them.

The UK is one of those places.

They're not a common thing anywhere but because of our climate being

around zero, rather than being very cold or particularly mild in the

wintertime, then if the conditions occur, they will happen.

But they are quite rare.

Which makes this footage even more spectacular.

The elusive snow roller caught on CCTV in the dead of night.

What I like most about the natural world is that there's always more to

learn, and on that account,

I'm absolutely certain that in the future we'll be surprised by

plenty more weird and wonderful phenomena.

Coming up next time...

blood falling from the sky in Spain,

a truly shocking event that wiped out a herd of reindeer,

and a strange discovery in the Peruvian jungle.