Fantastic Feeding Weird Nature

There was a time when myths and science were entwined...

when mermaids and unicorns could mysteriously appear...

Nature was weird.

When science revealed the truth behind these imaginary creatures,

it found real animals lay behind the legends.

Today, science still makes astonishing discoveries,

but nature seems just as weird.

It's just that fact has broken free from fiction.

We catch our food in many ingenious ways, but nature is just as inventive.

The bolas spider can attract male moths by mimicking the scent of a female.

It uses a blob of glue dangling by a thread to catch them.

The spider's bolas is named after an old hunting weapon still used in South America.

Gauchos throw these weighted ropes around the legs of cattle to bring them down.

The spider's version is sticky. It is cued by the beating of wings.

The thread is stronger than steel. Few escape.

This weird journey shows many of the strange ways nature catches food.

In nature, it's only humans that rely on artificial tools to catch prey.

And nature's weapons put our inventions to shame.

This lethal saw belongs to a freshwater shark.

Monsters, 7m long, patrol the rivers of northern Australia.

The sawfish's long snout

is armed with pin-sharp teeth that slash at prey.

It drives fish to the shallows where this living chainsaw can do its devastating work.

Dismembered victims are sucked up by its underslung mouth.

While some use vicious weapons to dispatch prey,

others employ the finesse of a marksman.

The archer fish uses a water pistol.

It makes a gun barrel by pressing its tongue against a groove in its mouth.

It closes its gills to force out the water.

It's accurate up to 2 metres.

This expert in ballistics even allows for the curving of the jet through gravity...

..and adjusts for the way light bends at the boundary between water and air,

which appears to shift the position of its target.

By some amazing computation, it changes its firing angle to compensate for this optical illusion.

Archers target anything that moves or glows.

Hmm?

The velvet worm employs even deadlier firepower.

One of the oldest invertebrates,

its shooting style is unique.

Like a gunslinger, it has two pistols.

They fire lassos of glue.

The threads snake up to a metre.

Its glue guns weave from side to side to spread their fire.

The strands glue down the victim like a sticky net.

This rapid adhesive dries in seconds.

The velvet worm's knifelike jaw pierces its victim,

before sucking it dry.

New research suggests that dolphins also have a weapon that can be fired at prey,

but one based on sound.

CLICKING

CLICKING

Dolphins use a form of sonar to investigate their world.

They create an image by sending out a sound beam and decoding the returning echoes.

These pulses of high-intensity ultrasound can penetrate the sand

and create a sound picture of buried fish.

By upping the intensity, the dolphin appears to turn its sound system into a weapon.

The blasts disorientate prey, making them easy to catch.

Sonic weapons have been perfected by others.

Far from being quiet,

the ocean is filled with a cacophony of animal noise

that can even disrupt the sonic transmissions of submarines.

Most of the din is made by a surprisingly insignificant creature -

the pistol shrimp.

By snapping its claws, it can not only make communication sounds,

but something far deadlier.

These shrimps are its prey.

It deals a knockout blow from a distance by using its claw as a sonic weapon.

First, its claw is cocked like a pistol... CLICK!

..then fired...

BANG!

The effect is literally stunning.

As the claw snaps shut,

it fires a blast of bubbles.

Incredibly, as the bubbles collapse, they momentarily reach the temperature of the sun.

BANG!

BANG!

This implosion causes a shock wave that stuns.

This is also the haunt of other weird feeders.

The frogfish gives fast food a new meaning. It can catch its prey quicker than any other creature.

It uses its fins as legs to creep its camouflaged body around.

Prey, fooled by the disguise, is grabbed faster than the eye can see.

The process takes 1/6,000th of a second,

quicker than any creature can react.

Extreme slow motion reveals what no animal eye can see.

Its mouth balloons 12 times, creating a vacuum that sucks in prey.

The frogfish has the fastest known movement in the animal world.

But it isn't the only fast-food addict in the ocean.

The extraordinary eyes of the mantis shrimp, a creature famed for its high-speed knockout punch.

Its speciality is breaking into crab shells.

It finds its prey using the most sophisticated targeting system in nature.

Our eyes have three types of colour-analysing cells.

The mantis has 16, arranged in bands.

They target their prey like cross-hairs.

The mantis's heavy calcified clubs can be swung at prey.

They strike at lightning speed.

SMASH!

The clubs smash with the force of a .22-calibre bullet.

They shatter glass as easily as they pulverise a crab's shell.

An eagle's way of breaking into prey gave rise to a Greek legend.

It concerned a soothsayer who prophesied that a poet would die when a house fell down on him.

The story arose in an area where golden eagles prey almost exclusively on tortoises.

It has a beak that surgically cuts through flesh and effortlessly rips skin from bone

and talons that can pierce and crush almost any prey.

But these tools are no match for the tortoise's armour.

The eagle's solution fulfilled the soothsayer's prophesy.

The poet did die from a falling house, but one that belonged to a tortoise.

Its dive keeps up with its hapless prey.

The impact achieved what defeated the talons.

SQUAWKING

In the mountainous regions of northern Greece,

chicks are reared almost exclusively on tortoises,

but even the specialist tools of the eagle need help to keep food coming.

But one tool specialist is more perfectly equipped.

SQUEAK!

It lives in the forests of Madagascar.

SQUEAK!

Its specialist tool is a bony finger.

In a remarkable adaptation, the aye-aye finds hidden prey by tapping with this elongated middle digit.

TAPPING

Hollow cavities make a characteristic echo.

Variations in the echoes build up a 3D picture of the cavity.

It also listens for the characteristic sounds of a wood-boring grub.

Its ears cup the sound and confirm the spot.

The aye-aye's tool becomes a probe.

A sniff confirms there's life.

The finger transforms again,

this time into a gaffer hook.

Reaching inaccessible prey is a problem with many natural solutions.

The chameleon's independent swivelling eyes help it locate food.

BUZZING

They act as rangefinders,

only coming together when prey is firmly within their sights.

Reliable targeting is vital when using their projectile tongue,

an organ that new research shows is more remarkable than was thought.

The converging eyes help confirm distance, crucial for rangefinding.

With a tongue longer than its body, it needs long-range accuracy.

But some challenges are just too great.

But they do reveal the tongue's mechanics.

Circular muscles contract to shoot it forward.

The sticky tip then forms a suction cup.

The suckered tip allows some chameleons to even pluck small birds from the air.

Its tongue extension is the fastest movement of any land animal.

It accelerates to 50G,

five times that of a fighter plane.

There seems to be a fly in my soup.

What was that there?

Cuttlefish also use a long reach to catch food at a distance.

Instead of a tongue, they deploy two extendable tentacles.

Like the chameleon's tongue, the ends form suckers.

Each sucker has a ring of minute teeth

which bite into its prey to increase grip.

Having two tentacles also means they can act like tongs.

They accelerate at 25G, half the speed of the chameleon's tongue,

but even more impressive, as they have to plough through water.

Cuttlefish have more mysterious powers.

They appear to specialise in hypnosis.

These bands of colour are under nervous control.

The effect can be hypnotic.

Pigment cells beneath the skin expand and contract to create a mesmerising display.

The pulsing seems to create a deadly fascination.

But the cuttlefish may not be alone in using hypnotic powers.

Rabbits are a stoat's favourite prey.

Stoats are living bundles of energy and live life at breakneck speed.

They can tackle prey ten times their size...

if they can catch them.

To help, they do something quite strange.

This manic dance seems to be for the rabbit's benefit.

And it appears to cast a spell.

It's a deadly kind of enchantment.

Some snakes have found other ways to fool.

The death adder is one of Australia's deadliest and most perfectly camouflaged serpents.

And it has a deadly trick.

Its tail wriggles like a live lure.

Skinks are among its favourite prey.

They are especially partial to insect larvae.

This snake's tail wriggles like a beetle grub.

Its squirming tip even mimics a grub's segments.

Any animal finds it hard to tell the difference.

As the lizard nears, the writhing intensifies,

as the snake tries to lure it closer.

But a reprieve is at hand.

The death adder is aptly named - half of all humans bitten die.

Here you are, mate.

Crocodiles also lunge at prey.

They rely on stealth and a jump that exceeds their body length.

Many fish have also found that leaping makes the perfect ambush.

A tail flip propels the archer fish from the surface.

They often prefer this direct approach to shooting down prey with water.

These leaps are only used on prey that's close to the surface.

But the arowana is the ultimate high-jumper.

It jumps two metres out of the water.

A long tail provides propulsion.

Swivelling eyes help with targeting.

The arowana performs this feat using rhythmic waves of its long muscular tail.

Nature's animals use many fantastic ways of feeding,

from the graceful to the bizarre.

But we are the weirdest of all. We have no natural means to catch the animals we eat.

Sometimes, our equipment catches more than we bargained for.