Original subtitles

Why invertebrates? Well, that's quite a big question.

I mean, for a start, there are enormous number of them.

It's estimated that there are 200 million land invertebrates to every person.

And, like, there's 300,000 species of beetles alone,

120,000 species of flies, you know,

so there's an enormous variety to choose from.

And if you think of all the things that you can see around you quite easily,

even in your own back garden or when you go out for a walk,

all the millipedes, the centipedes, the beetles, the bugs, the flies,

moths, butterflies, scorpions and everybody's favorite, the spiders,

you know, you've got a lot to choose from.

But, oddly enough, I mean, they've been largely ignored by filmmakers,

wildlife filmmakers, up to now partly because of the difficulty of filming them.

You know, you're filming, often, very, very small creatures.

But quite recently, the advances in lenses,

in the sort of cameras we can use and so on,

it's just given us an opportunity to get down into their world

and see them, you know, at their level.

And that is extremely exciting.

The other thing is that, you know, they have a fascinating range of behaviors.

And this isn't just... exotic species.

We filmed all over the world, we filmed the best examples

of different behavior and so forth all over the world.

But you can see an awful lot, again, in your own patch.

I mean, take an example, you go out into the garden and there's a hover fly...

seemingly staying in the same place and always coming back to that little spot of sunlight

by the fruit tree and you might wonder, "What's it doing?"

Well, you know, in one of the programmes, in programme two, you'll find out what it is.

I mean, it's a male hover fly, it's holding a territory.

It's having to, every now and again, zip off and chase rivals away.

But it's all to do with mating, actually, it's all to do with females,

you know, coming by and seeing that this is a strong male that's able to hold a spot.

And, erm...

And so if a female comes by, they'll zip off and mate with her as well.

But, you know, those sort of things, they are things that everybody can see

and we've chosen a lot of, you know, home, UK, British examples,

European examples as well as exotic ones

so that it will hopefully give people this nice insight into, you know, a world

that they might, you know, we all to a certain extent ignore.

We tread on them and they're in the undergrowth all the time

but, you know...

we only take notice of the obvious ones, either the beautiful things like butterflies

or the ones that buzz around us and annoy us and sting us.

But there's a lot more to choose from.

Insects, invertebrates as a whole, are important to humans.

I know David Attenborough in his last statement makes the point that

if... all the vertebrate animals, you know,

the mammals, the birds, ourselves, disappeared,

it wouldn't make much difference to the world.

In fact, probably the world might be a darn sight better off.

But if the insects disappeared...

then we would be, for instance, we'd be knee-high in dung

because if you imagine all the beetles,

not just the obvious dung beetles on the plains of Africa,

but all the burying beetles in this country

or anywhere where there is dung,

you have beetles that are burying it and using it for their eggs.

And so, you know, they are great clearers-up of debris.

And there's all the other ones that chew leaf litter and so on

and turn it into nice growing medium for plants.

There's also, you know, another very obvious important role that insects have to play,

is pollination.

You know, they evolved with the flowering plants,

a lot of them, particularly the bees and wasps and the flying insects.

They have an enormous role to play in pollinating, you know, not just flowers

but our crops and so on as well.

So in many ways they are very prominent and important.

Our prime aim with this series was to get right down there

on the level of ants and other tiny, tiny creatures.

Get the cameras right down beside them

and that means actually getting the lenses, you know, at their level.

And I think it's in the lenses that's been the great advance recently.

We've got, sort of, much better depth of focus so that you can see,

you know, not just that tiny insect that might only be a few millimeters long doing its thing,

but you can see the background as well, and that helps place it in its environment.

Not create a sort of miniature world, we're not trying to do that.

We're trying to see them on their own scale.

Pinhole lenses, another one we've used a lot.

Tied to that is the cameras that we've used,

even with film cameras, the film is a lot faster nowadays, so you can film in lower light.

But we have used video a lot as well on this series,

high-definition video,

and even little MiniDV as well, in awkward situations.

And that, of course, is more light-sensitive

so you don't have to pour all that light onto your subjects

and frazzle them, you know, with hot, bright light.

So you can get a lot more behavior.

Sometimes there is behavior, we found, that is impossible to get with light at all.

And so we've done a lot with infrared cameras where you use,

you know, an infrared light that isn't visible to the insects,

the creatures concerned.

And then with infrared-sensitive cameras recording to video,

we've got, you know, some behavior...

that people, even the biologists we're working with, didn't think we would be able to get.

For instance, I've just seen in the other cutting room...

a sequence of a velvet worm.

It's a very primitive, early type of predator

that came on land quite early on in the evolution of land invertebrates.

And this thing goes along and it's blind but it has these sort of antennae

and it taps around looking for prey and very delicately, sort of,

finds out where the prey is and then squirts...

When it finds something it wants to overpower,

it squirts this sort of sticky liquid out of hydraulic pipes on the front of its head.

And it's a most amazing thing and nobody has really ever managed to film that before.

But with infrared the animal behaved, you know, absolutely perfectly.

There are lots of other examples.

Another piece of equipment we've used is...

a flexible endoscope with a tiny lens on the end, about...

about the diameter of a pencil.

And that actually has got a chip.

It's like a little camera, actually. It's called a chip-in-the-tip camera.

And it's on the end of this flexible line that you can steer

and so we've been able to go down burrows.

There's a lovely sequence where we've gone...

We've actually shown David Attenborough going down a burrow with this thing,

steering it down to see whether there's a scorpion in there.

We've done another sequence where a trapdoor spider...

We've been able to, sort of, drill a hole into its nest from the side,

put this little camera in, steer it looking upwards,

and then you can see the trapdoor spider going out of its trapdoor to grab something.

Just gives you a different angle on things that you wouldn't otherwise be able to get.

And I suppose the final thing which we've used a lot

is ultra high-speed video cameras...

which have advanced enormously of late.

People might have seen them in cricket coverage and tennis

where you can analyze the way the ball is spinning.

Well, it's the same sort of cameras

and we've been using the most up-to-date ones.

And, of course, for the flight programme in particular,

this has meant that we've been able to analyze

and look at the way dragonflies fly, the way, you know...

ordinary houseflies, bluebottles, take off and so forth.

And you see it in, you know, slowed down a thousand times or so on.

And it really has been a revelation what this camera can show.

The thing about it is that it records continuously.

You can press it at the moment the action happens

and it will record about eight seconds back.

So it's much easier to get your shot than with film cameras

where you had to sort of wait till the thing was about to happen and press the start button...

you know, at the moment, trying to anticipate this takeoff.

So that's been interesting.

Arachnophobia, yes, that is a thing that slightly worried us with this series

because we don't want arachnophobics, people who are scared stiff of spiders,

not to watch.

And one of the things we've done is,

we've called that particular programme that contains a lot of spiders,

we've purposely gone for The Story of Silk

rather than call it a programme about spiders.

And I know that might sound a bit subtle

but the fact is that silk is a unique invertebrate invention.

You know, caterpillars use it, all sorts of other...

invertebrates other than spiders use it for various things.

And so we've started off with non-spider use of silk.

And then people get used to that, and then we've gone into the fact that,

you know, of all the invertebrates,

spiders have brought the use of silk

to its absolute, you know, extremes.

And the different kinds of silk and the way they use it is just marvelous.

But we had one of our production coordinators on the team

who was really not happy about spiders at all...

and didn't go on many trips.

I don't think she went on a single trip that had spiders.

She managed to sort of avoid those shoots, went on a lot of others.

But when she saw the film that includes all the spiders,

she said at the end of it, she said, "You know, that has absolutely cured me.

"I think they are so clever, so beautiful, so fascinating...

"that, you know, it's totally changed my mind."

And when you see a female wolf spider,

again, another thing that you can see in your own garden...

you know, laying down an immaculate silk pad

with sort of loopy bits of soft silk...

ready to take her eggs, which she then lays on this,

and then delicately unpicking it around and folding them up

into this wonderful and waterproof... She puts waterproof silk on the outside

and then she carries it around with her.

When you're seeing that filmed in detail, you think, "Wow!

"You know, this is fascinating and beautiful and not too scary."

I think, you know, the actual...

The biggest arachnophobe that we met during the filming

was an Australian spider research biologist,

believe it or not, who had been absolutely petrified of...

particularly, redback spiders.

As you know, a lot of Australian spiders are pretty venomous and you need to avoid them.

But redback spiders are the ones that come into people's homes

and they like, sort of, hard surfaces, like toilets and things like that.

And as a child, he'd had awful experiences with these things.

I think he had been bitten and nearly died, 'cause they can kill a child.

Anyway, so he decided he wanted to learn more about them

and he's now the world's expert on these things.

And, you know, he's still a little bit scared of them,

but he's also in awe of them.

And again, we've done a wonderful sequence showing how these redback spiders

use a particularly springy silk which they...

They pull down a thread, anchor it to, you know,

say, if they're under a chair, they'd anchor it to the floor.

And do that, make a series of lines and then if anything stumbles into it,

like an ant,

there's a sticky bit on the bottom, the ant gets caught

and there's a weak, weak little joint in the silk.

And because it's under tension, once the ant gets caught,

it just goes "ping" and shoots up to where the spider is waiting to grab it.

And that is, you know, again, another great thing to behold.

And this arachnophobe is the guy who's worked out how they do all this and helped us film it.

New behavior.

I think that has been a thing

that has been a real eye-opener for all of the team working on this series.

Because, of all the creatures that you could hope to look at,

I think it is the invertebrates that are still being studied,

still being...

I mean, new species are being found, but also new behaviors all the time.

And, erm...

What we found is that, you know, because of this,

the biologists that work on them and are finding things out all the time,

were very keen for, you know, to tell us their stories

and get us involved and get us filming their stuff.

I mean, for instance, take an example, we were in Costa Rica...

filming various sequences, mostly during the day, at a research station called La Selva...

in the rainforest.

The routine is that most of the biologists,

they're studying all sorts of things, mammals, birds and insects,

but everybody goes out in the day and does their research and gets filthy

with, you know, mud and it rains and so on and so forth.

Then at the end of the day,

you come back, have a shower and everybody sort of smartens up

and goes into the communal sort of dining room for a meal

and people chat about what they've seen and so on.

And for filmmakers like ourselves

it's a brilliant place to pick up ideas and new information.

And there was this one guy who went right against this pattern.

He was always sitting there at supper with all his dirty old field clothes on

and his notebook and his bag

and a big, powerful head spotlight.

And we sat with him one time and he turned out to be...

a very enthusiastic Harvard professor called Piotr Naskrecki.

And, erm...

And he said to us... You know, we told him what we were doing

and he said, "God, you wanna come out at night with me. That's where the action is."

So he persuaded us to go out with him, and true to his word,

I mean, under every leaf and on every tree,

there was something he wanted to show us that, you know, was sort of different.

But there was one thing that he'd just discovered which he showed us and that was...

It's a sort of... It's called a lantern bug and it taps...

It's quite big, about that size, and it taps into the tree bark

and he found one to show us.

It has a lot of excess sugar

because it's sort of into the sap and it takes the proteins and things it needs,

but the excess sugar...

it squirts it out and there's a...

There's a moth that comes in behind, that you can see here now,

that actually puts its proboscis into the stream of droplets

that the thing is exuding

and then sucks it up.

And this saves the moth from flying around all night

to find flowers to feed from.

You know, it's totally new behavior.

Other examples, well, there's a lovely British example, actually, of brand-new research.

There's a quite well-known thing

where the blue butterfly has a relationship with a certain type of ant.

You find these in the Dorset heathland and places like that.

Somehow or other, there's been a...

The blue butterflies evolved a process whereby its caterpillar...

is taken down by the ants into the ants' nest...

and fed as if it was their own.

I mean, the caterpillar's enormous and the ant's own larvae are tiny,

but somehow or other, the butterfly caterpillar has the right sort of pheromones,

the right chemical smells to convince the ants that it's one of theirs

and should be fed and nurtured until it sort of grows up

and turns into a pupa and then a butterfly.

That's fine. That's quite well-known. We filmed all that.

But there was one biologist who's discovered that there's a parasitic wasp

that somehow or other has also evolved a way of...

finding these caterpillars in the wasp's nest...

In the ants' nest, sorry.

And... goes down the ants' nest and lays its eggs

in the blue butterfly caterpillar. In other words, it parasitizes them.

Normally, you'd expect the ants to swarm all over it and chase it out

'cause they're very protective of their nests.

But somehow or other, the wasp as well has got a chemical smell

that makes the ants accept it.

And so it can go down there, lay its eggs in the blue butterfly caterpillar

and then, when that turns into a cocoon,

instead of a butterfly coming out, of course, baby wasps come out.

So it's one of these incredible sort of partnerships that...

that, you know, is almost unbelievable and yet is there to film

and that's the sort of thing we've been doing.

It's always challenging to film in a tropical rainforest

because of the humidity,

the fact that you've just got set up and it pours with rain

and all that sort of stuff.

But that's sort of well-known. It comes with the job, as it were.

But I think probably the most challenging environment

that any sequence was filmed in in this series

was a bat cave in Venezuela

that was not only miles from anywhere,

but was...

Well, A, full of bats. B, full of bat guano,

like mountains of the stuff on the floor...

was very deep into the mountain

and so, you know, you had to go a long way in to get to where the action

that I'm about to tell you about happens.

The whole of the floor, because of the bat guano,

was absolutely crawling with enormous cockroaches,

with beetles, with all sorts of things that feed or live in the guano.

And the action that we wanted to film happens at night,

so you've got, you know, dark cave, dark night, stumbling around in bat guano...

millions of bats flying overhead

and what we went to film was the biggest centipede that anybody could imagine.

I mean, it's about this long.

It's sort of the world's biggest centipede.

It's extremely venomous and extremely aggressive.

And you've really got to keep your eyes about you...

to make sure you don't get bitten by this thing.

And Tim Green, our assistant producer who undertook to do this filming,

together with the cameraman Rod Clark,

they had to spend about 10 nights in this cave

trying to film with infrared again,

the activities of this giant centipede.

Because it had been told to us in an unpublished paper as yet,

that these centipedes actually caught bats in midair.

In other words, they hung on the roof of the cave by their back legs

and grabbed bats that came past, particularly baby ones,

and then fed on them.

They did, in the end, two trips to this cave

and they did, in the end, film it but it was...

I mean, Tim Green says, "I never wanna go back there again,"

but it made a wonderful sequence.

Another quite uncomfortable environment to film a sequence in

was in Malaysia, where for programme five,

which is largely about ants and bees and wasps...

we wanted to do a sequence about giant bees.

These make nests in the top of the very tallest jungle trees,

on the surface.

But they are extremely large and very aggressive and have...

You know, if more than two or three sting you, you are in really big trouble.

So everybody had to wear...

complete, you know, bee suits which look a bit ridiculous but you need to do it.

Crew and David Attenborough, everyone, everybody.

But we needed to get David Attenborough up the tree

to describe the behavior of these things.

So Steven Dunleavy employed a couple of guys

that the unit use a lot for doing, you know, stuff up in the canopy.

A rope system to get David up there.

And the sequence was done

and a few people did get stung but, luckily, not too badly.

But that was quite an awkward sort of sequence to do,

just because of the equipment and everything needed,

but also the danger from disturbing these giant bees.

There was one particular thing for the flight programme, actually.

It's called "oliarchaes". It's a strange sort of lacewing moth

that lives in Arizona

in a very remote part called the Black Mountains.

Miles from anywhere. It's about a, sort of, six-hour, four-wheel drive journey.

And, erm...

the scientist who'd sort of seen this happening said that

there is an absolutely spectacular emergence of millions of these all together,

like, over two mornings.

But it only happens if the rain, several months beforehand,

has triggered the larvae to go into their final stage

to get their wings and then disperse.

And we tried...

We camped out there with the cameraman and so on

for two lots of two weeks at a time

with everybody thinking it was about to happen.

And it never did! So it was a big, big disappointment,

this sort of spectacular happening never got down on film.

And never actually happened to my knowledge.

So that was a downer.

There was one or two, you know, other things that we tried for and didn't get.

There was a beetle...

The biggest beetle in the world is called the Titan beetle...

and what we wanted to find...

We found the beetle and David could describe it, but it must have a larva,

as he describes, that is twice as big as that.

So the biggest of these beetles is about seven or eight inches long

and the larva is absolutely enormous.

Nobody has ever found them and we did want to find that.

We had two goes at it but didn't find it,

so we had to make do just with the beetle itself,

which is still, you know, spectacular.

Who'd want to handle that? David's very good at handling beetles.

Very vicious. Those jaws can actually snap through a pencil

and they'd certainly do you a lot of damage in your finger.

One of the things we really wanted to do in this series...

is actually change people's perception of insects

and other invertebrates.

Because there is this feeling that they are creepy, crawly and nasty and so forth.

And I think that some of the sequences we've filmed,

I mean, we hope that people will see that, you know, not only is the behavior fascinating,

but they are actually, really, you know, very beautiful at times.

Highly colored.

And for instance, I mean, here's a cicada

coming out in time-lapse and developing its wings.

These...

These cicadas come out only every 17 years.

Nobody knows how they time that,

but they are called 17-year periodic cicadas.

Those are their empty shells on the screen now.

It is a spectacle that is just amazing.

You know, by timing, getting our timing right, getting there at the right time,

I think, with this cicada sequence and lots of other sequences,

we will show people, I hope,

that insects can be, you know, very beautiful, very fascinating

and well worth the watch, I hope.