Original subtitles

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- [Narrator] Peculiar, mysterious, magical.

Chameleons are familiar to almost every person on Earth.

Yet, they are found in just a handful of places

on the planet.

We still know so little about them.

Join us as we embark on a quest

to reveal the secret life of these strange exotic creatures.

And with the help of the latest technology,

we'll go right inside their amazing world.

We'll reveal new science,

and solve some age-old mysteries.

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From the island of Madagascar,

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the forests of eastern Southern Africa,

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to the sand dunes of the Namibian Desert,

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meet the Chameleons of the World.

The distribution of chameleons

is confined to Africa, the Mediterranean,

the Arabian Peninsula, India and Sri Lanka,

and also the island of Madagascar.

Travel with our two experts,

as they reveal the amazing world of chameleons.

Marius Burger explores the world

in search of frogs and reptiles,

and he has a specific interest in chameleons.

- These are the moments that I live for.

- [Narrator] Anthony Herrel has long been interested

in functional apology,

and investigates the feeding and movement of chameleons

in his lab in Paris.

Witness never been seen before X-ray imaging,

and high speed photography.

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In this episode, we investigate the mechanics

and the design of the ultimate predator.

We dissect it to the last bone, to the last nerve,

and recreate any bug's worst nightmare,

a near invisible phantom of the forest.

Chameleon design is ingenious.

It's neither an armor suit, nor a robotics simulation.

In fact, it's nothing predator-like.

But an in-depth study of this perfect hunter

reveals the extraordinary evolution of a reptile body,

which resulted in a creature that is built for the kill.

With the stealthy movement,

a weapon perfectly positioned for frontal attack,

a support structured to focus on the target,

pinpoint vision, these assassins move into position.

Then, a silence before an accurate perfect attack.

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Perhaps the most famous attribute

is the chameleon's ability to catch prey over a distance

using a projectile tongue.

But for this weapon to be used most effectively,

the sniper must also be an expert at hide and seek.

- Chameleons are renowned as masters of disguise,

and this little fellow is certainly the best of the best.

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Still can't see it?

Well, that's the whole idea.

Camouflage has two functions.

Number one, you want to remain undetected to your predators.

A rainforest like this is full of snakes

that would love to snack on a doozy chameleon,

and of course you also don't want your prey to see you.

Sitting there motionless, invisible,

the little insects land just within striking distance.

This Usambara pygmy chameleon

is trying his hardest to look like

like another dead bronze and he's doing an excellent job.

He's got the right coloration, the right skin pattern,

he's got tiny little spines,

these little spines the break the outline of the body.

And he's using stealth.

Not moving, or if he's moving, so slowly

that it's not really visible.

Impressive.

- [Narrator] The chameleon's tongue strikes again.

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Back in the lab in Paris, science provides us

with the blueprints of chameleon design.

The latest technology, high speed photography,

X-ray filming and microcomputer thermography scans

take his right inside the body of a chameleon.

At the forefront of this research,

stands evolutionary biologist, Dr. .,

based at the Natural History Museum in Paris.

His discoveries have corrected

many of our previous misconceptions.

- Technology has really changed the way we look at science.

Especially in my line of work,

technology is extremely important

to understand how animals really work.

So what we're trying to do

is explain animals in their natural environment,

and to do that we need to look at the animals in more detail

and we need to understand how animals work.

Take for example a chameleon.

What's the coolest thing about a chameleon

that you can really think about?

Is it the hands that are special,

the color changes, the eyes?

No, it's the projectile tongue.

It's the tongue that flies out of the mouth of a chameleon,

captures a fly sitting on another branch,

and brings it back to the mouth.

Now if you want to understand how that tongue really works,

we need to look at slow speed,

and we need to look inside the animal.

And I don't mean cutting it open.

What we're gonna do is look inside the animal,

using high-speed X-ray technology.

Let's have a look.

Alright, breakfast's served.

Look at it.

Oh, look at the tongue, look at the tongue.

It's coming slowly, there it goes.

There it goes.

Alright, it's got it, cool.

- [Narrator] Using high-speed X-ray cameras,

Anthony investigated the trigger mechanism

of this phenomenon.

- Wow, did you see that?

That was pretty cool, you know.

I bet you didn't really see that.

Now how it does it is really interesting,

and the trigger to that mechanism

is something you can only understand

by looking inside the animal using X-rays.

Now what's really important about it

is that the tongue actually acts like a spring.

So a chameleon actually compresses a spring inside its mouth

and then uses its tongue bone, the bone inside the tongue,

to release the trigger,

and then the song shoots like a spring

out of the mouth towards the prey.

And that's how this little guy

actually shoots out its tongue.

Think about it, how does a chameleon tongue work?

How does the animal manage to shoot out its tongue

in a fraction of a second, to reach that prey,

which is two body lengths away from it?

I mean, that's really amazing.

So how do we understand that movement,

how can we explain it?

Well, the only way we can do that

is by using this technology.

The first time I saw these images of the tongue moving

towards a prey item, it was really amazing

because for the first time I could really understand

how that mechanism may potentially work.

And so if you look at that image

of the chameleon shooting out its tongue,

the first thing that you'll notice

is that the hyoid bone,

the bone in the back of the tongue,

is unfolding first slowly,

but all of a sudden snaps,

and triggers that whole ballistic tongue movement,

and the tongue just flies out under its own momentum

towards the prey.

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- [Narrator] Everything in the building blocks

of the chameleon,

contributes to the success of chameleons as predators.

Its skin is able to change color.

Very handy when you want to disappear into the background,

and also when you need to send a signal.

Kirindy, Madagascar.

The forest is peaceful,

and so is this female of the Labord's chameleon,

but not for long.

In the short breeding period,

the male Labord's chameleon is always on the lookout

for amenable females.

But our lady si already carrying eggs,

and upon meeting each other,

she undergoes a dramatic color change.

Her skin is literally speaking not interested.

But not all males will take no for an answer,

and she results with an ultimate rejection,

swing to-and-fro, mouth agape,

and our Casanova scurries away.

- This is not a scene that you will see everyday.

A male Labord's chameleon accidentally stumbling

upon a female of his own kind.

What a lot of drama.

- [Narrator] The color change happens

in the most ingenious manner.

The chameleon's skin consists of four different layers,

containing specific primary color pigments.

Color change happens by widening

and reducing windows in the skin

to reveal more or less of a specific color.

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Additionally, colors may be overlaid

to produce completely different color hues.

But the darkening of chameleons,

usually to indicate a stressful mood,

happens entirely differently.

Dark melanin spreads along the upper surface of the skin

by means of a fine network of tentacle-like tubes,

darkening the skin like a black cloud darkens the land.

So the chameleon can change color,

and capture its prey over a distance

with its incredible tongue, but there's more.

Independently swiveling eyes, mounted on conical turrets

allowing for 360 degree vision,

the chameleon's brain has to analyze

two different images at once,

an accomplishment which human brains

would struggle to comprehend.

From a chameleon's perspective,

it is certainly an ecological advantage.

Being able to target your prey,

whilst at the same time looking out for your enemy.

The proverbial eyes in the back of your head.

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The final building block that makes a chameleon unique

is its feet.

There are unlike that of any other lizard,

a highly specialized fusion of digits form claspers.

This is a useful adaptation for tree living existence.

What's more, the hands have the fingers fused.

Two on the outside, and three on the inside

whereas the feet have three toes fused on the outside,

and two on the inside.

Each digit is adorned with a small sharp claw

to improve the grip.

- X-ray cinematography has revealed

something very interesting about how chameleons move.

'Cause if you think about a lizard,

or many other porwling animals,

like crocodiles, alligators, lizards, all those things,

when they move, they actually put their legs

to the side of their body.

But when a chameleon moves,

it has to move on really narrow substrates.

It's living out in the trees,

on small branches and everything.

So it has to put its hand under his body,

to keep its stability.

Now if you want to do that,

if I put my hands like this and I still want to move,

I need to do something very special,

otherwise I can only take very short steps.

So if I want to take a decent step,

I have to move my shoulder forward.

And if you look at a chameleon,

the interesting thing you see using X-rays,

'cause otherwise you won't see it,

is that the shoulder blade

actually slides along the body forward,

allowing the chameleon to actually take a much bigger step

than it could do otherwise.

And again, it's one of those things

that we never could have dreamt of what s going on there

without the use of that X-ray vision,

and it's really looking inside the animal,

that's telling us how these animals work,

and how they really are adapted

to their natural environment.

So it's a really interesting tool to use in this context.

- [Narrator] This is all well and good for the tree dwellers

but maybe not the best design for ground living chameleons.

In the lab, Anthony discovered

that the Leaf chameleon of Madagascar

has found an alternative strategy

to deal with this apparent handicap.

Something that was never obvious

until scientists had a closer look in laboratories

while studying locomotion.

High-speed imaging has revealed so much to us,

I mean high-speed especially

in combination with your X-rays,

about chameleons, and how they move, and what they do,

and how they're adapted to their natural habitat.

But there's one thing which is actually really cool,

and it didn't require any high-speed,

and it didn't require any X-rays.

Now if you think you're walking around

here in the tropical forest of Madagascar,

you're walking through the bush,

you're looking at all the interesting animals,

and all of a sudden if you look down at the ground,

not just up in the trees,

you'll see a very small chameleon.

It's a little chameleon of the genus Brookesia, it's called,

and it's a ground chameleon

so its main habitat is out there on the ground.

Now what was interesting about this little guy,

was not just the fact that it's small,

and living on the ground,

but if you see how it moves,

and you put it on different branches,

you see something very interesting.

Now a normal chameleon, as you know,

has very specialized hands

that allow it to hold onto a substrate.

So it allows it to keep its stability,

move about very nicely.

But what happens if you make the substrate

bigger and bigger and bigger?

Those little hands, especially those little guys,

can no longer hold on to the substrate,

they can no longer grab it.

What these little chameleons do

is something you can never have guessed.

They actually use their tail as a fifth limb.

They're at their four,

and they're gonna use the tail

to generate an extra point of pressure

to give them more stability,

just as if you were walking with a walking stick.

You're standing on an unequal terrain,

you want extra stability, you use that walking stick,

extra point of contact.

And that's what these little guys do,

and as far as we know, no other chameleons do that.

So if you look at these chameleons here,

they're ground chameleons of the genus Brookesia,

if you look at both of them

you'll see that they're doing something very very different.

The guy in the front here moving in the broad substrate

is actually pushing with its tail on the substrate

with every step.

The guy on the narrow substrate here,

is actually keeping its tail nice and straight.

This is very unusual, and this is kinda

what you'd expect these chameleons to do.

They're on the narrow substrate, they can use their hands

which are really specialized for grasping

to hold on to the substrate.

The interesting thing is that these chameleons

actually live most of their life on the ground

When they're on the ground,

they can no longer hold on to the substrate,

and to compensate for that loss of stability,

they're actually gonna use her tail.

So these chameleons are highly specialized to use their tail

as a fifth limb to give them extra stability

when they're walking broad substrates.

This is something we've discovered only recently,

right here in the lab.

- [Narrator] The tail is not to be underestimated

in the acrobatic lifestyle of chameleons.

It is truly prehensile, a fully functional fifth limb.

Moving through the branches for some

might be the road less traveled, and on a daily basis,

chameleons have to navigate three-dimensional routes.

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A lifeline for any Cape Dwarf chameleon,

making its way through an obstacle course of reeds

swaying in the wind.

So this is what it takes to be a chameleon,

but every young hunter has to crawl

before he can become such an arboreal acrobat.

A newborn Stanford's chameleon

peeps out on an unfamiliar world.

This naive explorer may want to ponder its next move,

but the need to feed is strong,

and so he embarks on his very first hunt,

but he's not the only hunter out on the prowl.

Fortunately for our young explorer,

parents do not view their own offspring as a meal.

Instead, our young adventurer gets a head start in life

by hitching a ride on dad's back.

Chameleons in Greek means dwarf lion,

and sometimes when seen working or hunting,

it seems just to be named after the king of beasts.

These colorful phantoms are varied

both in their design and distribution,

ranging from the horned chameleons in East Africa

to the dwarves of Southern Africa.

Some live in evergreen forests,

and others in the scorching deserts of Namibia.

Some are larger than you would ever imagine,

and others so small, you would find it difficult to spot

even when right in front of you.

Each, regardless of its size or where it lives,

is built for one thing and one thing only,

to be the perfect predator.

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Next time in Chameleons of the World,

we journey for the last time with Marius,

to glimpse upon the everyday life of chameleons.

- Yes.

- [Narrator] How they reproduce, evade predators.

Anthony comes second.

- 240 Newtons, don't even compare.

- [Narrator] And debunks the myth of the sticky tongue.

Join us for another fascinating look

at the world of chameleons in Chameleons of the World.

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