Life in the Undergrowth (2005): Season 1, Episode 1 - Invasion of the Land - full transcript

An eye from another world,

A smell-detector, investigating the path ahead.

We don't often see a snail that way.

And that's because we've only recently
had the tiny lenses and electronic cameras

that we need to explore this miniature world.

But when we meet its inhabitants face to face,

we suddenly realise that their behaviour
can be just as meaningful to us

as the behaviour of many animals
more our own size.

Look at this, for example.

It's an earwig, yes.

But it's also a female and a mother.



And like so many mothers,
she's guarding her young.

These two ants are not quite sure
whether they like one another.

Stroking antennae is the equivalent
of a cautious chat over the garden fence.

When big animals go courting, they show off.

And so do damselflies.

Courtship signals for a male wolf spider
are rather more frantic

because if his female doesn't understand
why he's approaching her,

she'll eat him.

This ant is a farmer

and these aphids, the cows which it milks
for a drink of honeydew every day.

Other ants are eternally on the march.

Powerfully armed soldiers
guard the flanks of their column as they travel,

protecting the workers
who are carrying their helpless young.

When it comes to craftsmanship,
few can beat this wasp.



Using mud to construct an elegant jar
in which to store her eggs.

Mud is also used by termites.

They build tower blocks
that, in proportion to their size,

are taller than New York skyscrapers.

These two worlds, ours and theirs,
influence one another to an extraordinary degree.

If we and the rest of the backboned animals
were to disappear overnight,

the rest of the world would get on pretty well.

But if they were to disappear,

the land's ecosystems would collapse.

For the fact is, they were the pioneers.

The first animals of any kind
to colonise the lands of the earth.

To tell their story we must go back to a time

when the world was a very different place.

Some 400 million years ago,

the lands of planet earth were totally without life.

They were bare, naked rock,

roasted by sun during the day,
freezing cold at night

and swept by terrible storms.

But in the waters of the world
conditions were much more stable.

Life had begun there
some 2,000 million years earlier still.

For a long time it remained microscopic,
but eventually larger animals appeared.

Jellyfish and corals, starfish and snails,

and animals with segmented bodies.

All needed food.

Many would have eaten unguarded eggs
given the chance.

And then, around 400 million years ago,
some enterprising creatures

found it safer to lay their eggs out of the sea,
up on the beach.

They still do.

Every spring, on a few special nights
along the Atlantic coast of North America,

thousands of horseshoe crabs emerge
from the sea.

And here in the wet sand, they spawn.

They may only stay for a few minutes or hours,

but animals like these
may well have been the first of any kind

to leave the sea and venture onto land.

Although these creatures
spend virtually all their lives at sea,

they can survive surprisingly well on land.

It's almost as if they were pre-adapted.

They have shells, external skeletons,

and that means that their legs are rigid
and jointed.

And at the back they have a series of plates,
called book lungs,

which extract oxygen from seawater,

but can also do the same thing,
if they're kept reasonably moist, from the air.

So creatures like this can in fact spend
about a week on land.

And it only requires minimum modifications

to enable them to live up there permanently.

It was difficult to abandon the sea altogether
until the land became green.

But eventually it did.

Simple plants, algae
and then mosses and liverworts

began to advance over the mud and rock
to clothe the earth.

And into these first green tangles
came animals looking for food.

Some had armour

for that, in the sea,
had protected them from their enemies.

Now it would help them conserve moisture.

They were the ancestors of today's millipedes.

Small holes had developed
along the underside of their bodies

that led to internal tubes
with which they could absorb oxygen from the air.

Their rigid,jointed legs, however,
were largely unchanged

and worked very well on land
even without the support of water.

Battering-ram heads enabled them
to bulldoze their way through the vegetation

to collect the rotting plants on which they fed.

They grew big, increasing the number of segments
in their bodies.

Some had over 300, each with two pairs of legs.

Some that didn't curl up, reinforced their armour
with plates along their backs.

Crustaceans like shrimps came, too.

They were the ancestors of woodlice.

So, today there is a huge
and varied population of animals

living on the land with bodies that are
little different from those of their ancestors

who lived in the sea so long ago.

And they are extraordinarily successful.

Some are the most numerous
of all land-living species.

But we seldom see them.
This pin will give you an idea of why.

They're tiny.

This minute little creature is a springtail.

It's less than a half a millimetre long.
The size of a full stop.

In one square metre of soil,
there may be over 10,000 of them.

Drying out is a very real danger for them.

And some waterproof themselves regularly
with a droplet of special grooming fluid.

You might even say that they have turned bathing
into an art form.

They even have two inflatable tubes

that enable them
to get to those hard-to-reach places.

To help them get around through the leaf litter,

these springtails, as their name suggests,
have a rather novel way of jumping.

They have a tiny two-pronged lever
beneath their abdomen.

One small flick from it
can catapult them six inches,

some 15 centimetres, into the air.

It's the equivalent of a human being
jumping over the Eiffel Tower.

And if they happen to land upside down,

well, they have a special way
of righting themselves.

They use their grooming fluid dispenser
to stick onto the ground

so that they can pull themselves
back onto their feet.

So the foundations were laid
for the ecosystems that now flourish on earth

and on which we ourselves depend.

It has to be said, however,

that sometimes
some of us regard a few of these pioneers

more as our enemies than our friends.

Many of the molluscs in the sea develop shells
to protect themselves from predators.

But on land those shells serve just as well
to keep the occupant nice and moist.

So without any major change to their anatomy,
molluscs were able to creep up out of the water

and graze in the forests of algae and mosses
that were then spreading over the land.

And given the right conditions, they still do.

With rain and the coming of night
a secret army comes out of hiding.

These are the conditions they like best.

Dark and, best of all, wet.

Gliding along a carpet of slime

works just as well on land as it does underwater.

And a rasping tongue scrapes algae off rocks
wherever they are.

In times of drought, snails may be unable
to move around for months on end.

So when conditions are right,
they eagerly set off to find food.

Their upper pair of tentacles carry those eyes
with which they look around.

The lower ones smell what's beneath.

They breed by means of a small pouch

on the right hand side of their body
just within the shell

which, because it's permanently moist,
is able to absorb oxygen.

This is what they're seeking,
a succulent green leaf.

No time to be lost.

Dawn will bring a change in conditions.

So they have to return to their shelters
and clamp down their shells once more

so that they retain their moisture.

The ancient forests were colonised
by all kinds of plant eaters

long before there were any frogs or lizards,
birds or insect-eating mammals.

But there were, nonetheless, hunters
prowling through the vegetation.

This was one of the first.

Fossils very like it have been found
in rocks that are 540 million years old.

This is a velvet worm.

It, too, has scarcely changed
since it lived in the sea

and today it's only found in wet, humid forests.

It usually hunts at night,
but infrared cameras can reveal it in action.

Soft, stumpy legs enable it to move
in total silence

and it finds its way with long, sensitive feelers.

It's a master of stealth.

This cricket has huge eyes
but it's difficult to see what's going on around it.

Though the velvet worm has fangs,

it will attack its prey when it finds it
with a very special weapon.

Anxiously, the cricket probes around
in the darkness

with its long antennae.

The velvet worm will only know
if it's found its prey when it touches it.

So when it does, it has to react immediately.

There!

And the cricket is trapped.

A slow motion camera shows the remarkable way
in which the velvet worm attacks.

Two nozzles beneath its feelers
squirt twin streams of glue.

The more the cricket struggles,
the more it becomes entangled.

With the prey immobilised,
the velvet worm reclaims its glue by eating it.

And then it starts on the cricket.

There were other hunters, too,
in the ancient forests,

relatives of the horseshoe crabs,

and they were even more formidable.

This is a whip spider.

Like its ancestors, it has a hard external skeleton.

Two of its limbs have been turned
into highly mobile, sensitive feelers.

It uses them to probe around delicately
both in front and behind.

Any prey within a foot of it
will be immediately detected.

It's extremely territorial and it has no hesitation
in attacking one of its own kind.

The width of its claws
is a good indicator of strength

and a smaller animal will quickly back down.

But these two are equally matched
and they will fight.

The loser retreats.

But even whip spiders were not
the most formidable hunters in these forests.

There were others
with an even more venomous weaponry.

This centipede has powerful jaws, poison fangs

and is very, very fast.

It's a very good hunter.

But it's only half as long as my little finger.

There are centipedes in the world, however,
that are as big as my forearm.

This is one of these alarming giants.

It's over 13 inches, 35 centimetres, long

and with the muscular strength of a small snake.

And the poison in its black-tipped fangs is lethal.

It hunts in the dark, bat-haunted caves
of Venezuela.

Like the whip spider and the velvet worm,

it uses its antennae to feel for its victims.

The beetles that swarm on the rocky floor
of the cave are of no interest to it.

It's after bigger prey.

And it knows it can find that by climbing.

Its many legs give it a secure hold
on the vertical rocks.

It's heading for the ceiling.

Now in the darkness,
it can sense bats flying past it.

Holding on with its hind legs,
it reaches out into their flight path

and almost immediately it has one.

An injection of venom from its fangs
kills the bat almost instantaneously.

It will take it an hour or so,
but it will eat all the bat's flesh.

So all these animals, having left the sea,

solved the problems of moving around
and breathing air

in their own differing ways.

But there was another difficulty, mating.

In the sea, animals need only release
their eggs and sperm

and the water mixed the two together.

On dry land that couldn't happen,
even for the most moisture-loving of creatures.

An individual slug
carries both male and female organs.

But even then, that was of no help.
Each had to both give and receive.

Somehow or other,
pairs of individuals had to get together

and the ways they have evolved
in which to do so are quite extraordinary.

Indeed, some of them
are almost beyond imagining.

The leopard slug, you might think,
has the simplest of habits.

Maybe, but not when it comes to mating.

When an individual is looking for a partner,

it gives its trail of slime a special taste
that advertises the fact.

Another, if it feels the same way,
will detect the invitation and start to follow.

The pursuer, to confirm that
it's there and ready to mate,

gives the pursued a nibble.

The leader heads upwards.

An overhang is what's needed.

The underside of a branch will do very nicely.

The two start to circle one another
more and more closely

until they entwine.

For an hour or so they continue
to wind themselves around one another.

Then, suddenly,
the pair release their hold on the branch

and start to slide downwards on a rope of mucus.

Now, in midair,
they move to the next stage in their pairing.

Each everts its male organ
from just behind its head.

These grow longer and longer.

Then they, too, begin to entwine.

They fan out to form a translucent,
flower-like globe.

And now, at last,
sperm passes from one slug to the other.

The transfer is complete. Each has been fertilized.

Finally, their strange, balletic relationship
comes to an end...

with a bump.

A millipede, unlike a slug,
is either a male or a female.

In southern Africa,
where there are many different species,

both sexes spend the winter in hibernation,

curled up in the leaf litter or beneath the bark.

As the temperatures rise
with the coming of spring,

they all unwind themselves
and set off to look for a mate.

Finding one in the tangled undergrowth
is not easy.

This male forest millipede

knows that he can increase his chances
if he heads upwards

into the trees.

Leaving the safety of the undergrowth
may seem a risky thing to do,

but these millipedes secrete a poison
from pores in their armour

and their conspicuous red and black colours
warn predators to leave them alone.

They emerge in thousands.

Surprisingly perhaps,
a male, when he does find a female,

is not met with a friendly greeting.

Quite the reverse. She coils up.

This is her way
of sorting out the men from the boys.

Only the strongest and fittest male
will have the strength to force her coils apart.

To help him do so, he has white suction pads
on the bottom of his feet

which give him a good grip.

Eventually she relaxes and he lifts her up

so he can extend two specially modified legs
with which he inseminates her.

Once inserted, these legs swell
so that the partners become fastened together.

And that's important

because it will take him a couple of hours
to transfer his sperm.

But there are lots of males around
and before long another one turns up.

The new arrival checks out the pair
with his antennae.

If they're not tightly bound together,
he may have a chance of taking over.

He pushes between them, levering them apart.

Gradually, he manages to unzip their legs.

The first male's white mating legs
are dragged out.

He's been defeated.

It will be the second, stronger male
who fertilizes her eggs.

So, mating on land isn't as random
as it had been for so many in the sea.

Now it's selective.

But brute force isn't the only basis
on which to select.

A female springtail is bigger than a male

and she prefers a partner who can give her
a sustained head-to-head push.

Other males are eager to try their luck
but butting her sides won't get them anywhere.

She seems unimpressed by any of them,

but one is determined to stay
as her dance partner.

She simply can't get rid of him.

He confidently signals victory
with a couple of fancy twirls.

Then he deposits a droplet of sperm onto the leaf

and she graciously takes it onboard.

One group of colonists
were of particular importance

for they changed the nature of the soil

and thus made it possible for new kinds
of plants and animals to evolve.

They outweigh all other animals
in any given area of the forest.

A single hectare may be home
to eight million of them.

They spend nearly all their time below ground.

Worms.

They eat their way through the earth
extracting edible vegetable material

and making it suitable for plants.

And at night, they come to the surface
and collect dead leaves.

They also take the opportunity
to call on their neighbours,

poking their heads into next-door burrows.

They're looking for partners.

Like slugs, they're hermaphrodite,
each individual both male and female.

They mate by lying alongside one another.

Two narrow grooves form
between their two bodies.

These are the conduits that carry sperm
from one partner to the other.

Their bodies slowly pulse
as sperm travels along the space between them.

But the process is a long one

and it may be three hours or so
before they separate,

each carrying the other's sperm.

Like so many of the inhabitants
of the undergrowth,

earthworms can only live in a moist environment.

But they are found in soils
of every continent except Antarctica.

This small valley in southern Australia

is home to one of the rarest
and the most extraordinary

of all earthworms.

And I know they're around...

(GURGLING)

...because I can hear them.

Those gurgling noises, believe it or not,

are being made by giant earthworms
as they squelch along their water-filled burrows.

The vibrations of my footsteps are enough
to stir them into activity.

They never come to the surface,

but in places where there's been a small landslip,
you can sometimes find their burrows.

They are over an inch in diameter

and in them, if you're very lucky,
you may occasionally find one of these.

This...

is one of their egg cocoons and it's enormous.

If I hold it up against the light,
I can see the young worm inside wriggling.

It'll take a year for this to develop

and when the young one finally does break free,

it's already 20 centimetres long.

Huge.

It will take a further five years to reach full size

and become this remarkable creature.

So the question is, how long is a giant earthworm?

Well, it's not an easy question to answer.

The fact of the matter is
they're rather delicate creatures and they break.

If I were so unfeeling as to try and stretch it,

well, I guess it might stretch
to a couple of metres,

almost six feet long.

How long they live, well, some say up to 20 years
but we really don't know.

And we certainly don't know
how they manage to mate deep underground

as they squelch their way
through their lonely tunnels.

The land may have been a safe place for eggs

when horseshoe crabs first laid theirs
up on the beach.

But as new kinds of animals appeared,

so it became increasingly important
for animals to protect their eggs.

Most creatures just hid them,
but a few now actively defend them.

The builder of this circular mud wall
in the Central American rainforest is one.

During the day he conceals himself,

but when night comes, he emerges
to inspect his collection of eggs.

His body is smaller than a grain of wheat.

He's a relative of the spiders, a harvestman.

His eggs, up to 100 of them,
are half buried in the floor of his nest

and he regularly inspects each one of them.

If it has a fungus on it, he carefully cleans it
before putting it back into its moist bed.

He also continually repairs and improves his nest

for females will only call on those
who have well-built and well-kept ones.

Some males, however, follow a different policy.

They don't bother to build a nest for themselves,
they try to take over an existing one.

A nest holder has to leave sometimes to feed

and that gives an intruder his chance.

But the owner is back almost immediately...

and they fight, trying to bite one another
in the weakest point of their armour,

the joints of the legs.

The intruder retreats
and the nest owner checks his eggs.

No damage done.

And then another, more welcome visitor arrives.

This is a female.

She's bigger than he is and she's touring
all the nests in the neighbourhood

to choose the one where her eggs
will be best cared for.

She seems to approve
of the standard of his housekeeping.

So now, face to face through the tangle of legs,
she mates with him.

He has a rod with which he injects his sperm.

He withdraws and she's been fertilized.

Half an hour later,
she lowers her white, tubular ovipositor

feeling for a suitable place for her egg.

She thrusts the egg into the floor of the nest
and then covers it with a thin blanket of mud.

She leaves.

He will now tend and guard the egg
with the rest of his collection

for the month that it will take to hatch.

His nest is clearly one of the best
in the neighbourhood

for throughout the night
a succession of females call on him.

But not all have come to lay.
Life is not that simple.

This one starts, as usual, with a routine inspection

and then, without more ado, she mates.

He waits for her to produce a new egg,
but nothing appears.

He constantly checks the nest floor
with his feelers

but there are no signs of a new egg.

And then she grabs one from his collection.
She wants to eat one.

She grabs again.

He bites her leg joints and tries to pull her away.

She's had enough and he has rescued his egg.

He checks it over, cleans it with great care
and then takes it away to rebury it.

A month after the eggs were laid,
his young begin to emerge.

The skins from which they hatched
provide them with their first meal.

He will now guard his young for a couple of days
until they leave the nest.

Excellently adapted though harvestmen are
to a life on land,

they cannot survive for very long
away from this damp undergrowth.

In fact, most of the direct descendants
of those early colonists that came from the sea

are still trapped in a world of moisture.

Those with no external skeletons are always
in imminent danger of death by drought.

Even those with exoskeletons are not safe

for most have armour that is not totally watertight

and will eventually dry out and die
if they leave the dank shelter of the undergrowth.

But beyond the reach of the forests,

in the centre of continents
where little or no rain falls,

there is a very different territory.

Empty and hostile.

Here there is little shelter from the scorching sun.

Temperatures rise above 70 degrees centigrade

and there may be no rain whatsoever
for years on end.

Deserts, like this one in
the southwest of the United States,

represented the ultimate challenge
for those ancient creatures

whose ancestors first left the sea.

Here there's virtually no water at all.

And yet those early creatures,
the very first to walk on land,

reached even here.

And they're still around.

In order to survive the ferocious heat of the day,

they take refuge in little burrows like this,

which go quite a long way down into the ground.

But I can use this special optical probe

to see whether anyone's at home.

And there it is.

It's a scorpion.

They won't come out for the rest of the day.

But at night, when it gets cool,
scorpions all over the desert will be emerging.

And then, we have a very special way
of finding them.

In ultraviolet light
scorpions are magically transformed.

They glow with fluorescence.

So with an ultraviolet torch

you can get a better idea
of just how abundant scorpions are,

even in this arid wilderness.

That's because they have managed to develop
external skeletons that are virtually watertight.

They also have powerful stings and pincers,

so getting together to mate could be dangerous.

A male looking for a female must be careful.

She is powerful enough to kill and eat him.

So he begins to dance.

Is she impressed?

Apparently so.
And his solo becomes a pas de deux.

But stings are still held high, ready to strike.

She tries to sting him.

His response is to give her
a dose of her own medicine with a quick jab.

But it's so slight,
it merely makes her a little drowsy.

At last she seems more amenable.

He pulls her to a part of the dance ground
that is smooth and level.

He has extruded a small packet of sperm
on a stalk glued to the ground.

He manoeuvres her so that as she dances,

she goes over the stalk
and takes the sperm packet up into her body.

The nuptial dance is over.

Her fertilized eggs stay
within a special chamber in her body

for more than a year while they slowly develop.

And then, in her burrow deep underground,
she gives birth.

She has produced up to 50 young ones.

They cling tightly to her back
for a few weeks after birth,

each sustained by a small blob of yolk
in its stomach.

And then at last, they're all ready
to venture into the open desert for themselves.

By colonising this,
the most hostile of environments,

the first animals to walk on land
finally broke their link with open water.

And they did that about 300 million years ago

at a time when the animals with backbones,
including our own ancestors,

were still swimming in the seas.