[Music]
Iike Phila the Weaver ant they’re
predatory here they’ve cut a large white
bug they’re gonna carry it up to the
nest and tear it to pieces inside I love
stories and the stories from nature from
nature that I like are the stories
people haven’t seen before and
particularly the ones people aren’t
expecting and I love to get people
excited about things they don’t think
they’re gonna like like spiders because
when you’re a spider male and you’re out
there trying to get a female it’s the
same struggle that he’s having that
we’re all having when we’re trying to
find the love of our lives in a single
nest in the middle well protected is the
single queen a big plump slightly green
and so it’s the same story throughout
nature with all these different colors
and approaches and techniques and
everybody has their own way of solving
the same problems in their lives once
people realize that they connect all the
dots and can become more comfortable
with nature I’m going to start off by
talking about the way I began and I grew
up 15 years ago in fact I think I talk
more about this climbing trees this is a
tree from Harvard Yard that I took for
an article for National Geographic I
actually had to put my head in a hole to
get this view and lie on my stomach and
the police were called twice so I
eventually put a sign on my back saying
National Geographic photographer please
leave me alone I’ve left it there ever
since
in any case grew up climbing trees so
here I am in Ohio how many of you climb
trees as kids yeah and I still do a lot
of studies on trees look at trees and
different ecosystems around the world
have climbed trees with amazing
character and architecture some of the
world’s largest trees out in the west
coast but for National Geographic gives
me another opportunity outside of
ecology to tell stories about the things
I love particularly when I was a kid
outside of the science and so I have
this wonderful chance of just pursuing
things in nature and presenting them as
stories to people which is what I love
to do and people ask me how is what is
it like to be at National Geographic do
they like do they ever digitally alter
pictures and I say no we’re very pure
people here though I was rather shocked
by the Japanese version of this cover it
was really threw me off but otherwise
it’s the place to be to tell stories and
it has been for us longer than a century
and you can pick out all kinds of
stories and tell them you can pick out
stories from your backyard so one of the
things I did when I was a kid is look a
lot in acorns and I found out there was
a whole ecosystem within an acorn and
this ecosystem starts when a beetle or a
moth will talk about the beetle this is
the acorn weevil with that huge nose
look at that long skinny proboscis there
lands on an acorn this is right living
right around Washington DC and it looks
like it’s an alien here it is here and
what it does is it has a completely
round head living inside that inside
that capsule there you see there and it
actually rotates that head backs back
and forth and like an oil rig gradually
saws a hole right to the center of the
acorn turns around lays an egg and flies
away and a little grub grows up inside
that acorn eventually pushes out its
head and it’s like toothpaste coming out
of the tube this is the grub version of
the acorn weevil making its appearance
on this earth
and plops to the ground and leaves an
opening for other things to get in and
you can look at the whole everything
about ecology happens inside a single
acorn once it’s breached so over time a
whole community enters the acorn and one
of the things I love to do is open up
acorns and find out what’s happening
inside them and the story that unfolds
it’s a simple thing to do if you’re if
you got kids you’d like to think like a
kid try some acorns just drop them into
water and the ones that float have
creatures living inside of them it turns
out that the mice and the squirrels
which we normally think of as the
enemies of acorns they’re eating them
they’re the only way acorns survive and
these mice for example and squirrels do
the same thing bury acorns and little
caches and in fact if you follow the
fate of the acorns
there is one researcher who buried a
thousand acorns all over the place and
returned to the next day and every one
of them had moved so if you could
actually mark acorns you would find out
that they’re like animals they’re
actually shooting across the landscape
as different mice and squirrels dig them
up and carry them to another spot and so
acorns might travel miles carried from
place to place to place to place by
these animals before they are allowed to
sprout another story another backyard
story this was once a very successful
beetle that occurred all across the
eastern United States
now it’s restricted to Block Island and
very small patches otherwise an American
bearing beetle and endangered species
but there are bearing beetles of
different kinds in different places and
this thing is on a dead rat and without
them we’d have a dead rats everywhere it
would not be pleasant and so here’s
another story of being a photographer I
ended up at home with a lot of dead rats
in the refrigerator and bearing beetles
and these are lovely beetles these are
one of the few animals that form a
monogamous pair they mate for life and
they actually bury the rat together they
roll
up into a ball and transform it into a
squishy mass and that’s over to the
right side of this picture that was once
a rat and on top of it they lay their
eggs and it’s like a bird nest but it’s
a rat and the larvae grow up and here
they are regurgitating rat two babies
one of the few morally high note animals
that I can mention another thing to do
for National Geographic and to tell
stories is to pick an animal that
everyone thinks they know and explore it
in new ways and so for some time I was
traveling around the world looking at
praying mantises and praying mantises
are familiar to everybody they’re loved
by people everywhere here’s a Burmese
boy with a Mantid in his hands and so we
all kind of have an affinity to them in
a way that we don’t – most insects but
as you travel around you find
extraordinary once I photographed a
bunch of them for a story last year
here’s one can you see the insect this
is the head the arm and that’s the tail
end and legs of a mantis that’s trying
very hard to look just like lichen that
previous one was from South America this
one is from Africa a giant Mantid eating
a gecko so everywhere you go you look
for things and you find stories and the
fun thing is that there are stories out
there that nobody knows most of nature
photography and nature documentaries
rehashes the same stuff but there are
extraordinary stories about all about
the world and every creature that we
think we know in an ordinary way becomes
extraordinary if we look at it in a new
fashion dance are fabulous they’re all
female societies that get along
perfectly it’s great
they don’t need males here’s a couple of
soldier army ants in Central America
what do you think they do with those
jaws anything Pleasant well probably not
the soldier army ants are actually
full-time defenders against vertebrates
alike eh you and me and this is my
finger a moment later and if you
remember the length of the jaws and the
previous image you can imagine they’re
down to the bone they’re also stinging
at the other end so it’s a little bit of
things going on everywhere at once and I
actually photographed the Queen I
managed to get a picture of the Queen
during our migration for National
Geographic and I had to put my head down
on the ground and a whole bunch of
soldiers because she swarmed with
soldiers went all over my head and I had
to tweezer them out all night basically
because their jaws have little recurved
tips they really do look like fishing
hooks with these little recurved knife
blades at the end so we all grow up and
we all love things that we saw as kids
rainforests were a big thing for me but
I love the deserts as well as my parents
say when Here I am and some sand dunes
in Colorado so I find my way to deserts
sometimes Here I am with Warren savory
and you find as you travel around there
were eccentric people all over the world
a lot of them concentrated in the US for
some reason this is Warren savory who
works for Food and Drug and his thing is
salt Puget a group of creatures that no
one talks about they’re called wind
scorpions sometimes there’s often big
and nasty here we are in the deserts of
the southwest looking for them there’s
one in this cup not too big and I
started thinking well these are kind of
cool what can I do with these and I’ve
heard about huge ones overseas the cool
thing about them is that the salt huge
uns have the most enormous jaws for
their body size of any living thing
they’re not a scorpion they’re not
anything else to their own group and
here’s one scissoring a part a lizard
and they have these horriffic
heads that kind of come apart as they
Jam their jaws at different angles and
kill and eat things so I decided to go
after the biggest ones I could and went
to Iran and the first scientific
expedition there a little over 10 years
ago by Americans and I had a great time
the Iranians were wonderful live and
snuck into Afghanistan on my own those
were the days and found all kinds of
creatures including the Giants all Fugit
and it turns out these things get
several inches across and they don’t
know how it to do anything without
aggression so sex and saw huge uns
involves either the female eating the
male or the male beating the female so
badly that she can’t eat him so she
staggers off afterwards I’m not saying
anything more about that weather so here
I am with a Bob ney seus another
scientist looking at a salt Fugit eating
a gecko in Iran actually got stuck out
in the middle of the desert with an
Iranian group of military and the
military were terrified of them because
the people in that region believe that
Saul Fugit will eat your face if you
sleep so they refused to sleep to sleep
and they started smashing them in the
middle of the night whenever they get
close to me and I had a screaming match
with the military that went on for about
two minutes with the head of the
military face-to-face with me like this
and we eventually decided we were both
macho enough to go out and collect solve
pooja together and I had a wonderful
conversation with these guys with
sentences like they only knew about ten
words of English one of them was
dinosaurs live America they had clearly
seen Jurassic Park and Michael Jackson
human
Galapagos a wonderful place to go and
I’ve worked there with a really
brilliant guy frank sulloway who’s
studied there for years Frank is one of
these very serious scientists most of
the time but he’s also a little bit
eccentric so he travels with 12 teddy
bears and many people know about the
teddy bears and know the names of the
teddy bears so if you meet Frank be sure
to say hello to Darwin bear which is the
lowest bear in the Galapagos with Frank
the first time I was there just to give
you a flavor of what it’s like to work
in a research team Frank decided we
should have the best diet and for him
the best diet was to have the the most
calories in the least weight because we
had to carry all this stuff so I arrived
at the Galapagos to find a pile of 1,400
Snickers bars
Gary Dodson studies another kind of
unusual creature that I heard about as a
child and never seen photographed and
these are the fighting flies
these are stag flies he’s watching down
below him they come to recently fallen
trees and they were described by Alfred
Russel Wallace an early Explorer and no
one had really done much with them since
but they’re wonderful things they’re
sort of like what dr. Seuss would do
with a fly they’re multicolored with all
kinds of weird attributes including
these and this is a one that’s sort of
like a deer with these stag horns in the
front they even have musk glands like
deers do and they form Lexx and they
fight and clash their horns together
their antlers and there’s usually a
female waiting nearby and she’s going
for the guy with the best territory on
this fallen log
exactly like deer these flies vary quite
a bit you ever watched the movie the 40
year old virgin this particular male fly
would be a 40 year old virgin because
his antlers are little stubs
so some flies have huge antlers and
Stubb thought some flies have small ones
and one of the great things that Gary
Dodson does is a little bit of special
restoration work for the
flies and knead and here he is gluing
extensions on to impressed males and it
turns out that once they have the
extensions they’re fabulous this is a
species that is more like a moose with
gigantic antlers look for stories
wherever you can find them sometimes
they’re the unexpected little things and
one place I have often found stories and
I’ve been working on various things
about the ecology of this little
ecosystem are the surfaces of leaves and
in the rainforest leaves can have tiny
little plants growing on them called
epiphysis so the subject of this picture
isn’t this crane fly it’s these tiny
little things at its feet and these are
my newt plants and if you could blow
them up it would look something like a
forest on the surfaces of single leaves
so here you have a sprouting plant on a
leaf surface in a rain forest and all
kinds of other plants there and you can
find things like this is a liver wart
and this is believe it now I liken it’s
a leafy lichen minut thing and these are
little fungi growing in forests on the
surfaces of single leaves and they’re
all kinds of stories about leaves and
how leaves interact it’s not easy being
green in the forest neither for frogs
nor for plants and here’s a leaf
sawing apart and other leaf the Johnny
Appleseed of the epiphyses tiny little
plants is this ant in Borneo this ant
actually goes around and feeds on these
minut plants and actually disperses
their tiny little spores from place to
place planting them from place to place
so you get these little colonies of
different kinds of plants growing on a
single leaf here’s a cordyceps fungus
it’s an ant that’s been invaded its
brain has been taken over by this fungus
it’s died on a leaf surface up in the
treetops and what happens is that the
fungus enters its brain takes over the
mind of the ant which causes the ant to
climb the tree and die up there
on to a leaf and the fungus then sprouts
these reproductive organs that come out
its top and the ant serves as a vessel
for the reproduction of this thing very
bizarre little story and of course
nothing like the Chinese to make it more
interesting because for them these
mind-control fungi are medicinal and
this woman in Tibet and China is
actually connected collecting little
caterpillars that have been taken over
by these fungi down there on the ground
and a few years ago these things were
made famous because several women in
China broke world records and running
supposedly from taking this as a drug
these have been used as drugs for 20
centuries in China
frogs are fun most people love frogs the
only frog I’ve heard complaints about is
the Chinese stinky frog this is it but
fortunately you can’t smell it from here
this is a roasted frog from Ivory Coast
it is over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit
out and this kind of frog will actually
apply itself to the side of a leaf and
dry out and just sit there covered with
a kind of shellac so if you’ve ever had
one of those little children’s things
where you say just add water that’s what
happens with this frog it unfolds into a
frog at the first rain poisonous frogs
have been one of my favorite things
because they’ve got fabulous behavior
and they’re often used as medicine so
there there are medical purposes to some
of these species here’s a frog that
lives in an island in Panama in huge
numbers this is a the poison dart frog
species that actually lives on an island
covered with frogs and tarantulas and
every once in a while you find a
tarantula on its back writhing and and
dying while foaming at the mouth that
presumably got bit or was bit by one of
these frogs by accident in Africa
you can find people using poisonous
beetles these are the comb Bushmen and
these beetles are actually used for
their weapons over there their bows and
arrows their errors are coated with the
larvae of this beetle the frogs have the
same purpose to some South American
tribes and this is the most impressive
of them terrible Asst the terrible one
it was described in 1977 by a research
team that went down there and found that
it was so toxic that it was potentially
lethal to the touch and so I decided to
come back a few years ago I was the
first outsider to visit this area since
its discovery and this is the Frog here
and you see it has quite a bit of
attitude it’s like you’re like it’s a
deadly frog and it’s hard to say oh
please
why shouldn’t I pet this thing but
because it comes up and goes come on
touch me come on come on and I had to
get within two inches of this frog for
the picture so it’s quite intriguing
here’s how you collect them the Embera
choko indians in this little village in
colombia and a remote valley put them in
special containers like this this is the
only time I ever saw one of these
Indians touch a frog and I think he was
trying to impress me and as finger went
numb but what do you do is you take one
of the blowgun darts and you touch it to
the back of the Frog and it’s good for a
year here they are making the blow guns
which was fun to do to watch and as well
the tricky part is that they had certain
sort of games down there they do they
developed and one was why not shoot blow
darts close to the funny foreign guy to
see if he reacts and this whole thing
just after a couple of days
and anyway it was a complicated story it
involved me using blowguns in defense
against drug lords by the end of it to
get out of there because we were caught
between a rock and a hard place for sure
and I will tell you the whole thing but
it’s one of those great stories that you
find National Geographic people able to
do the fun part of the story for me was
going to Panama later and looking at the
loved glass of the poison dart frog and
this is the top male on his log he’s the
king of the king of the log and he beat
up any other male that came along I I
both hate this picture because I hate
stage II lookin portrait pictures but
he’s just too cute and people always ask
me if I glued the hands together here’s
Kyle summers a researcher following a
frog up the tree here and she’s looking
for a bromeliad you know those plants
are the pineapple top plant so there are
little ones here but she’s looking for a
big one like these in the treetops you
see these thorny masses and those hold
water in the in their centers and she
finds one of those little pools she
backs in and she deposit deposits her
tadpole in that little private pond and
now she walks back down to the ground
and picks up the next tadpole and she
delivers it to another tree in another
spot why does she go to all this work it
turns out that tadpoles
unlike the adult frogs aren’t poisonous
yet and so they’ll be eaten by things
like these canopy crabs this one will
probably just scoot over and eat that
one right away so she doesn’t put all
her eggs in one basket she scatters them
around and now the great part she’s
distributed two dozen three dozen
tadpoles in different places she goes
down to the ground and starts doing our
normal froggy things which are usually
eating ants this is where these frogs
get their poisons they eat a lot of ants
which are of course full of poisons and
their stings and so forth and they
transform those poisons but she just
does her normal froggy things for a few
days and then suddenly she starts
climbing the trees again and she manages
to remember where she put all two dozen
tadpoles scattered in three-dimensional
space a memory feat the beach squirrels
and just about anything else even though
a frog’s brain isn’t supposed to be very
big or very sophisticated and so she now
goes back up and she looks into each
pool where she left her tadpole baby and
the tadpole of it still there will raise
its tail and wiggle the tail to say
hello mom kind of sign language for
tadpoles and she backs in and she lays a
little infertile egg and you see the
tadpole behind her here in the water and
that egg has hurt the omelet of her baby
for the next few days she tends all her
babies for the next couple of months as
they develop into young frogs an amazing
feat of motherhood
well serious scientists abound of course
and for some years I was at Berkeley and
I I came from Harvard and everyone in
Harvard was it oh there was a little
tension floating around there so I went
to Berkeley and they were so laid-back
I couldn’t resist moving there for a
while and working with them so here we
have some of the leading scientists of
Berkeley
head poppin fuzz is here he’s studies
lizards and Iran and other places with
no government he lurks places with no
government Jim Patton studies rats he
can tell rat species apart by taste
David Wake is the leader in frog the
loss of frogs around the worlds and at
the far end we have Harry Greene who
studies snakes and what are they doing
here do you suppose oh don’t know it’s
so obvious
they’re putting on pantyhose there from
Berkeley but it has nothing to do with
Berkeley they are simply preparing to
protect themselves from leeches I prefer
leeches over pantyhose any day here’s a
hairy green collecting a venomous tree
snake and I’ve worked with a lot of
snake people I love snakes and I’ve had
many fun experiences with snakes this
was one of the more fun ones because
this is not a snake anyone can tell what
this is it it is in fact a flat worm
which is a worm so primitive it has no
brain and yet it is managing to mimic a
snake it’s a kind of a snakey head at
this end at the species I discovered in
Borneo this is snake island
and it’s a island off of South Paulo
that has the most venomous snakes in the
world one every two square yards so
within this little lit area here there
would be maybe one-and-a-half to two of
them and the really cool thing as I
traveled with a scientist who was so
eager to take me to this remote island
that he came even though his arm was
broken and so he staggered up the hill
with poisonous snakes on every side and
showed me proudly this species which
lives only on the single island and it’s
poison is so toxic because on this
island it has to kill seabirds before
they can take off and fly more than a
couple of feet Jost Lewinsky was one of
the greats
snake people he had discovered new
species of Cobra working in Burma and
remote parts of China and I traveled
with him in 2001 and a story that was
very personal for me because Joey tried
to get me to go on trips for years and I
finally was able to go on this one to a
very remote village this is the day
before he died and he was hit by a crate
which is a minut version it’s a small
kind of Cobra and he had reached into a
snake bag
not realizing it was a real crate he
thought it was a mimic of a crate there
was a great deal of agony over this
decision and he made at the moment this
happened just as the towers were falling
in September 11th so we got out of Burma
to find that our news mattered nothing
because we had no idea it took us three
days to even find out what happened in
the US and it led me to think a lot
about what matters to people in nature I
mean Joe is he was lying there dying we
kept him going for a long time through
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but what
was he thinking about and I like to
think he was thinking about how much he
loves snakes and nature because true
nature requires that you take risks if
everything’s turned into a garden nature
disappears this is the snake that got
him it was about 10 inches long this is
a man who made the right decision this
is a Russian I met working in Vietnam
and he had actually chopped off his
finger after being bitten by a snake so
you you do these things despite the
risks because that’s what nature is
about nature is about having it’s like
falling in love love is a risk anything
that you devote yourself to that has
meaning it’s going to involve some risks
and wiping those risks risks away
doesn’t help anything and there are many
of the people I deal with are great at
finding ways of keeping the risks low
but making great stories and adventures
and learning about the world the last
trip I did well a couple trips back now
we dropped down a quarter mile deep into
a sinkhole and at the bottom of this
hole found a forest in its shaded depths
including two new species of frogs and
this is the great news about frogs frogs
are going extinct they’re very fragile
but we’re also finding a lot of them at
the same time so we have both the great
positive news about diversity we found a
couple thousand species in the last few
years and also
these horrendous things happening to
frogs around the world as many species
are declining in numbers I’ve looked for
all kinds of things over time it’s not
fair to be an entomologist and being you
know impressed by size but still I did
once look for the world’s largest insect
and it’s this Wetty from New Zealand
this thing is 71 grams I broke the
record for an adult insect at least four
frogs though you have to go to West
Africa and there I went after the
world’s largest species and I was hoping
to break the record and we got to six
and a half pounds unfortunately the
record is 7.2 so I need to go back again
I suppose at the other end of the frog
scale I went after the smallest frog
this is the species from Brazil we spent
three days going through leaf litter
finding this tiny jumping dots Brazil is
a great place to look for diversity and
I did actually for a story on the
Atlantic forests of Brazil which is the
force along the coast a story on
diversity just in frogs for Geographic
just because there was so much to be
found there that people haven’t
photographed before this is the pumpkin
frog tiny species poisonous frog
fighting biting and nipping in each
other and it turns out that they’re so
aggressive that they will fight with
their reflection in the mirror which is
a lot of fun to get some time on your
hands in Brazil this is the only fruit
eating frog this species actually lives
in a desert like coastal area with few
insects and eats fruit this is a marine
frog blending in down there next to some
of the marine life it’s the only species
of frog that will go down and eat things
and tide pools and so there are a whole
bunch of new frogs that had never been
reported on my favorite though is the
dancing frog and I think it’s important
to take back some lessons from the bat
dancing frog it lives in waterfalls so
noisy that it can’t call very
effectively it does call a little you
can see its cheek pouches here but they
basically it dances and it doesn’t very
it’s sort of a John Travolta way it
raises the leg on one side expands it
like it’s got to be done slowly and then
a little bit of this here and then here
here here here now while it’s doing this
I was told I was never going to be able
to photograph this thing because it’s
too shy and basically what I did is I
what what you can do in the animal
kingdom if you want to take a picture of
something they say as impossible as you
realize that once a male is preoccupied
with a female you can do anything you
want so as soon as he was dancing I
snuck right up on him I was within 3
inches of him and the female hopped up
in my shoulder and admired him from
about this distance fabulous canopies
are a place that I like to spend a lot
of time I talked about climbing trees
here’s a red-eyed tree frog up in the
canopy in Costa Rica where this is where
the species normally exists and I’ll
tell you a couple quick canopy stories
about frogs there are frogs that like to
glide from trees this is the biggest of
them this is is it true that people look
like their pets and in the case this
herpetologists discovered this lovely
frog and it’s the biggest of them so
it’s not a very good glider lands was
kind of a splat but I did get a picture
of it coming down the really great right
glider though is the coqui frog and if
you ever go to Puerto Rico this is a
frog that you will see everywhere
because it’s the most numerous amphibian
on earth there are about 40,000 of them
per hectare and all say Koki together
every night and so the whole island
explodes with their song and this frog
has a very unusual lifecycle that was
only discovered a few years ago when
someone got up very early in and found
out something about them what these
frogs do is they sleep near the ground
where it’s during the day when it’s too
hot up in the trees and then as sunsets
there’s a point in time when the birds
have fallen asleep but before the
tarantulas have woken up one it’s safe
to climb the trees and they all climb
the trees together it turns out
tarantulas four are the big predators of
frogs so it’s not good to come out when
tarantulas are awake and they’re on the
tree trunks mostly so they all climbed
the trees together during about a 15
minute period at sunset and then they
hop around in the canopy and do the
little canopy thing all night and then
at sunrise just as about Sun is
beginning to show itself there’s again a
15-minute period when it’s safe to come
down that is but after the tarantulas
have gone to sleep but before the birds
wake up and suddenly at about 5 o’clock
in the morning – 5:15 in Puerto Rico
everywhere it’s raining frogs because
they save time on the commute at the
size of a frog you can’t be hurt by a
fall so you end up with just a rain of
parental rain of frogs this is the one
picture I got in focus tarantulas okay
we’ll do a couple of spiders for you
because I know you’re all like gearing
up for eight-legged here and the
tarantulas are one of my favorite groups
here’s one that we caught in the act of
shedding her skin she’s actually
writhing out of this tight little sock
which are the dark brown things above
that’s her old skin if you have a pet
tarantula this is the big mistake people
make they they’ve start to they fall on
their back and lie dormant it for a
couple days they’re dormant because
they’re about to shed their skin so
people put a lot of transyl’s in the
toilet when they’re just gearing up for
their skin being shed so here you go
this picture was called a new skin for
mrs. ugly and the world press awards one
of the fun places I look for tarantulas
was in caves in Mexico went down to
Oaxaca with Peter Sprouse here and these
tarantulas have been collected but never
studied so he looked around found a cave
went in it eventually get in about a
kilometer and found this tarantula and
the
Angella like all cave animals very big
slender thing no eyes almost no eyes and
Peter had tortured me on the way in
because you know I’m carrying this
camera bag didn’t know much about caving
and so I was kind of pleased when the
tarantula which had never been breathed
on you know in millenia no one does
breathed on these tarantulas freaked out
and ran up his pant leg and he’s
screaming what do I do what I do
and I said don’t hurt it it’s an
endangered species it did bite him and I
made up stories about what we would have
to do if the tarantula venom was serious
but tarantulas actually don’t have any
effect it’s like a bee sting okay have
three short stories on spider life and
I’m gonna tell them about jumping
spiders jumping spiders are little
spiders that you will find outside this
building or anywhere in the United
States hopping around they don’t make
nests and they catch mosquitoes they do
a lot of good for us and they hop their
jumping spiders here’s one cotton freeze
frame jumping from one twig to another
and the three stories are from Sri Lanka
just to give you an example from one
spot
this is murmur acne loop pata sort of
the Jimmy Durante of the ant world of
the spider world if you remember Jimmy
Durante
and has this enormous nose like a fair
at one end and it wanders around
blundering into things with this giant
nose and you wonder what it’s all for
until you see one walk up to another
murmur acne lopata spider and then this
nose it turns out splits down the middle
and unfolds two enormous fangs and they
battle with these fangs like gladiators
in a duel throwing themselves back and
forth like this and this one on the far
right is backing away he’s freaking out
and about to take off this one is sort
of they rear up at the end of the battle
like rocking in the ring remember that
like whoa
here’s a tiny little fascia spider it’s
about the size of a dust speck it’s not
probably what you’re looking at this is
a normal jumping spider over here this
is on the right side the little fascia
species or the right side that little
clump is a tiny little spider that looks
like a bit of debris and we’d collected
them in bamboo with Robert Jackson the
researcher that I was working with on
this project and it turns out that these
little tiny spiders actually do look
like debris on purpose they actually
shake their body like debris moving in
the wind so what they do for a living is
that they enter the nests of normal
sized jumping spiders like this is a
mother here with her eggs and the facia
comes in looking like a bit of debris
blowing in the wind and the mother looks
down and watches the facia
she has very good vision they will
actually understand TV these spiders
they’re so good in their vision and she
doesn’t know what to do as the facia s–
picks up an egg and walks out with it
because it’s just a clump of debris
blowing in the wind here’s one that
there’s stolen an actual baby spider
from a mother it’s kind of playing with
it like a cat with a mouse and I don’t
know what you got around Washington DC
but these were common in Berkeley you’ve
got the guys with the Mohawks and the
little spike things this white are kind
of combines both of them as simonia
teeth apiece now gals courtship is never
easy and for spiders it’s like anything
else it’s a rough world out there for
the guys and it turns out that this
gorgeous creature look at this guy here
look at those gorgeous purples and reds
and yellow legs who wouldn’t be
impressed with this yeah it’s a hard
thing to do
attracting the lady look at her over
there she’s all plump and pale on the
right side he can start making his move
but she’ll just run away this is what
happens again and again I saw this up in
the trees the male looks
Daanish as the female rushes to the
other side of the leaf and you’re going
like females have rushed to the other
side of the leaf for ten thousand a
hundred thousand years in these spiders
and the male is always astonished how
did she do that where did she go
well eventually the male figures it out
that the rule of nature and he flips
over to the correct side of the leaf and
here he is making his slow approach and
the female is looking a little nervous
now what you have to do and this is a
rule of courtship that I’ve learned with
Melissa’s assistance is that you have to
about Lissa get over here
you have to you have to do what this
spider does it’s really right over there
what you have to do is you have to get
down like this and move slowly towards
the female a behavior that we signed us
called groveling now some spiders are
thank you very much
some spiders are very impressed with
that here’s the female here’s the male
groveling this one is groveling so well
he is like almost falling over backwards
for this female and then they get
together in the male they mate with
their face they have like little squishy
things and corkscrews that’s too much to
describe of course mammals were much
more reasonable animals we’re not like
birds with all our colors and so forth
so we tend to be much more sedate more
sophisticated about our ways of
approaching the female that’s why my
marriage recently was very understated
on Easter Island very traditional I
think a ceremony hasn’t changed for a
thousand years
I know you’ve all gone through this the
stripping and the re repainting your
body sort of thing and but you know
anyway I am here now part of a team
we’re going out for more expeditions
we’re going to try the match the animals
with our color and our finesse and our
stories and I hope you follow those
stories in the years to come
thanks so much
[Applause]
[Music]
you
Iike Phila the Weaver ant they’re
predatory here they’ve cut a large white
bug they’re gonna carry it up to the
nest and tear it to pieces inside I love
stories and the stories from nature from
nature that I like are the stories
people haven’t seen before and
particularly the ones people aren’t
expecting and I love to get people
excited about things they don’t think
they’re gonna like like spiders because
when you’re a spider male and you’re out
there trying to get a female it’s the
same struggle that he’s having that
we’re all having when we’re trying to
find the love of our lives in a single
nest in the middle well protected is the
single queen a big plump slightly green
and so it’s the same story throughout
nature with all these different colors
and approaches and techniques and
everybody has their own way of solving
the same problems in their lives once
people realize that they connect all the
dots and can become more comfortable
with nature I’m going to start off by
talking about the way I began and I grew
up 15 years ago in fact I think I talk
more about this climbing trees this is a
tree from Harvard Yard that I took for
an article for National Geographic I
actually had to put my head in a hole to
get this view and lie on my stomach and
the police were called twice so I
eventually put a sign on my back saying
National Geographic photographer please
leave me alone I’ve left it there ever
since
in any case grew up climbing trees so
here I am in Ohio how many of you climb
trees as kids yeah and I still do a lot
of studies on trees look at trees and
different ecosystems around the world
have climbed trees with amazing
character and architecture some of the
world’s largest trees out in the west
coast but for National Geographic gives
me another opportunity outside of
ecology to tell stories about the things
I love particularly when I was a kid
outside of the science and so I have
this wonderful chance of just pursuing
things in nature and presenting them as
stories to people which is what I love
to do and people ask me how is what is
it like to be at National Geographic do
they like do they ever digitally alter
pictures and I say no we’re very pure
people here though I was rather shocked
by the Japanese version of this cover it
was really threw me off but otherwise
it’s the place to be to tell stories and
it has been for us longer than a century
and you can pick out all kinds of
stories and tell them you can pick out
stories from your backyard so one of the
things I did when I was a kid is look a
lot in acorns and I found out there was
a whole ecosystem within an acorn and
this ecosystem starts when a beetle or a
moth will talk about the beetle this is
the acorn weevil with that huge nose
look at that long skinny proboscis there
lands on an acorn this is right living
right around Washington DC and it looks
like it’s an alien here it is here and
what it does is it has a completely
round head living inside that inside
that capsule there you see there and it
actually rotates that head backs back
and forth and like an oil rig gradually
saws a hole right to the center of the
acorn turns around lays an egg and flies
away and a little grub grows up inside
that acorn eventually pushes out its
head and it’s like toothpaste coming out
of the tube this is the grub version of
the acorn weevil making its appearance
on this earth
and plops to the ground and leaves an
opening for other things to get in and
you can look at the whole everything
about ecology happens inside a single
acorn once it’s breached so over time a
whole community enters the acorn and one
of the things I love to do is open up
acorns and find out what’s happening
inside them and the story that unfolds
it’s a simple thing to do if you’re if
you got kids you’d like to think like a
kid try some acorns just drop them into
water and the ones that float have
creatures living inside of them it turns
out that the mice and the squirrels
which we normally think of as the
enemies of acorns they’re eating them
they’re the only way acorns survive and
these mice for example and squirrels do
the same thing bury acorns and little
caches and in fact if you follow the
fate of the acorns
there is one researcher who buried a
thousand acorns all over the place and
returned to the next day and every one
of them had moved so if you could
actually mark acorns you would find out
that they’re like animals they’re
actually shooting across the landscape
as different mice and squirrels dig them
up and carry them to another spot and so
acorns might travel miles carried from
place to place to place to place by
these animals before they are allowed to
sprout another story another backyard
story this was once a very successful
beetle that occurred all across the
eastern United States
now it’s restricted to Block Island and
very small patches otherwise an American
bearing beetle and endangered species
but there are bearing beetles of
different kinds in different places and
this thing is on a dead rat and without
them we’d have a dead rats everywhere it
would not be pleasant and so here’s
another story of being a photographer I
ended up at home with a lot of dead rats
in the refrigerator and bearing beetles
and these are lovely beetles these are
one of the few animals that form a
monogamous pair they mate for life and
they actually bury the rat together they
roll
up into a ball and transform it into a
squishy mass and that’s over to the
right side of this picture that was once
a rat and on top of it they lay their
eggs and it’s like a bird nest but it’s
a rat and the larvae grow up and here
they are regurgitating rat two babies
one of the few morally high note animals
that I can mention another thing to do
for National Geographic and to tell
stories is to pick an animal that
everyone thinks they know and explore it
in new ways and so for some time I was
traveling around the world looking at
praying mantises and praying mantises
are familiar to everybody they’re loved
by people everywhere here’s a Burmese
boy with a Mantid in his hands and so we
all kind of have an affinity to them in
a way that we don’t – most insects but
as you travel around you find
extraordinary once I photographed a
bunch of them for a story last year
here’s one can you see the insect this
is the head the arm and that’s the tail
end and legs of a mantis that’s trying
very hard to look just like lichen that
previous one was from South America this
one is from Africa a giant Mantid eating
a gecko so everywhere you go you look
for things and you find stories and the
fun thing is that there are stories out
there that nobody knows most of nature
photography and nature documentaries
rehashes the same stuff but there are
extraordinary stories about all about
the world and every creature that we
think we know in an ordinary way becomes
extraordinary if we look at it in a new
fashion dance are fabulous they’re all
female societies that get along
perfectly it’s great
they don’t need males here’s a couple of
soldier army ants in Central America
what do you think they do with those
jaws anything Pleasant well probably not
the soldier army ants are actually
full-time defenders against vertebrates
alike eh you and me and this is my
finger a moment later and if you
remember the length of the jaws and the
previous image you can imagine they’re
down to the bone they’re also stinging
at the other end so it’s a little bit of
things going on everywhere at once and I
actually photographed the Queen I
managed to get a picture of the Queen
during our migration for National
Geographic and I had to put my head down
on the ground and a whole bunch of
soldiers because she swarmed with
soldiers went all over my head and I had
to tweezer them out all night basically
because their jaws have little recurved
tips they really do look like fishing
hooks with these little recurved knife
blades at the end so we all grow up and
we all love things that we saw as kids
rainforests were a big thing for me but
I love the deserts as well as my parents
say when Here I am and some sand dunes
in Colorado so I find my way to deserts
sometimes Here I am with Warren savory
and you find as you travel around there
were eccentric people all over the world
a lot of them concentrated in the US for
some reason this is Warren savory who
works for Food and Drug and his thing is
salt Puget a group of creatures that no
one talks about they’re called wind
scorpions sometimes there’s often big
and nasty here we are in the deserts of
the southwest looking for them there’s
one in this cup not too big and I
started thinking well these are kind of
cool what can I do with these and I’ve
heard about huge ones overseas the cool
thing about them is that the salt huge
uns have the most enormous jaws for
their body size of any living thing
they’re not a scorpion they’re not
anything else to their own group and
here’s one scissoring a part a lizard
and they have these horriffic
heads that kind of come apart as they
Jam their jaws at different angles and
kill and eat things so I decided to go
after the biggest ones I could and went
to Iran and the first scientific
expedition there a little over 10 years
ago by Americans and I had a great time
the Iranians were wonderful live and
snuck into Afghanistan on my own those
were the days and found all kinds of
creatures including the Giants all Fugit
and it turns out these things get
several inches across and they don’t
know how it to do anything without
aggression so sex and saw huge uns
involves either the female eating the
male or the male beating the female so
badly that she can’t eat him so she
staggers off afterwards I’m not saying
anything more about that weather so here
I am with a Bob ney seus another
scientist looking at a salt Fugit eating
a gecko in Iran actually got stuck out
in the middle of the desert with an
Iranian group of military and the
military were terrified of them because
the people in that region believe that
Saul Fugit will eat your face if you
sleep so they refused to sleep to sleep
and they started smashing them in the
middle of the night whenever they get
close to me and I had a screaming match
with the military that went on for about
two minutes with the head of the
military face-to-face with me like this
and we eventually decided we were both
macho enough to go out and collect solve
pooja together and I had a wonderful
conversation with these guys with
sentences like they only knew about ten
words of English one of them was
dinosaurs live America they had clearly
seen Jurassic Park and Michael Jackson
human
Galapagos a wonderful place to go and
I’ve worked there with a really
brilliant guy frank sulloway who’s
studied there for years Frank is one of
these very serious scientists most of
the time but he’s also a little bit
eccentric so he travels with 12 teddy
bears and many people know about the
teddy bears and know the names of the
teddy bears so if you meet Frank be sure
to say hello to Darwin bear which is the
lowest bear in the Galapagos with Frank
the first time I was there just to give
you a flavor of what it’s like to work
in a research team Frank decided we
should have the best diet and for him
the best diet was to have the the most
calories in the least weight because we
had to carry all this stuff so I arrived
at the Galapagos to find a pile of 1,400
Snickers bars
Gary Dodson studies another kind of
unusual creature that I heard about as a
child and never seen photographed and
these are the fighting flies
these are stag flies he’s watching down
below him they come to recently fallen
trees and they were described by Alfred
Russel Wallace an early Explorer and no
one had really done much with them since
but they’re wonderful things they’re
sort of like what dr. Seuss would do
with a fly they’re multicolored with all
kinds of weird attributes including
these and this is a one that’s sort of
like a deer with these stag horns in the
front they even have musk glands like
deers do and they form Lexx and they
fight and clash their horns together
their antlers and there’s usually a
female waiting nearby and she’s going
for the guy with the best territory on
this fallen log
exactly like deer these flies vary quite
a bit you ever watched the movie the 40
year old virgin this particular male fly
would be a 40 year old virgin because
his antlers are little stubs
so some flies have huge antlers and
Stubb thought some flies have small ones
and one of the great things that Gary
Dodson does is a little bit of special
restoration work for the
flies and knead and here he is gluing
extensions on to impressed males and it
turns out that once they have the
extensions they’re fabulous this is a
species that is more like a moose with
gigantic antlers look for stories
wherever you can find them sometimes
they’re the unexpected little things and
one place I have often found stories and
I’ve been working on various things
about the ecology of this little
ecosystem are the surfaces of leaves and
in the rainforest leaves can have tiny
little plants growing on them called
epiphysis so the subject of this picture
isn’t this crane fly it’s these tiny
little things at its feet and these are
my newt plants and if you could blow
them up it would look something like a
forest on the surfaces of single leaves
so here you have a sprouting plant on a
leaf surface in a rain forest and all
kinds of other plants there and you can
find things like this is a liver wart
and this is believe it now I liken it’s
a leafy lichen minut thing and these are
little fungi growing in forests on the
surfaces of single leaves and they’re
all kinds of stories about leaves and
how leaves interact it’s not easy being
green in the forest neither for frogs
nor for plants and here’s a leaf
sawing apart and other leaf the Johnny
Appleseed of the epiphyses tiny little
plants is this ant in Borneo this ant
actually goes around and feeds on these
minut plants and actually disperses
their tiny little spores from place to
place planting them from place to place
so you get these little colonies of
different kinds of plants growing on a
single leaf here’s a cordyceps fungus
it’s an ant that’s been invaded its
brain has been taken over by this fungus
it’s died on a leaf surface up in the
treetops and what happens is that the
fungus enters its brain takes over the
mind of the ant which causes the ant to
climb the tree and die up there
on to a leaf and the fungus then sprouts
these reproductive organs that come out
its top and the ant serves as a vessel
for the reproduction of this thing very
bizarre little story and of course
nothing like the Chinese to make it more
interesting because for them these
mind-control fungi are medicinal and
this woman in Tibet and China is
actually connected collecting little
caterpillars that have been taken over
by these fungi down there on the ground
and a few years ago these things were
made famous because several women in
China broke world records and running
supposedly from taking this as a drug
these have been used as drugs for 20
centuries in China
frogs are fun most people love frogs the
only frog I’ve heard complaints about is
the Chinese stinky frog this is it but
fortunately you can’t smell it from here
this is a roasted frog from Ivory Coast
it is over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit
out and this kind of frog will actually
apply itself to the side of a leaf and
dry out and just sit there covered with
a kind of shellac so if you’ve ever had
one of those little children’s things
where you say just add water that’s what
happens with this frog it unfolds into a
frog at the first rain poisonous frogs
have been one of my favorite things
because they’ve got fabulous behavior
and they’re often used as medicine so
there there are medical purposes to some
of these species here’s a frog that
lives in an island in Panama in huge
numbers this is a the poison dart frog
species that actually lives on an island
covered with frogs and tarantulas and
every once in a while you find a
tarantula on its back writhing and and
dying while foaming at the mouth that
presumably got bit or was bit by one of
these frogs by accident in Africa
you can find people using poisonous
beetles these are the comb Bushmen and
these beetles are actually used for
their weapons over there their bows and
arrows their errors are coated with the
larvae of this beetle the frogs have the
same purpose to some South American
tribes and this is the most impressive
of them terrible Asst the terrible one
it was described in 1977 by a research
team that went down there and found that
it was so toxic that it was potentially
lethal to the touch and so I decided to
come back a few years ago I was the
first outsider to visit this area since
its discovery and this is the Frog here
and you see it has quite a bit of
attitude it’s like you’re like it’s a
deadly frog and it’s hard to say oh
please
why shouldn’t I pet this thing but
because it comes up and goes come on
touch me come on come on and I had to
get within two inches of this frog for
the picture so it’s quite intriguing
here’s how you collect them the Embera
choko indians in this little village in
colombia and a remote valley put them in
special containers like this this is the
only time I ever saw one of these
Indians touch a frog and I think he was
trying to impress me and as finger went
numb but what do you do is you take one
of the blowgun darts and you touch it to
the back of the Frog and it’s good for a
year here they are making the blow guns
which was fun to do to watch and as well
the tricky part is that they had certain
sort of games down there they do they
developed and one was why not shoot blow
darts close to the funny foreign guy to
see if he reacts and this whole thing
just after a couple of days
and anyway it was a complicated story it
involved me using blowguns in defense
against drug lords by the end of it to
get out of there because we were caught
between a rock and a hard place for sure
and I will tell you the whole thing but
it’s one of those great stories that you
find National Geographic people able to
do the fun part of the story for me was
going to Panama later and looking at the
loved glass of the poison dart frog and
this is the top male on his log he’s the
king of the king of the log and he beat
up any other male that came along I I
both hate this picture because I hate
stage II lookin portrait pictures but
he’s just too cute and people always ask
me if I glued the hands together here’s
Kyle summers a researcher following a
frog up the tree here and she’s looking
for a bromeliad you know those plants
are the pineapple top plant so there are
little ones here but she’s looking for a
big one like these in the treetops you
see these thorny masses and those hold
water in the in their centers and she
finds one of those little pools she
backs in and she deposit deposits her
tadpole in that little private pond and
now she walks back down to the ground
and picks up the next tadpole and she
delivers it to another tree in another
spot why does she go to all this work it
turns out that tadpoles
unlike the adult frogs aren’t poisonous
yet and so they’ll be eaten by things
like these canopy crabs this one will
probably just scoot over and eat that
one right away so she doesn’t put all
her eggs in one basket she scatters them
around and now the great part she’s
distributed two dozen three dozen
tadpoles in different places she goes
down to the ground and starts doing our
normal froggy things which are usually
eating ants this is where these frogs
get their poisons they eat a lot of ants
which are of course full of poisons and
their stings and so forth and they
transform those poisons but she just
does her normal froggy things for a few
days and then suddenly she starts
climbing the trees again and she manages
to remember where she put all two dozen
tadpoles scattered in three-dimensional
space a memory feat the beach squirrels
and just about anything else even though
a frog’s brain isn’t supposed to be very
big or very sophisticated and so she now
goes back up and she looks into each
pool where she left her tadpole baby and
the tadpole of it still there will raise
its tail and wiggle the tail to say
hello mom kind of sign language for
tadpoles and she backs in and she lays a
little infertile egg and you see the
tadpole behind her here in the water and
that egg has hurt the omelet of her baby
for the next few days she tends all her
babies for the next couple of months as
they develop into young frogs an amazing
feat of motherhood
well serious scientists abound of course
and for some years I was at Berkeley and
I I came from Harvard and everyone in
Harvard was it oh there was a little
tension floating around there so I went
to Berkeley and they were so laid-back
I couldn’t resist moving there for a
while and working with them so here we
have some of the leading scientists of
Berkeley
head poppin fuzz is here he’s studies
lizards and Iran and other places with
no government he lurks places with no
government Jim Patton studies rats he
can tell rat species apart by taste
David Wake is the leader in frog the
loss of frogs around the worlds and at
the far end we have Harry Greene who
studies snakes and what are they doing
here do you suppose oh don’t know it’s
so obvious
they’re putting on pantyhose there from
Berkeley but it has nothing to do with
Berkeley they are simply preparing to
protect themselves from leeches I prefer
leeches over pantyhose any day here’s a
hairy green collecting a venomous tree
snake and I’ve worked with a lot of
snake people I love snakes and I’ve had
many fun experiences with snakes this
was one of the more fun ones because
this is not a snake anyone can tell what
this is it it is in fact a flat worm
which is a worm so primitive it has no
brain and yet it is managing to mimic a
snake it’s a kind of a snakey head at
this end at the species I discovered in
Borneo this is snake island
and it’s a island off of South Paulo
that has the most venomous snakes in the
world one every two square yards so
within this little lit area here there
would be maybe one-and-a-half to two of
them and the really cool thing as I
traveled with a scientist who was so
eager to take me to this remote island
that he came even though his arm was
broken and so he staggered up the hill
with poisonous snakes on every side and
showed me proudly this species which
lives only on the single island and it’s
poison is so toxic because on this
island it has to kill seabirds before
they can take off and fly more than a
couple of feet Jost Lewinsky was one of
the greats
snake people he had discovered new
species of Cobra working in Burma and
remote parts of China and I traveled
with him in 2001 and a story that was
very personal for me because Joey tried
to get me to go on trips for years and I
finally was able to go on this one to a
very remote village this is the day
before he died and he was hit by a crate
which is a minut version it’s a small
kind of Cobra and he had reached into a
snake bag
not realizing it was a real crate he
thought it was a mimic of a crate there
was a great deal of agony over this
decision and he made at the moment this
happened just as the towers were falling
in September 11th so we got out of Burma
to find that our news mattered nothing
because we had no idea it took us three
days to even find out what happened in
the US and it led me to think a lot
about what matters to people in nature I
mean Joe is he was lying there dying we
kept him going for a long time through
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but what
was he thinking about and I like to
think he was thinking about how much he
loves snakes and nature because true
nature requires that you take risks if
everything’s turned into a garden nature
disappears this is the snake that got
him it was about 10 inches long this is
a man who made the right decision this
is a Russian I met working in Vietnam
and he had actually chopped off his
finger after being bitten by a snake so
you you do these things despite the
risks because that’s what nature is
about nature is about having it’s like
falling in love love is a risk anything
that you devote yourself to that has
meaning it’s going to involve some risks
and wiping those risks risks away
doesn’t help anything and there are many
of the people I deal with are great at
finding ways of keeping the risks low
but making great stories and adventures
and learning about the world the last
trip I did well a couple trips back now
we dropped down a quarter mile deep into
a sinkhole and at the bottom of this
hole found a forest in its shaded depths
including two new species of frogs and
this is the great news about frogs frogs
are going extinct they’re very fragile
but we’re also finding a lot of them at
the same time so we have both the great
positive news about diversity we found a
couple thousand species in the last few
years and also
these horrendous things happening to
frogs around the world as many species
are declining in numbers I’ve looked for
all kinds of things over time it’s not
fair to be an entomologist and being you
know impressed by size but still I did
once look for the world’s largest insect
and it’s this Wetty from New Zealand
this thing is 71 grams I broke the
record for an adult insect at least four
frogs though you have to go to West
Africa and there I went after the
world’s largest species and I was hoping
to break the record and we got to six
and a half pounds unfortunately the
record is 7.2 so I need to go back again
I suppose at the other end of the frog
scale I went after the smallest frog
this is the species from Brazil we spent
three days going through leaf litter
finding this tiny jumping dots Brazil is
a great place to look for diversity and
I did actually for a story on the
Atlantic forests of Brazil which is the
force along the coast a story on
diversity just in frogs for Geographic
just because there was so much to be
found there that people haven’t
photographed before this is the pumpkin
frog tiny species poisonous frog
fighting biting and nipping in each
other and it turns out that they’re so
aggressive that they will fight with
their reflection in the mirror which is
a lot of fun to get some time on your
hands in Brazil this is the only fruit
eating frog this species actually lives
in a desert like coastal area with few
insects and eats fruit this is a marine
frog blending in down there next to some
of the marine life it’s the only species
of frog that will go down and eat things
and tide pools and so there are a whole
bunch of new frogs that had never been
reported on my favorite though is the
dancing frog and I think it’s important
to take back some lessons from the bat
dancing frog it lives in waterfalls so
noisy that it can’t call very
effectively it does call a little you
can see its cheek pouches here but they
basically it dances and it doesn’t very
it’s sort of a John Travolta way it
raises the leg on one side expands it
like it’s got to be done slowly and then
a little bit of this here and then here
here here here now while it’s doing this
I was told I was never going to be able
to photograph this thing because it’s
too shy and basically what I did is I
what what you can do in the animal
kingdom if you want to take a picture of
something they say as impossible as you
realize that once a male is preoccupied
with a female you can do anything you
want so as soon as he was dancing I
snuck right up on him I was within 3
inches of him and the female hopped up
in my shoulder and admired him from
about this distance fabulous canopies
are a place that I like to spend a lot
of time I talked about climbing trees
here’s a red-eyed tree frog up in the
canopy in Costa Rica where this is where
the species normally exists and I’ll
tell you a couple quick canopy stories
about frogs there are frogs that like to
glide from trees this is the biggest of
them this is is it true that people look
like their pets and in the case this
herpetologists discovered this lovely
frog and it’s the biggest of them so
it’s not a very good glider lands was
kind of a splat but I did get a picture
of it coming down the really great right
glider though is the coqui frog and if
you ever go to Puerto Rico this is a
frog that you will see everywhere
because it’s the most numerous amphibian
on earth there are about 40,000 of them
per hectare and all say Koki together
every night and so the whole island
explodes with their song and this frog
has a very unusual lifecycle that was
only discovered a few years ago when
someone got up very early in and found
out something about them what these
frogs do is they sleep near the ground
where it’s during the day when it’s too
hot up in the trees and then as sunsets
there’s a point in time when the birds
have fallen asleep but before the
tarantulas have woken up one it’s safe
to climb the trees and they all climb
the trees together it turns out
tarantulas four are the big predators of
frogs so it’s not good to come out when
tarantulas are awake and they’re on the
tree trunks mostly so they all climbed
the trees together during about a 15
minute period at sunset and then they
hop around in the canopy and do the
little canopy thing all night and then
at sunrise just as about Sun is
beginning to show itself there’s again a
15-minute period when it’s safe to come
down that is but after the tarantulas
have gone to sleep but before the birds
wake up and suddenly at about 5 o’clock
in the morning – 5:15 in Puerto Rico
everywhere it’s raining frogs because
they save time on the commute at the
size of a frog you can’t be hurt by a
fall so you end up with just a rain of
parental rain of frogs this is the one
picture I got in focus tarantulas okay
we’ll do a couple of spiders for you
because I know you’re all like gearing
up for eight-legged here and the
tarantulas are one of my favorite groups
here’s one that we caught in the act of
shedding her skin she’s actually
writhing out of this tight little sock
which are the dark brown things above
that’s her old skin if you have a pet
tarantula this is the big mistake people
make they they’ve start to they fall on
their back and lie dormant it for a
couple days they’re dormant because
they’re about to shed their skin so
people put a lot of transyl’s in the
toilet when they’re just gearing up for
their skin being shed so here you go
this picture was called a new skin for
mrs. ugly and the world press awards one
of the fun places I look for tarantulas
was in caves in Mexico went down to
Oaxaca with Peter Sprouse here and these
tarantulas have been collected but never
studied so he looked around found a cave
went in it eventually get in about a
kilometer and found this tarantula and
the
Angella like all cave animals very big
slender thing no eyes almost no eyes and
Peter had tortured me on the way in
because you know I’m carrying this
camera bag didn’t know much about caving
and so I was kind of pleased when the
tarantula which had never been breathed
on you know in millenia no one does
breathed on these tarantulas freaked out
and ran up his pant leg and he’s
screaming what do I do what I do
and I said don’t hurt it it’s an
endangered species it did bite him and I
made up stories about what we would have
to do if the tarantula venom was serious
but tarantulas actually don’t have any
effect it’s like a bee sting okay have
three short stories on spider life and
I’m gonna tell them about jumping
spiders jumping spiders are little
spiders that you will find outside this
building or anywhere in the United
States hopping around they don’t make
nests and they catch mosquitoes they do
a lot of good for us and they hop their
jumping spiders here’s one cotton freeze
frame jumping from one twig to another
and the three stories are from Sri Lanka
just to give you an example from one
spot
this is murmur acne loop pata sort of
the Jimmy Durante of the ant world of
the spider world if you remember Jimmy
Durante
and has this enormous nose like a fair
at one end and it wanders around
blundering into things with this giant
nose and you wonder what it’s all for
until you see one walk up to another
murmur acne lopata spider and then this
nose it turns out splits down the middle
and unfolds two enormous fangs and they
battle with these fangs like gladiators
in a duel throwing themselves back and
forth like this and this one on the far
right is backing away he’s freaking out
and about to take off this one is sort
of they rear up at the end of the battle
like rocking in the ring remember that
like whoa
here’s a tiny little fascia spider it’s
about the size of a dust speck it’s not
probably what you’re looking at this is
a normal jumping spider over here this
is on the right side the little fascia
species or the right side that little
clump is a tiny little spider that looks
like a bit of debris and we’d collected
them in bamboo with Robert Jackson the
researcher that I was working with on
this project and it turns out that these
little tiny spiders actually do look
like debris on purpose they actually
shake their body like debris moving in
the wind so what they do for a living is
that they enter the nests of normal
sized jumping spiders like this is a
mother here with her eggs and the facia
comes in looking like a bit of debris
blowing in the wind and the mother looks
down and watches the facia
she has very good vision they will
actually understand TV these spiders
they’re so good in their vision and she
doesn’t know what to do as the facia s–
picks up an egg and walks out with it
because it’s just a clump of debris
blowing in the wind here’s one that
there’s stolen an actual baby spider
from a mother it’s kind of playing with
it like a cat with a mouse and I don’t
know what you got around Washington DC
but these were common in Berkeley you’ve
got the guys with the Mohawks and the
little spike things this white are kind
of combines both of them as simonia
teeth apiece now gals courtship is never
easy and for spiders it’s like anything
else it’s a rough world out there for
the guys and it turns out that this
gorgeous creature look at this guy here
look at those gorgeous purples and reds
and yellow legs who wouldn’t be
impressed with this yeah it’s a hard
thing to do
attracting the lady look at her over
there she’s all plump and pale on the
right side he can start making his move
but she’ll just run away this is what
happens again and again I saw this up in
the trees the male looks
Daanish as the female rushes to the
other side of the leaf and you’re going
like females have rushed to the other
side of the leaf for ten thousand a
hundred thousand years in these spiders
and the male is always astonished how
did she do that where did she go
well eventually the male figures it out
that the rule of nature and he flips
over to the correct side of the leaf and
here he is making his slow approach and
the female is looking a little nervous
now what you have to do and this is a
rule of courtship that I’ve learned with
Melissa’s assistance is that you have to
about Lissa get over here
you have to you have to do what this
spider does it’s really right over there
what you have to do is you have to get
down like this and move slowly towards
the female a behavior that we signed us
called groveling now some spiders are
thank you very much
some spiders are very impressed with
that here’s the female here’s the male
groveling this one is groveling so well
he is like almost falling over backwards
for this female and then they get
together in the male they mate with
their face they have like little squishy
things and corkscrews that’s too much to
describe of course mammals were much
more reasonable animals we’re not like
birds with all our colors and so forth
so we tend to be much more sedate more
sophisticated about our ways of
approaching the female that’s why my
marriage recently was very understated
on Easter Island very traditional I
think a ceremony hasn’t changed for a
thousand years
I know you’ve all gone through this the
stripping and the re repainting your
body sort of thing and but you know
anyway I am here now part of a team
we’re going out for more expeditions
we’re going to try the match the animals
with our color and our finesse and our
stories and I hope you follow those
stories in the years to come
thanks so much
[Applause]
[Music]
you
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