An attack can happen anywhere.
Even the suburbs of an American city are a nightmare world for insects
just another battleground in a war
that's been fought for hundreds of millions of years.
A moth confused by the flight is being watched
a ruthless predator is waiting for just the right moment.
Humans only face monsters in their fantasies
but insects face them every day in their world.
A preying mantis is a fearsome predator in its miniature universe
but it still needs its own defences.
Every insect is just a convenient mouthful of protein to bigger animals.
When it takes to the air the predator become the prey.
This mantis has been targeted by the sonar of a bat.
But the mantis has a single ear.
It can hear the bat's puses of ultrasound.
When the bat gets closer the mantis deliberately stalls
and tumbles out of the air to safety.
And to the bat its target has just disappeared.
Insects live in a world of attack and defence
measure and counter measure.
The most deadly battleground is the rainforest.
Human scientists have no real idea
of how many different kinds of insects live out their lives here.
Certainly hundreds of thousand possibly millions.
And they're all fighting their own private wars
usually out of sight of human eyes.
It's a jungle out there
insects are in conflict with spiders
with other insects
with plants with just about everything.
For many insects the best defence is to look like the plants they live on.
Every vein, every blemish is reproduced down to the last detail.
Dead leaves
damaged leaves
green leaves.
Perfect camouflage so long as they keep still.
If danger does come too close an enemy can be started
by a sudden flash of colour.
Most of these secret wars
are being fought high in the tree tops and the only way
that humans can even glimpse the scale of these battles
the sheer number of antagonists is by fogging the trees
discharging a fast acing insecticide into the canopy.
It'll bring down the rain of hidden insects into the collecting funnels below
There are millions of insects
with millions of different strategies for staying alive
but they all have one basic aim in life
to find enough to eat amongst all this competition.
Yet insects are masters at exploiting any kind of food
whether in the jungle or in a human eating house.
Their secret lies with their mouthparts versatile, flexible
engineered precisely to process any food on offer.
Cockroaches still have the same basic design
as the earliest insects.
Their mouths come complete with their own cutlery set
the outer instruments act like knives
slicing and crushing the food.
Then it's passed back to a pair of forks
which shovel it upinto the mouth itself.
A caterpillar also needs jaws like knives
for slicing up endless amounts of tough plants.
But a caterpillar eventually becomes a butterfly
and when it does it alters its diet from solid leaves to liquid nectar.
So, during its transformation
it completely redesigns its mouthparts.
The knives disappear
and the forks transform into a flexible drinking straw.
Less than half a millimeter wide
it sucks up liquid and when the butterfly's finished
it just rolls it up like a hosepipe on a reel.
But the most complex design belongs to the fly.
A pad of fine tubes to slurp up its liquid food.
Finding food is only half the battle.
The other half is staying alive long enough to enjoy it.
In the world of insects
there's no such thing as a free lunch.
There's fierce competition for anything edible.
Even something that at times the howler monkey dung
It's greaing fead to fly
But it happening quick
These beetles specialise in howler monkey dung.
They claim it as their own
taking it away to bury it out of sight of predators and rivals
they have no intention of sharing their food.
All they have to do is to hang onto their prize
while they plunge the hundred fee to the forest floor.
The beetles are so quick at carrying off their food
that at times the forest rains dung.
Howler monkey dung does have one advantage as a food
it doesn't mind being eaten.
This leaf on the other hand does.
Its part of a plant
that can defend itself by producing a nasty poison.
Milkweed for example has several poisons in it
but its still covered with aphids sucking its juices.
And milkweed beetles
that happily chew the leaves immune to all its toxins.
And some insects are not just immune to the toxims
they store them in their bodies making them poisonous to their enemies.
But there's no point in being poisonous
and having to be eaten before a predator learns its lesson.
Deadly insects advertise their toxins in advance
by wearing bright colours.
Ganging together emphasizes these point.
Orange and black is a hazard warning recognized everywhere.
But at night poisonous insects need a different alarm system.
A tiger moth's warning colours protect it
during the day but it can't be seen in the dark.
And anyway the main danger at night comes
from bats which use sound to find their prey.
The moth though can hear the bat's sonar
and turns on its own siren.
It screams an ultrasonic warning that the bat can't fail to hear.
The bat understands and leaves the moth in peace.
Insects are never free from danger
and often an insect's worst enemy is another insect.
A clover worm caterpillar seems helpless
defenceless to a hungry ladybird larva.
But the caterpillar can escape it drops out of sight on a line of fine silk.
Its victim seems to have vanished
so the lad bird larva just gives up.
Once the threat has gone
the caterpillar hauls itself up and carries on eating.
This wasp is also hunting the caterpillar not to eat it
but to lay her eggs inside it.
An a wasp is not so easily fooled.
The caterpillar tries its vanishing act again
but the wasp just abseils down the line.
Injecting her eggs won't kill the caterpillar straight away
but it will die as her grubs hatch and eat it from the inside.
But its day isn't over yet
another kind of wasp needs a caterpillar incubator.
This one reels in the lifeline and injects her eggs.
When they hatch they will eat the first wasp's grubs
even the muggers get mugged.
It seems that every defence is open to counter attack
in the battle ground of the rainforest
where they're a threat lurking in every shadow
insects have adopted some drastic measures.
Termites live inside a caste.
They don't often leave the safety of their fortress.
If they do it's to build extensions or make repairs
and they're guarded by an army of soldier termites.
With all this security
termites should be safe from attack.
But waiting outside is their worst nightmare
an assassin bug in full disguise.
Termites take a big risk
when they open their fortress they're blind
and the bug has covered itself in their building material.
To them
its just another part of the nest.
They simply blunder into it.
The assassin bug sucks the termite's body dry.
The workers try to close the gaps in their defences
as quickly as they can they're still not safe
until every tiny crack is sealed.
In the meantime
the bug has a sinister use for its victim.
Termites live by rules they're fanatically tidy.
A dead termite has to be taken to the communal graveyard
and the assassin bug exploits this obsession.
All that the worker detects is a corpse
and the assassin bug shakes the body teasing the worker.
Compulsive tidiness will cost this termite its life.
As if fishing through a hole the bug dangles the corpse as bait.
Then it drops it
and grabs the worker the next in a chain of up to twenty serial murders.
Insects weren't even safe from other insects
when they took to the air.
Robber flies are deadly flying predators
and there are thousands of them stationed across the high plains of Colorado.
Anything flying through their airspace is adking for trouble.
They all scramble to intercept
the first one there make a grab
snatches the bee from the air and crash lands with its bounty.
But all flying insects face an even worse threat
from an ancient enemy.
As long as insects have been able to fly
spiders have built traps to snare them.
Some webs don't just entangle their victims
they draw them in with a trick.
These zig-zags reflect ultra violet light
looking like dappled sunlight to the vision of a butterfly.
And a patch of sulight on the ground would be just the place to find flowers.
Paralysed and wrapped in silk
some victims will be stored in the web a future meal
but that's an open invitation to some other insects.
This spindly Australian assassin bug makes a living
by stealing from spiders.
This spider has no idea that there's a burglar in its home.
The assassin bug tip toes across the web
so delicately that any vibration seems just like the breeze.
It snaps each strand in its path carefully
so the spider doesn't notice.
Safely in the center of the web
the bug just has to wait for the spider to stop its food
A different burgalr this time a scorpion flies
is already awaiting the spider's supplies
This may seem like a free meal but it's still a risky place to eat
It can sometimes get caught on the sticky thread
but he has a cunning ban
It spits out of solvent to dissolve the deadly silk
fling himself to infiltrate another web
But there's one insect that launches a full frontal attack on spiders.
The giant damselfly.
Six inches long
the damsel fly doesn't just steal the spider's prey
it steals the spider.
It can hover stalking the spider
from the air then snatching it from its web.
A deadly air raid performed like an aerial ballet.
In their battle for survival
insects are obviously winning there are so many of them
and so many different kinds and each and very one has come up
with a unique strategy for staying alive.
But for insects the war is never over
and in their bid to stay one step ahead
some insects have evolved surprisingly powerful weapons.
Few creatures will risk annoying a bombadier beetle.
It mixes a cocktail of deadly chemicals in a special chamber.
They react and explode at boiling point
from its rear end an awesome chemical weapon.
But even this is no defence against one predator.
The power of the many out weights the power of the one.
A bivouac of army ants
perhaps three quarters of a million individuals
meshed together to form a living nest.
This encampment is resting now.
But when the order is given the monster will waks
and send out its tendrils into the forest.
There's no defence against this invasion
no room for negotiation.
This army takes no prisoners.
Even ruthless predators succomb to this wave of devastation
there's no mercy
This relentless tide of destruction creeps
through the forest at twenty metres
an hour annihilating everything in its path.
Individual insects can't reach the size of monsters
from the world of science fiction but working together
an army of ants behaves like a single giant creatures
a monster from the world of science fact.