Narrator: ln a monster bug war...
...there's treachery at every turn.
Enemies with super weapons...
Really big, nasty jaws.
Narrator: Foes with superpowers...
They just leap onto it and [shing!] sink the fangs in.
Narrator: ln a bug war, your best chance of staying alive
is to take nothing for granted.
[ thunder rumbles, wind howls ]
ln myths, magical forests
are filled with shape-shifting monsters.
But in the bug world, there really are such beasts.
They morph into their eerie environment
to catch their victims off guard.
What happens
when a grey tree runner mantis and a lichen huntsman
drop their invisibility cloaks?
Their true and deadly colors are revealed.
One of the most powerful tricks a magician can master
is to make things disappear.
And in the monster bug world,
invisibility can mean the difference
between life and death.
Dr. Fry: Camouflage is probably
the most important form of defense in the bug world
even for really capable fighters like mantis.
Once your foes spot you,
you have a good chance of being injured or even killed.
lf they can't see you, they can't hurt you.
Narrator: The grey tree runner mantis
has perfected the art of blending in.
lt moves about the forest like a shadow.
Dr. Fry: This guy is like a ninja
who can slip through the enemy territory without being seen
and then launches lightning-fast attack,
catching the prey totally unaware.
Narrator: Even the mantis' massive compound eyes
are striped...
So their enemies can't see them in the trees.
Made from hundreds of tiny units called ommatidia,
they're among the sharpest binoculars
in the insect world...
...detecting prey where others only see shadows.
Dr. Fry: The size of the grey tree runner's eyes
gives a great indication of how important they are.
They can spot things
that other bugs would have no chance of seeing.
Narrator: The mantis hits its target with pinpoint accuracy.
[ insect chirping ]
lt grabs this grasshopper
like a kung fu master snatches a passing fly.
But holding it down is a bigger challenge.
The grasshopper's legs bristle with spikes.
One well-placed kick could deliver a permanent K.O.
But the mantis has raptorial legs.
Once you're trapped, there's little chance of escape.
Dr. Fry: The raptorial legs of all mantises
are extremely efficient weapons,
even on small species like the grey tree runner.
Once they've spiked their prey, they hold onto it
while the mandibles start inflicting the serious wounds.
Narrator: lmprisoned,
the grasshopper pays the ultimate price.
lt's eaten alive.
There's no mercy in this forest.
Not even for the mantis.
There are other invisible eyes watching it.
The lichen huntsman
takes the power of invisibility to the ultimate level.
The lichen huntsman's ability to hide out in the open
gives it a real predatory advantage.
Narrator: lf the mantis is like a forest shadow,
then this spider
is like the ghostly phantom of the underworld.
She could be anywhere anytime,
and you'd never know.
Dr. Rayor: They're relatively flat spiders
that pin themselves against the bark of trees.
They've got lots of hairs on their legs
that make them blend into the background.
They're almost impossible to find.
Narrator: Those clusters of hair not only camouflage,
they double as motion detectors
for unwitting passersby.
lf all else fails,
there's her all-seeing eyes...
...four at the front, two on top,
and another pair at the rear.
Poised in the perfect ambush position,
body flattened, head hidden,
she has 360-degree vision.
At the first sight of prey,
the phantom morphs from ghost to demon.
The huntsman spiders have rotated the legs
so that they're lateral to the body,
and what this means is that they're able to move sideways
as effectively as they're able to move forwards.
This gives them a much wider range of motion
so that they're able to move around fast.
Narrator: As this cockroach discovers,
there's no sneaking past the ghost who waits.
The cockroach won't make this mistake twice.
The sharp-eyed grey tree runner mantis
is nowhere near as naive.
lt knows the perils of passing this ghostly gatekeeper.
But it, too, wants another meal,
and the fellow shape-shifter would make a tasty treat.
Narrator: So when two masters of camouflage come face-to-face,
conflict is inevitable.
Dr. Rayor: You got a face-off here
with the mantid with its good vision
and the huntsman spider very close, looking at the mantid,
and so the question is, who's gonna move first?
Narrator: lt's a poker game where it's high stakes --
life or death.
Just inches away from its opponent,
the mantis tries to bluff with the ultimate poker face.
The mantis certainly isn't behaving like he's scared.
He's almost mocking the spider.
He's just grooming himself,
like, ''Not even concerned about you at all.''
He's probably relying on his speed to run away
if things get a little bit too much.
Narrator: But the spider is not fooled.
No amount of speed will protect the mantis now.
The ghostly spider's fangs
pierce the mantis' thorax like massive poison darts,
stopping it dead in its tracks.
The spider eats at leisure.
Dr. Rayor: So, what she's going to do
is she'll mash up the mantid,
regurgitate digestive enzymes, suck up the prey.
Depending on the size of the mantid,
it'll take anywhere from half an hour to hours.
Narrator: When it's over,
it's time to put out the trash.
And the phantom of the underworld
fades invisibly back into the forest.
ln the dead of night, the forest is a dangerous place.
lt's crawling with cold-blooded killers,
and sometimes the difference between life and death...
...all comes down to making one wrong move.
What happens
when a destructive katydid clashes with a tent spider?
The home-ground advantage may not be enough.
From a distance,
it looks like a misty cloud in a rainforest canopy.
Don't be deceived.
Enter this gossamer nightmare
and you're on a guaranteed journey through hell.
lt's the hunting ground of the tent spider.
And worse still,
where there's one tent spider, there are hundreds.
Dr. Rayor: Tent spiders live in groups.
Each spider has its own web, but it's connected by frame lines,
and the big advantage of this is that they're able to feel
vibrations throughout the colony.
This is particularly helpful
if a potential predator comes through.
[ insect buzzing ]
Narrator: This fly has made a fatal error.
The tent spider senses vibrations.
lt drops onto its prey in a split second.
They grab it in their third legs,
and then they wrap it up...
...using their fourth legs to pull swaths of silk.
They wrap up their prey very, very effectively.
Narrator: Once the victim is wrapped, it's bite time.
Behind feelers called pedipalps
are menacing fangs that curve inwards
to pierce and rip their prey.
Within moments,
the tent spider is back at the top of her silken dome,
devouring her tightly wrapped snack.
Just yards away, also prowling for a snack,
another equally terrifying rainforest fighter...
...the destructive katydid.
lts super-long antennae detect far-off prey.
Dr. Fry: The antennae are at least as long as the body,
so this allows the katydid to sense prey
approaching from quite some distance away.
They're incredibly active and mobile,
just cruising all the time, checking out, getting the cues,
trying to get that little elusive chemical trail
to tell it what's approaching or what's recently been around.
Narrator: lts lime-green body is near-perfect camouflage.
When it's time to eat,
this bug is all business...
Whether it's gorging on a giant cicada...
...or disemboweling a live caterpillar.
The destructive katydid and the tent spider
are both sit-and-wait hunters.
But they still take the occasional midnight stroll.
Tonight, one of them will regret not staying home.
Narrator: This destructive katydid
has few rivals on terra firma.
But when she takes to the air in these parts, she's vulnerable.
The tent spiders have lousy vision,
but they are incredibly sensitive to vibrations.
And so they're very, very responsive
to airborne vibrations and vibrations in their silk.
Narrator: The katydid's unplanned landing
is met by a barrage of legs and spider silk.
They wrestle frantically.
As long as a katydid is stuck in the web,
it is at great risk of becoming prey to the tent spider.
lt needs to cut its way out, and fast.
Narrator: lf those jaws do break free,
the fight could turn in an instant.
This katydid has really big, nasty jaws
that could totally do in this spider.
lt's important to the spider
to keep that katydid as far away as it possibly can from its body
while still entangling it further,
or wrapping it up further in silk.
Narrator: The katydid tries to kick through the silk
with its sturdy hind legs.
lt snips at the web.
The spider must move fast.
What it needs to do is it needs to get in there,
bite the katydid, and pump as much venom as it can in there,
but still make sure that that katydid can't bite it.
Narrator: The tent spider makes its move.
Now it's up to the venom to do its deadly work.
Even as it begins shutting him down,
the katydid continues to fight.
But it's too late.
Today, venom wins...
...and the silken cloud of death claims another victim.
ln the bug world,
many things that creep, crawl, and slither
share the same patch of land.
They also share a primeval urge
to kill on sight.
When a giant rhinoceros beetle
encounters a swarm of voracious meat ants...
lt's a conflict that will end in blood.
[ owl hooting ]
Rhinoceros beetles
are like tanks on the bug battlefield.
They're among the biggest of all the beetles --
titans of the bug world.
Dr. Rayor: Rhinoceros beetles aren't misnamed.
They're big, they're kind of clumsy.
They have a thick, heavy, sclerotized ex oskeleton
that is incredibly hard to pierce.
lt covers most of their body,
and the rhinoceros beetles are awesomely strong.
Narrator: On a power-to-weight ratio, these battle bugs
are the strongest animals on the face of the Earth.
Dr. Rayor: lt's estimated
that a rhinoceros beetle is able to push or carry
as much as 850 times its body weight.
We're talking that a human could lift as much as 65 tons.
This is a crazy, heavy amount
that this rhinoceros beetle is able to carry.
Narrator: For all its brute force,
this monster mostly eats rotting fruit,
which provides all the fuel it needs to wrestle a rival.
Dr. Rayor: The males, and males alone,
have these big hornlike structures that act like levers.
Narrator: Each male has two forked horns --
one on the head, the other on the top of the prothorax.
As a weapon, they work like a pair of sharp tongs
to catch and dispatch an opponent.
But for all his brutish ways,
the rhinoceros beetle has one surprising trick up his sleeve.
He can fly.
The rhinoceros beetle almost transforms itself
when it gets ready to fly.
lt opens its four wings in a click
and then lumbers into flight.
These are not great flyers.
Narrator: lt takes to the air
with all the grace you'd expect from a tank with wings.
Still, it's a talent that could save its life.
And he may need an escape strategy
if he strays into meat ant territory.
One single ant isn't much of a threat.
But where you find one, you'll find many.
lndividual nests can contain tens of thousands of ants,
but they're often linked together into super colonies
that can contain hundreds of thousands or more.
Narrator: Meat ants don't sting,
but they bite with a vengeance
with mandibles honed like steel shears
to rip through raw flesh.
For the victim, it's death by a thousand cuts.
The ants just swarm over whatever they're attacking...
...and all those tiny little jaws
keep snipping and snipping and snipping until it's history.
They can make an animal much larger than them
run for the hills.
Narrator: Whenever a meat ant is moving, it's hunting.
And there are many mouths to feed.
Meat ant colonies have multiple queens,
all pumping out larva that need to be fed.
This is why the colonies are always on the hunt.
They just have so many larva back at home
screaming for energy-rich food.
Narrator: ln the eternal tussle for insect supremacy,
some bugs are Goliaths
and some more like Davids with a bad attitude.
Meat ants are really kind of ill-behaved ants.
These are aggressive ants that are perfectly willing to attack.
They're scary ants.
Narrator: Meat ants are active in daylight...
While rhinoceros beetles get busy at night.
But there's sometimes a crossover hour.
lt's early morning, and a tanklike vegetarian
blunders into meat-ant territory.
[ air-raid siren wails ]
The alarm goes out through the colony.
The ants have sent out the chemical signal
to call in further reinforcements,
so if the beetle's in trouble now,
soon he's gonna be in even bigger trouble.
Narrator: As the ants start nipping at his heels,
he loses his balance...
...and falls onto the nest.
The beetle's best defense is its impenetrable armor.
Really the only places
where these ants are going to be able to get in
and bite at the rhinoceros beetle effectively
is at its joints.
Narrator: And that's where the ants attack in force.
The beetle tries to escape.
He needs to get clear to fly away.
But carrying vicious ants as excess baggage,
he can't get to the runway.
Dr. Rayor: The best thing it could do is fly away.
But it gets ready to fly really slowly.
Narrator: The ants dig deeper now.
They crawl inside the skin of their prey,
spraying formic acid savagely and relentlessly.
Dozens of mandibles are biting the beetle to death.
At this point, the beetle's armor is useless.
The ants are going to crawl into every crevice they can
and bite him into oblivion.
Narrator: ln this battle, size becomes a disadvantage.
A lumbering armored tank
is no match for armor-piercing infantry.
The way some bugs move makes your flesh crawl.
Some scuttle...
Some creep...
...and some can bring on an instant cold sweat.
But the creepiest of all
are the bugs that pounce out of nowhere.
Jumping spiders are really the primates of the spider world
in terms of being intelligent and totally alert.
Narrator: When two predatory jumping spiders
come face-to-face...
Which one will have the jump on the other?
ln the battle of the leaping assassins,
the long-jawed jumping spider is armed to the teeth.
The long-jawed jumping spider
is in many regards a fairly typical jumping spider.
But what makes these spiders unusual
is that they've got these incredibly long, thick chelicera
with long fangs that are almost half its body length.
Narrator: Some spider fangs are barely visible.
Not these.
These have the potential to be really good weapons.
Narrator: That's bad news for all kinds of prey.
Not only that,
but you can't sneak past a killer
whose eyes are everywhere.
Dr. Rayor: Jumping spiders have incredible vision.
They've moved a number of the eyes back on their carapace
so that, effectively, jumping spiders have 360-degree vision.
Narrator: Those two huge eyes, front and center,
sense contrast...
Colors...
Even ultraviolet light.
This smaller spider
is already a marked bug.
But the long-jawed jumping spider
needs all of its visual acuity to make the kill.
lf you're jumping long distances,
you need to have good depth perception
so you actually land on your prey and effectively catch it.
Narrator: Death comes in an instant,
as those elongated fangs skewer the prey.
With brains and brawn, the long-jawed jumping spider
is more than a match for most bugs its size.
But how will it fare
when its opponent shares exactly the same talents?
Dr. Rayor: Now, the issue here
is that we've got jumping spider against jumping spider.
Narrator: The green jumping spider
has all the skills and all the smarts of the long-jaw.
ln the eyes of some,
she's also the supermodel of the spider world.
[ camera shutter clicking ]
The green jumping spider is absolutely gorgeous and big.
Narrator: ln the miniscule world of jumping spiders,
''big'' is a relative term.
The body is compact and the legs short --
the perfect build for a spider that leaps onto its prey.
Dr. Fry: When it comes to jumping,
these guys are in a class of their own.
They can launch themselves
an amazing 20 times their own body length.
Astounding.
Narrator: More often than not, the jump is a winner.
This time, the prey is a fly...
[ fly buzzing ]
...also renowned for its speed and its wide field of vision.
The green jumping spider measures the distance.
The key to the kill
is securing the victim as quickly as possible.
The two front pair of legs are quite well-developed,
and they have these large spinelike hairs on them.
lt's like nature gave them a cute little face,
but then gave them these mean legs
to give them a little bit of street cred.
Narrator: When you encounter spider beauty like this,
you can guarantee the outcome won't be pretty.
Dr. Rayor: Both of them have the same capabilities,
except the long-jawed spider
has much, much longer fangs than the other spider.
On the other hand,
the green jumping spider has size and power to its advantage.
So in this case, it really is who has the element of surprise.
Narrator: When two species of jumping spider
target each other...
lt's anyone's guess as to which one will lose...
...and which one will live to leap again.
lt's a close match.
The long-jaw might have bigger fangs,
but, you know, size isn't everything.
Narrator: Then again,
sheer body bulk might win the day.
Both the spiders
have fairly similar intellectual and visual capabilities,
but one has a huge size advantage.
Narrator: The larger green jumping spider
makes the first move.
lt's a Mexican standoff.
Who will blink first?
The long-jaw plays safe.
But the green beauty isn't giving up.
Dr. Rayor: The key in this entire battle
is, whoever catches the other spider first is going to win.
Narrator: She stalks her opponent...
...and scores a direct hit.
Her fangs might be smaller,
but they drip with deadly venom.
These guys have a really fast-acting venom.
The long-jaw's legs have already started to curl up,
a sure sign it's about to pass its use-by date.
Narrator: As the long-jaw discovered, to his dismay...
The supermodel is more than just a pretty face.
Looks can kill.
Of the world's 40,000 different spider species,
only one is known to be a vegetarian.
That means in a spider's world,
getting a square meal...
Almost always means...
Murder.
When two master huntsmen go head-to-head...
...it's never a case of meet and greet.
lt's catch and kill.
Like cage fighters, spiders may be known by their nicknames.
This one goes by the initials G.B.H....
...the giant banded huntsman.
Huntsman spiders are the best spiders in the world.
They're big...
...they're fast...
...they're powerful, they're great predators.
Narrator: Those long legs
give the huntsman a formidable reach advantage.
Dr. Rayor: We're talking probably
on the order of 6 inches across,
and they can get larger than this.
These are big, fast spiders.
Narrator: This killer is a lowrider.
lts specially designed legs let it hug the ground...
So it keeps a low profile.
Unlike other spiders,
whose leg joints hinge downward,
the huntsman's legs hinge sideways.
This means they can lie flat as a pancake.
They can also move sideways.
So she can jump in any direction.
They are largely sit-and-wait predators.
When something comes by,
they run out incredibly fast and grab it.
Narrator: She smashes her prey with two monstrous fangs.
The huntsman also has eight eyes
and giant limbs bristling with sensory hairs to detect prey.
She's a walking seismometer.
But sometimes she meets her match.
Another huntsman.
This is the jungle huntsman,
a close relative and archenemy.
lt has every weapon the G.B.H. has,
plus one bonus extra.
More speed.
Dr. Fry: All huntsman spiders are quick.
They have the ability to run fast and react fast,
but the jungle huntsman,
he's the gold-medal sprinter of the lot.
Narrator: Bizarrely, those fast-moving legs extend...
...using hydraulics.
Spider blood flows directly into each limb,
inflating them into motion.
When blood pressure drops, the legs contract.
An ingenious system of valves at the body
alternates the pressure.
So, how do these two hydraulic hunters fare
when they run into each other in the forest?
lt's an even match.
Dr. Rayor: You got two really fast spiders,
but the giant banded huntsman is bigger and stronger.
The jungle huntsman has speed and stealth to its advantage.
Dr. Fry: This is a really tough fight to call.
Both are very competent fighters.
lt could go either way.
Narrator: The giant banded huntsman is lying in wait.
lt's on a hair trigger to strike.
This jungle huntsman is also looking for a meal.
But there's a problem.
They're occupying the same diner,
and neither one wants to share.
There aren't any fancy tricks
to the way these spiders catch their prey.
For them, it's all about speed and agility.
Quite simply, they just leap onto it and sink the fangs in.
Narrator: The jungle huntsman goes for a speedy sidestep.
But the G.B.H. moves even faster.
The jungle huntsman is skewered through its soft underbelly.
Fangs like eagles' talons rip into its body
again and again.
Dr. Rayor: The giant banded huntsman
is able to really crunch up its prey once it catches it.
The fangs are big, they're strong...
...really go deeply, and they're really able to do some damage.
Narrator: One night out with a giant banded huntsman...
...and there's little left the morning after.
Winning a bug war
is often the triumph of finesse over firepower.
A finely woven web can neutralize fearsome armaments.
Maneuverability can outflank a fast-moving foe.
Well-organized infantry
can overcome impenetrable armor.
And relentless pursuit prevails
over hard-hitting weaponry.
When you're fighting a bug war,
it's the things you don't see that kill you.