Transcription
No one said life in the wild would be easy. Yikes.
These four miniature hunters use stealth, speed, and lethal weapons to dispatch their prey in the most creative of ways. First up, check out these mysterious little towers poking up from the forest floor. A cunning, patient, and ruthless surprise lurks inside.
The world is a very different place when darkness falls. Most of us head for home, for cover, because as the shadows creep in, they hide things. Frightful things. What is that? That little tower? Look, there's another one. They blend in so well.
That was a California turret spider. Its lair is like the turret of a castle, rising above the forest floor. It's lined the inside with pearly white silk and coated the outside with mud, moss, or leaves. The turret leads down to the spider's burrow that can descend six feet underground. The spider spends its days down there. As the last rays of sun die out, it rises to wait, motionless, until some unsuspecting creature happens by, like this pill bug.
Every step it takes creates tiny tremors, betraying its location. Woo, that was close. Turret spiders actually have pretty poor vision. Instead, they rely on feel, bursting out in whichever direction the vibrations seem to come from. So sometimes, they miss. They belong to a group of spiders called mygalomorphs, along with their more famous cousins, tarantulas and trapdoor spiders. They pack oversized fangs that swing down like a pair of pickaxes. They were hunting this way long before spiders started building intricate aerial webs, like this orb weaver spider. Instead, a female turret spider might live for 16 years and never stray from her turret. She only ventures into the world for a split second, just long enough to drag her next victim down to its demise.
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Our next creature is straight out of science fiction. The worm lion ambushes its prey from the bottom of its tidy and terrifying sand pit. You never really know where trouble is lurking when one wayward step means disaster. This small hole in the sand is really the lair of a worm lion, and it's ferocious. You find them in dry, dusty soil in the mountains of Northern California. The ground is cratered with danger. Sure, it's a tiny little wriggly thing, but worm lions set a fearsome trap that's straight out of science fiction.
To build it, they slink below the surface, pushing through dirt, sand, and rocks. They'll fling them out of the way as they get settled into their shallow pit. Oops, try again. Then, it just lies in wait. It's almost invisible, camouflaged by the sand stuck to its body. This ant is totally clueless.
The worm lion strikes like a cobra, injecting venom into its prey to paralyze it. It constricts the ant, dragging it under until it's all over. When the worm lion is done feeding on the juicy innards, it flicks the empty carcass away and tidies up its pit for its next meal. Careful. After a couple of years of the good life, this worm lion will leave this dusty ditch behind and take to the skies, because really, it's not a worm at all. It's a fly larvae. It'll turn into this: a fly that lives for less than a week. Its only job is to mate and lay eggs, but for most of its life, it's sitting pretty in its pit, waiting for lunch to fall right in its lap.
The assassin bug kills its victim by stabbing it over and over, but does this perpetrator have an accomplice? Sticky droplets at the scene of the crime could be a clue.
Just beneath the petals of this flower, a brutal murder is in progress. This was the victim a few minutes earlier: a caterpillar. Before it got whacked, it was on its way to becoming an owlet moth. And this is the perpetrator: *Copus spinus*, aka the assassin bug. It dispatches its victims with this sharp weapon. When it's not using it, it keeps it folded up like a switchblade. Let's review that crime footage again, shall we? Yep, the assassin bug is definitely the hitman, but did it have an accomplice?
The scene of the crime is this tarweed. Pretty, right? But what are these glossy droplets all over the place? A few nights back, this midge got trapped in them. So did this other tiny fly. Turns out, the tarweed lured them with these sweet, lemony droplets. This plant is an insect graveyard. Those bodies are a bribe for the assassin bugs, so they'll take care of the plant's caterpillar problem. See, the caterpillars eat its flowers. No flowers, no pollen. No pollen, no reproduction.
Now that they're on the tarweed, the assassin bugs mate and lay an egg or two right next to the cadavers, so their offspring have something to eat when they hatch. Then they get to work on that job for the tarweed. The bigger caterpillars put up a fight. The little ones, they'll try to make themselves scarce, dangling down on a line of silk. But plenty of them end up like our murder victim: sucked dry. With the caterpillars out of the way, the tarweed mastermind can hang onto its flowers and spread its pollen for one more day.
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Dragonflies are masters of the aerial attack, but their babies grow up underwater, where they use a lightning-fast killer lip to nab their prey. For over 300 million years, these lethal hunters have ruled the skies. They're the order Odonata, that's dragonflies and damselflies to most of us. Before the dinosaurs even existed, they had a two-foot wingspan like a small hawk. Today, they're more modest in scale, but no less deadly. Take their eyes. Each tiny hexagonal cell picks up light from a different direction, which gives dragonflies an almost 360° range of vision. Four wings help them hover or turn on a dime. That means this hunter rarely misses.
The weird thing is, Odonata spend most of their lives in a place where these killer piloting skills don't help. This is where their mothers lay their eggs. When they hatch, the babies, called larvae or nymphs, spend months or years underwater. Their wings are still growing, so they aren't any help in scoring a meal, like this tasty mosquito larvae. It's a larva-eat-larva world down here. Did you see that? Let's slow it down. The nymph has a killer lip called a labium. Remind you of this creepy thing? For this skimmer nymph, it's shaped like a spork. Only dragonfly and damselfly nymphs have this special lip. This kind of dragonfly nymph, a darner, has an extra surprise. There's a pair of pincers right at the end. It all happens in a fraction of a second. Think of the lip as a knife, fork, and plate all rolled into one. When the meal is over, it folds up neatly, ready for the next occasion. These baby skimmers don't stand a chance, and that's good for us. Let's hope it stays this way for a few million more years.
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Now, now, keep your streak going with these five buzzworthy bees.