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 Life In The Undergrowth
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Fly On The Wall
In a series of five ten-minute shorts the 91Èȱ¬ and the Open University present he challenges of bringing a miniature universe to the small screen.
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The world of invertebrates has never truly been explored before. Until now, it has been impossible to gain footage of many tiny creatures in their natural habitats.
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A number of technical innovations means that it is now possible to film invertebrates in incredible detail, giving an amazing insight into their behaviour and revealing many breathtaking stories.
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New optics mean camera lenses can now give an even greater depth of focus, enabling viewers to have a much truer sense of the insects' real world and, with the aid of computerised motion control, the camera can move around, over and zoom through the animal landscape.
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Meanwhile, tiny chip-in-the-tip cameras on flexible probes have allowed the team to get inside insect burrows without disturbing them, revealing their natural and previously unseen behaviour.
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The production team visited more than 20 countries and worked with hundreds of international entomologists and researchers to capture the most amazing footage of invertebrates.
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This includes some truly breathtaking spectacles, such as the mass emergence of 17-year-old cicadas in North America, thousands of swarming purple Crow butterflies in Taiwan, an army of Matabele ants raiding a termite nest, and a cave twinkling with the neon blue glow of fungus fly larvae.
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Nevertheless, it's not easy filming insects, especially when some of the subjects are, quite literally, the size of a full stop!
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Special Fly On The Wall inserts at the end of each programme will explore, in greater detail, how the 91Èȱ¬'s Natural History Unit was able to capture such stunning footage for the first time.
Ìý Here are just some of the challenges overcome by the production team while making Life In The Undergrowth.
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Weather conditions can play havoc when you are trying to film insects and the production team certainly hit a run of bad luck.
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Series producer Mike Salisbury and cameraman Martin Dohrn experienced the only typhoon to have hit Taiwan during December in recorded history.
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Unseasonably early rains arrived in California, meaning the team had to fly out to film rain beetles at two days' notice, only for the rain to stop.
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The rainy season in French Guiana was unseasonably dry, and the dry season was unseasonably wet, and hurricanes and freak floods also followed the team around the globe. Ìý
To film Asian Giant Honey Bees involved winching David Attenborough up some of the tallest rainforest trees to where the colonies live together 150 feet up.
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During the day, these bees can be lethal and, if a single bee decides to attack, it will release an alarm pheromone which causes all the bees in all the colonies to launch a simultaneous and deadly attack on whoever is passing at the time.
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To be on the safe side, the team spent five weeks getting the bees used to their presence and putting ropes up into the trees. Ìý
Producer Peter Bassett was rushed to hospital with anaphylactic shock on one filming trip, probably caused by an allergy to caterpillar hairs.
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Not all insect behaviour happens on cue for the cameras, either.
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The team waited eight days for thousands of mayflies to emerge in central Hungary.
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As the early June sun begins to set over a calm river, masses of ghostly shapes emerge from their larval cases to take to the air for the first time in a spectacular display and the team had to shoot all this on their last day on location. Ìý
Assistant producer Tim Green and cameraman Rod Clarke spent five days waiting in a horrible, inhospitable cave for a bat-eating centipede to appear.
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This cave was humid and smelly, but the wait was worth it in the end.
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Meanwhile, cameraman Alastair McEwan sat up for 36 hours waiting for the blue butterfly parasitic wasp to emerge from its pupa.
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On just a few special nights when the tide is high in Delaware Bay, USA, there is a mass invasion from the sea of several hundred thousand horseshoe crabs.
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It's a primeval scene that re-enacts the way animals first left the sea to get on to the land.
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The first year the team tried to capture this behaviour, there were no crabs. They were expecting 400,000 on one beach and, instead, saw five!
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A year later they returned, but couldn't get on to the beaches because freak winds caused the spawning beach and the surrounding town to flood. Luckily, they found them elsewhere. Ìý
Filming lacewings and ladder web spiders in Florida, USA didn't go quite to plan.
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Shortly before the team arrived, a hurricane swept through Florida, which seemed to wipe out all the spiders.
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They spent days searching for spiders, and found some just as the next hurricane, Francis, was arriving.
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The cameraman had to evacuate, spending 15 hours in traffic queues to try to move the spiders to safety. He succeeded, but the spiders refused to spin their webs in Kentucky. Ìý
Using high-speed digital cameras up to frame rates of 5,000 frames per second, the team was able to film, in extreme detail, tiny springtails jumping, showing exactly how different species jump and right themselves when they land.
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This is no easy thing when some springtails are the size of a full stop! Ìý
In one species of harvestman in Panama, it is the males, rather than the females, that take care of the young, a very rare phenomenon.
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With infra-red cameras, the cameramen have revealed a whole raft of new behaviours that the researchers were previously unable to see.
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To do this, they had to spend a week or so in a damp jungle at night, focusing on a small ring of mud (slightly larger than a 50p coin). Ìý
While filming webspinners (small insects that live in a silken tunnel complex) in Trinidad, the production team used a video probe system – a tiny camera with a diameter of only six millimetres - to film right inside the tunnels of a webspinner colony.
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This allowed them to film eggs hatching and a mother webspinner helping young out of their eggs. Ìý
The infamous redback spider of Australia makes vertical threads down to the ground, ending in a blob of sticky glue.
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When prey becomes stuck to these, they are 'pinged' up into the air by the taut silk lines, to be consumed by the spider at leisure.
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To capture this took a heady mix of patient cameramen, infra-red cameras and ultra high-speed video. Ìý
Bolas spiders refused to hunt with light on them so the team had to set up the cameras with red lights then switch the white lights on, giving them a few seconds to film.
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