Tiny and delicate, pygmy seahorses survive by attaching to vibrant corals where they become nearly invisible to both predators and researchers. Now, biologists at the California Academy of Sciences have successfully bred them in captivity for the first time. Finally, they're able to study the seahorses' amazing act of camouflage up close.
For thousands of years, mysterious bacteria have remained dormant in the Arctic permafrost. Now, a warming climate threatens to bring them back to life. What does that mean for the rest of us?
What does it mean to be blue? The wings of a Morpho butterfly are some of the most brilliant structures in nature, and yet they contain no blue pigment -- they harness the physics of light at the nanoscale.
Sea otters aren't just cute -- they're a vivid example of life on the edge. Unlike whales and other ocean mammals, sea otters have no blubber. Yet they're still able to keep warm in the frigid Pacific waters. The secret to their survival? A fur coat like no other.
Turtles grow up without parents, which might sound lonely. But for threatened baby turtles raised in a zoo it’s an advantage: they can learn to catch crickets all by themselves. There’s a paradox, though. When they are ready to leave the nursery, there is little wilderness where they can make a home.
Pacific mole crabs, also known as sand crabs, make their living just under the surface of the sand, where they're safe from breaking waves and hungry birds. Some very special physics help them dig with astonishing speed.
The silent star of classic Westerns is a plant on a mission. It starts out green and full of life. It even grows flowers. But to reproduce effectively it needs to turn into a rolling brown skeleton.
Pollinator. Mason. Jeweler. A female blue orchard bee is a multitasking master. She fashions exquisite nests out of mud and pollen that resemble pieces of jewelry. And in the process, she helps us grow nuts and fruits.
There are strange little towers on the forest floor. Neat, right? Nope. Inside hides a spider that's cunning, patient and ruthless.
With their big heads and beady black eyes, Jerusalem crickets aren't winning any beauty contests. But that doesn't stop them from finding mates. They use their bulbous bellies to serenade each other with some furious drumming.
Honey bees make honey from nectar to fuel their flight – and our sweet tooth. But they also need pollen for protein. So they trap, brush and pack it into baskets on their legs to make a special food called bee bread.
Yep, you probably have Demodex mites living on your face. These tiny arachnids feast on sebum, the greasy oil in your pores. But should you be worried about your eight-legged guests?
Straight out of science fiction, the fearsome wormlion ambushes prey at the bottom of a tidy - and terrifying - sand pit, then flicks their carcasses out. These meals fuel its transformation into something unexpected.
At night, these parasites crawl onto your bed, bite you and suck your blood. Then they find a nearby hideout where they leave disgusting telltale signs. But these pests have an Achilles’ heel that stops them cold.
Peregrine falcons catch other birds mid-flight by diving at more than 200 mph. To do it, they need some high-precision gear: special eyesight, talons and aerodynamics that can't be beat.
Alfalfa leafcutting bees are way better at pollinating alfalfa flowers than honeybees. They don’t mind getting thwacked in the face by the spring-loaded blooms. And that's good, because hungry cows depend on their hard work to make milk.
Kidnapper ants raid other ant species' colonies, abduct their young and take them back to their nest. When the enslaved babies grow up, the kidnappers trick them into serving their captors – hunting, cleaning the nest, even chewing up their food for them.
Giant Malaysian leaf insects stay still – very still – on their host plants to avoid hungry predators. But as they grow up, they can't get lazy with their camouflage. They change – and even dance – to blend in with the ever-shifting foliage.
Something is growing inside that fruit fly in your kitchen. At dusk, the fly points its wings straight up and dies in a gruesome pose so that a fungus can ooze out and fire hundreds of reproductive spores.
Every fall, male tarantulas leave home for good with one thing on their minds: sex. But before these spiders can make the ultimate connection, they have to survive the perils of the open road...which include their potential mates.
To protect herself and her eggs, female webspinners shoot super-fine silk from their front feet. They weave the strands to build a shelter that serves as a tent, umbrella and invisibility cloak. But shooting silk from her feet requires her to moonwalk to get around.
Original Title: Crickets Use Their Wings To Sing Male crickets have a different song for every occasion: to advertise their fitness, woo a mate or keep their rivals away. So how do they make all those different chirps? One word: stridulation.
Mammalian moms, you're not alone! A female tsetse fly pushes out a single squiggly larva almost as big as herself, which she nourished with her own milk.
Kangaroo rats use their exceptional hearing and powerful hind legs to jump clear of rattlesnakes — or even deliver a stunning kick in the face.
Before they can bite your cat or dog, these little "itch hikers" make an amazing leap 100 times faster than the blink of an eye. So how do they do it?
Indian walking sticks are more than just twig impersonators. They even clone themselves into a surprising variety of colors to stay hidden in plain sight from predators.
The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can transmit dengue fever and Zika, makes a meal of us around our homes. And her eggs are hardy. They can dry out, but remain alive for months, waiting for a little water so they can hatch into squiggly larvae.
The California floater mussel does a surprising amount of travel - for a bivalve. First it gets ejected from its parent's shell into the wide watery wilderness. Then it leads a nomad's life clamped on the fins or gills of a fish. Once it's all grown up, the mussel goes to work filtering the water, keeping it clean for all the life that depends on it.
The new coronavirus packs a devastating punch. It penetrates deep into your lungs, causing our immune cells to go haywire and damage tiny air sacs – the alveoli – where oxygen normally flows into our blood.
Sharpshooter insects are beautiful, but they transmit a devastating disease that kills grapevines. When it's time to mate, they shake their abdomens to make strange calls that – when amplified in a lab – sound like a clucking chicken, a howling monkey or a motorcycle revving up. Now scientists have found a way to use their songs against them.
Ever wanted to be invisible? The elusive glasswing butterfly knows just how to do it. Its transparent wings, covered in an anti-glare nano-coating, help it hide from its predators in the rainforest.
Ensatinas are a sprawling group of colorful salamanders, each one with different strategies for avoiding predators, from bold warning colors to confusing camouflage. Their diverse family tree offers us a rare snapshot of millions of years of evolution – how one species becomes many.
Cape sundews are carnivorous plants that grow in bogs, where they don't have access to many nutrients. So they exude sweet, shimmering droplets from their tentacles to lure in unsuspecting insects. Once their prey is hopelessly stuck, they wrap it up and dissolve it for a tasty meal.
Ducks and geese spend *a lot* of time preening their all-weather feathers. This obsessive grooming – and a little styling wax from a hidden spot on their back side – maintains the microscopic feather structure that keeps them warm and dry in frigid waters.
Not every yellow bloom ― or fluffy white globe ― taking over your backyard is a dandelion. Some of them are close relatives called catsears. But both of them have a little secret. To tell them apart and discover why they’re so successful you need to peek under their petals.
Orb weaver spiders build exquisite spiral webs not only to catch insects, but to extend their senses. Once they shrink-wrap their prey with silk, the nearly blind spiders can store them for later, and read their web's strands as a kind of memory map to guide them back.
High up in their 300-foot tower penthouse, falcon stars Annie and Grinnell's romance quickly gets real, as they face the tough demands of raising a family. They furiously guard their eggs from invaders, then stuff their screaming newborn chicks with meat. Will these kids ever leave the nest?
OG Title: Starfish Gallop With Hundreds of Tubular Feet They may look cute and colorful, but starfish are actually voracious predators. To sniff out and capture their prey, they rely on hundreds of water-propelled tube feet, each with a fiercely independent streak.
Eelgrass sea hares may look like lazy, zebra-striped spoonfuls of jello, but these sea slugs are actually environmental heroes. Their voracious appetite for algae helps keep underwater meadow ecosystems in balance–which is great news for sea otters.
A fly has a pair of tiny, dumbbell-shaped limbs called halteres that were once a second pair of wings. They wield them to make razor-sharp turns and land out of reach on your ceiling. But don't despair – there *is* a trick to smacking these infuriating insects.
California oak moth caterpillars eat all the leaves on an oak, leaving a brown skeleton. Then they rappel down on a strand of silk, twirling and swinging. If you were enjoying the shade, good luck getting out of their way. For the oak, the caterpillars are a bigger deal –– will the tree survive?
As the sun sets, hordes of tiny crustaceans called beach hoppers –– also known as sand hoppers –– emerge from underground burrows to frolic and feast. They eat so much decaying seaweed and other beach wrack that by morning all that’s left are ghostly outlines in the sand.
What *is* that bizarre fishlike thing squirming in your sink at night? Firebrats and silverfish are pretty darn similar to some of the earliest insects on Earth. With three long filaments poking out their back, no wings and mini-me babies, they have something to teach us about survival.
Female aphids are the matriarchs of a successful family operation— taking over your garden. But don’t lose hope; these pests have some serious predators and creepy parasites looking to take them down.
To find its place in the shade! Each hollowed-out seed is home to a head-banging moth larva, just trying to survive the harsh Sonoran Desert sun.
This fly’s larvae tunnel inside bitter-tasting greens like arugula and kale, leaving squiggly marks behind. The plants fight back with toxic chemicals. So before laying her eggs, the fly mom digs into a leaf and slurps its sap – a taste test to find the least toxic spot for her offspring.
Could this tiny creature, named after a mythical multiheaded monster, hold the secret to eternal youth? Related to jellyfish and anemones, the hydra has an almost otherworldly ability to heal itself and stave off aging.
Look past their grasping claws and lightning-fast stingers, and you'll see scorpions have a delicate pair of comb-like organs on their belly called pectines. These sensory body parts help them navigate, and figure out who's a menace, a meal or a mate.
The devilish caterpillars of the pipevine swallowtail butterfly *devour* the California pipevine, never mind that the plant is trying to poison them. Their butterfly moms don’t pollinate the pipevine in return, though. So, the vine traps unlucky gnats in its labyrinthine flowers to do the job.
Hermit crabs are *obsessed* with snail shells. These crafty little crabs, found in California's rocky intertidal zone, are more than happy to let the snails build them a perfect home. When the crabs find a snail shell they like, they hop right into their new abode.
Native to the lakes of Mexico City, the axolotl stays in the water its whole life, swimming with a tail fin and breathing through frilly external gills. It’s nearly extinct in the wild, but survives in research labs the world over, studied for its amazing regenerative abilities. With our help, can these beloved creatures thrive once again in their ancestral home?
It might seem peculiar to see bees at the beach. But the bumblebee-mimic digger bee (Anthophora bomboides stanfordiana) makes its home at beaches in Northern California and Oregon. Once they’ve mated, the females spend the spring digging their nests into sandy cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Horseshoe crabs may look scary, but when it's springtime in Delaware Bay, millions of these arthropods show they're lovers, not fighters. They lay masses of blue-green eggs up on the shore. At just the right time, they pop and release the larvae within the sea.
Most damselflies prefer sunny spots, but the quirky San Francisco forktail damselfly digs the fogginess of its hometown. When they hook up, they do it in style – linking their delicate bodies in a heart shape, then flying tandem for an hour or more after.
Under the bright yellow petals of a tarweed plant, an insect known as the assassin bug kills its caterpillar victim by stabbing it over and over. But does this perpetrator have an accomplice? Sticky droplets all over the plant could be a clue.
Tadpole shrimp are neither tadpoles nor shrimp. They're time-traveling crustaceans called triops. Their eggs can spend years – even decades – frozen in time, waiting to hatch. When California rice growers flood their fields, they create the perfect conditions for hordes of these ravenous creatures to awaken.
On first impression, skeleton shrimp anatomy is confusing. These crustaceans use a funky assortment of body parts to move around like inchworms, feed on bits of sea garbage, stage boxing matches, and make lots of clingy babies.
A kissing bug gorges on your blood. Then it poops on you. And that poop might contain the parasite that causes Chagas disease, which can be deadly. Without knowing it, millions of people have gotten the parasite in Latin America, where these insects live in many rural homes. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the saliva of some kissing bugs in the U.S. can give you a dangerous allergic reaction.
They might look like harmless grasshoppers, but locusts have an appetite for destruction. When the conditions are right, they transform from mild-mannered loners into gregarious partiers. They swarm, causing chaos and suffering at the level of a biblical plague. So what sets them off?
Promecognathus crassus beetles are even able to withstand cyanide levels that would knock down beetles 10 times their size in lab tests.
Kids are back in school, so these parasites might come with them...
When male tarantulas reach maturity, right before they set out on their quest, they develop a special set of clasps on their front legs called “tibial hooks.” Tibial hooks serve a single purpose: to fasten underneath the female’s fangs during courtship, allowing him to keep danger at arm’s length, so to speak.
The Australian walking stick is a master of deception, but a twig is just one of its many disguises. Before it’s even born, it mimics a seed. In its youth it looks and acts like an ant. Only when it has grown up does it settle into its final, leafy form. Along the way, it fools predators at every turn.
After the first big rain, western subterranean termites swarm by the thousands. Hungry ants, spiders and birds pick them off as they emerge from the soil. The survivors fly off to find mates, and quickly drop their delicate wings to start new underground colonies. If you’re really unlucky, they’ll build tubes of mud and saliva from their nest to yours.
The cage fungus looks and smells like decaying meat — on purpose. Its goopy lattice gives off a rotten odor that attracts flies, which help spread its spores far and wide. It's like a bee to a flower, but way more macabre and putrid.
The vinegaroon – also known as a whip scorpion – looks like a Frankenstein creation of monster body parts. But unlike true scorpions, it doesn’t use venom to defend itself from predators. Instead, it aims its tail at their face and sprays a blast of acid that reeks of – you guessed it – vinegar. Only this weaponized vinegar is 16 times stronger than what’s in your salad.
Deep in their underground nests, honeypot ants stuff members of their own colony until they look like golden water balloons. Drop by drop, worker ants deliver nectar and other liquid food into their largest sisters’ mouths. When food is scarce in the desert, the colony will feed from these living storage tanks, known as repletes.
Acorn barnacles might look like jagged little rocks at low tide, but they have a surprisingly wild sex life. These crusty little animals — related to crabs and shrimp — have the longest penis of any animal relative to their body size. It's up to eight times the length of the barnacle itself!
Those precious silk garments in your closet were made by the caterpillar of a fuzzy white moth – thousands of them. Silkworms spin a cocoon with a single strand of silk up to ten city blocks long. Humans have bred these insects into weaving machines that can no longer survive in the wild.
The spotted wing drosophila may look like a common fruit fly, but it’s so much worse. Just as strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and blackberries are ripening in the field, this fly saws into them and lays her eggs inside. The growing maggots turn the fruit into a mushy mess. Could a wasp and its own hungry maggots save the day?
Giant water bugs — aka "toe-biters" — pack one of the most painful bites of any insect. But they make the best dads ever. Rather than leaving the survival of his eggs to chance, dad will haul them around piggyback style for weeks, until they hatch right off his back.
Original Title: Carpenter Bees Stab Flowers To Steal Their Nectar With their short tongues, Valley carpenter bees can't easily drink the nectar from tubular flowers. So they use powerful mandibles to slice into the blooms and steal it. It's called nectar robbing, since the plants don't get the benefit of being pollinated by these enormous bees.
Barn owls swoop down on rodents and swallow them whole – gophers, voles and mice, gone in a few gulps. But how do they keep down all that food? Well, they don’t. In a few stomach-turning steps, they transform the varmints into compact balls of fur and bones known as pellets.
They look like little rowboats, cruising belly up below the surface of a pond or gentle stream. But don't be fooled. Backswimmers are voracious predators, and when it's time to find a new home they know how to make a dramatic exit.
As floodwater flows into their nest, red fire ants build a terrifying raft – out of their own interlocking bodies. And they put their babies on the bottom, like floaties. If you wade into this ant raft nightmare, you’ll likely get a vicious bite and sting.
Original Title: This Nasty Parasite Is Ruining Monarch Butterfly Wings Monarchs are locked in a battle with Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE), a parasite that can trap a butterfly in its own chrysalis and deform its beautiful wings. Turns out there is a wrong way, and a right way, for you to help these butterflies in your backyard.
Why is that yellowjacket crashing your BBQ? Well, she wants what you're having: burgers, hot dogs, fish and turkey. But she doesn't eat them herself. Her nest's larvae need that protein to develop. So she carves up your dinner and makes teeny-tiny meatballs for them.
Oblique streaktail hoverflies zip from bloom to bloom wearing a wasp costume to avoid getting eaten. But it’s all for show – they don’t even have stingers! Their fierce maggots, on the other hand, devour hundreds of insect pests. As they gorge, they help keep orange trees safe from disease.
Asian citrus psyllids transmit a disease that can ruin your oranges. Even worse, Argentine ants protect them in exchange for the psyllids' delicate ribbons of sugary poop, called honeydew. So, researchers are helping orange growers fight back with invisible lasers, ghastly wasps and more trickery.
What keeps the boneless, jawless hagfish thriving after more than 300 million years? SLIME. The goop it exudes – a mix of mucus and special protein cells– expands to 10,000 times its original volume in less than half a second, potentially clogging the gills of competitors.
Earthworms know a thing or two about romance. They cozy up with a mate inside tubes of slime, then follow a series of intricate steps to make cocoons full of baby worms.
Mussels create byssal threads, known as the mussel's "beard," to attach themselves both to rocks and to each other. They use their sensitive foot to mold the threads from scratch and apply a waterproof adhesive that makes superglue jealous.
How are frogs and toads so amazing at catching bugs? They smack ’em with a supersoft tongue covered in special spit, which flows into every nook and cranny of their target. Then, in less than a second, that spit transforms into a tacky glue, yanking the meal back into the toad’s maw.
Bird’s nest fungi look just like a tiny bird's nest. But those little eggs have no yolks. Each one is a spore sac waiting for a single raindrop to catapult it on a journey with a layover inside the bowels of an herbivore.
To us, a snake's forked tongue evokes danger and deceit. But the tongue's two sensitive tips, called tines, actually help the snake smell in stereo. That's bad news if you're a mouse ...
Gecko feet aren't covered in suction cups or Velcro. They don’t squirt glue, or leave any footprints. Their secret is a herculean amount of grip -- at the atomic scale. A gecko’s toes are covered in tiny hairs that branch out into millions of microscopic, spatula-shaped pads. Those pads, called spatulae, get so close to the surfaces on which a gecko moves, the electrons of the spatulae and those on the surface start to sync up. That dance is called Van der Waals force, and it’s what gives geckos their sticking power.
Step right up to see tiny springtails spin through the air with the greatest of ease! In ponds and streams, they skyrocket out of the reach of hungry insects like water striders by slapping a tail-like appendage against the water. And you won’t believe how they stick the landing.
Most of the sea snails in this tide pool cruise around searching for food. But not the scaled wormsnail. It cements its shell to a rock and snags its meals using the one thing a snail has plenty of: mucus!
A “bee fly” looks a bit like a bee, but it’s a freeloader that takes advantage of a bindweed turret bee’s hard work. The bees dig underground nests and fill them with pollen they collect in the form of stylish “pollen pants.” As the bees are toiling on their nests, the flies drop their own eggs into them. But the bees employ a tricky defense against the flies.
Covered in a shiny bubble, the alkali fly scuba dives into the harsh waters of California's Mono Lake. Thanks to an abundance of hair and water-repellent wax, this remarkable insect remains dry while embarking on a quest for tasty algae and a place to lay its eggs.
Do cockroaches -- those daring, disgusting disease vectors -- have anything at all to offer us? Scientists think so. They compressed American roaches with a hydraulic press, subjecting them to the force of 900 times their body weight. Don't worry (or do): They survived! How exactly do they do it?
Ladybugs may be the cutest insects around, but they don't start off that way.| Also called lady beetles or ladybirds, they pop out of their eggs as prickly mini-monsters with an insatiable hunger for aphids. Once they've bulked up, they transform, shedding their terrifying looks, but keeping their killer vibes.
Every year, up to half the honeybee colonies in the U.S. die. Varroa mites, the bees’ ghastly parasites, are one of the main culprits. After hitching a ride into a hive, a mite mom hides in a honeycomb cell, where she and her offspring feed on a growing bee. But beekeepers and scientists are helping honeybees fight back.
This fuzzy acorn weevil can’t crack open acorns like a woodpecker or chomp through them like a squirrel. Instead, she uses her incredibly long snout, called a rostrum, to power-drill through an acorn’s tough and resilient shell. And it's not just lunch on her mind – she's also making a nursery for her babies.
When grown-up jellyfish love each other very much, they make huge numbers of teeny-tiny potato-shaped larvae. Those larvae grow into little polyps that cling to rocks and catch prey with their stinging tentacles. But their best trick is when they clone themselves by morphing into a stack of squirming jellyfish pancakes.
Ever wonder how those tiny, jumpy flies got onto your bathroom wall? Well, they came out of your sink drain after growing up down in the pipes. A goofy, long “mustache,” fuzzy wings and some aquabatics help them survive in that soggy environment.
When the moon, sun and ocean temperatures all align, an underwater "snowstorm" occurs. Corals put on a massive spawning spectacle by sending tiny white spheres floating up the water column all at once.
Sharpshooters survive by guzzling a lot of plant sap. But drinking all of that liquid nutrition presents a problem for these tiny insects: How do they move it all out? Easy. They've perfected a super-propulsive urination technique using a special catapult in their butt.
Tiny marine flatworms called acoels hunt for prey in coral reefs. They're referred to as “plant-animals'' because they've got a partnership with photosynthetic algae that live inside of them. But this acoel's real superpower is its ability to regenerate any part of its body!
Look at the underside of a fern leaf. Those rows of orange clusters aren’t tiny insects; they’re spores waiting to be catapulted away. Once a spore lands, it grows into a tiny plant, from which fern sperm swim away, searching for an egg to fertilize. Think of *that* next time you’re hiking in the forest.
The cochineal is a tiny insect deeply rooted in the history of Oaxaca, Mexico. Female cochineals spend most of their lives with their heads buried in juicy cactus pads, eating and growing. After cochineals die, their legacy lives on in the brilliant red hue produced by their hemolymph. Dyes made from cochineal have been used in textiles, paintings, and even in your food!
The honeybee that sweetens your tea isn’t the only kind of bee that makes honey. More than 600 bee species across Mexico, Central and South America, and other tropical regions worldwide, also make the sweet stuff. But they don’t have stingers to defend their precious product. So, how do they keep thieves away? And what does their honey taste like?
Like the beloved butterfly, a house fly goes through an incredible metamorphosis. To make its grand entry into the world, it deploys a specialized, fluid-filled balloon on its head called the ptilinum (till-EYE-num) to break open its pupal casing, freeing itself to buzz around your kitchen.
Six-rayed sea stars make great moms! Unlike most sea stars, mama six-rayed sea stars are VERY involved in their kids' lives, caressing and protecting their babies for months. When they're big enough, the youngsters venture out on their own to ruthlessly hunt down their tiny prey.
In the sticky oil seeps known as the La Brea Tar Pits, the tiny petroleum fly and their larvae thrive in the natural asphalt that oozes up to the surface. The larvae hunt among the fossilized bones of dire wolves, mammoths and saber-toothed cats.
When a hungry bird comes near them, wandering salamanders can jump off the tallest trees in the world, California's coast redwoods, skydiving to a safe branch. Researchers decided to put them in a wind tunnel to investigate their daring moves in slow motion.
Insects called burying beetles haul mouse carcasses down into the dirt and prep them to feed their future offspring. Also known as carrion beetles, they have some stiff competition … and some help from tiny traveling mites.
Chances are you’ve got one of these bloodsuckers lurking nearby. Mosquitoes, ticks, lice, kissing bugs and tsetse flies are all looking to grab a bite ... of you. See exactly how they do it and what you can do to stop them.
To bring all the bees to the yard! These pollinators love warm, bright blooms early in the morning. But how did these plants end up facing east? It turns out they spend their whole life getting in just the right position.
You know honeybees make honey, but did you know they make bread too? And four other types of bees are also dedicated chefs! Alfalfa leafcutting bees take a punch from a flower for your ice cream. Blue orchard bees bring you almonds and sweet cherries. Plus, stingless bees protect their tasty honey in creative ways. And bindweed bees’ way of gathering pollen deserves a fashion award.
Green lacewings have babies that are prized as pest control. But before they can mate, they have to vibrate their bodies and sing to each other, making noises like purring cats or growling stomachs.
A baby hairworm hitches a ride inside a cricket, feasting on its fat until the coiled-up parasite is ready to burst out. Then it hijacks the cricket's mind and compels it to head to water for a gruesome little swim.
Have you seen any ladybugs in your area? In these huge wintertime gatherings, they'll do more than hibernate - it's their best chance to find a mate.
Here's how the director of photography for this episode, Kevin Collins, created the shot of earthworm cocoons that's featured at the end of our new Deep Look episode. He picked individual cocoons from the dirt in his worm farm, washed them and arranged them with the most mature ones in the center of a dish and the least mature around them. Then he waited for earthworms to emerge from the most mature ones.
Our team recently filmed at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California. This museum is close enough to our producer's home that she preferred pedaling some of our camera gear back to her place, despite some of the logistical challenges of loading it into the child's seat!
For those who are less welcoming of these unexpected guests, you can ditch the wall-to-wall carpets, vacuum and mop often and reduce humidity, because dust mites are not usually found in dry climates. Regardless, it’s practically impossible to rid a home of all of arthropod visitors.
Sharpshooters vibrate their abdominal muscles to call out to potential mates on grapevines.
In this behind the scenes video, watch how Deep Look's Teodros Hailye created this special animation that travels through the nudibranch’s complex digestive tract.
Our DeepLook producer Gabriela Quirós has a new episode about bird's nest fungi!
Our Deep Look producer Josh Cassidy is filming at the Tilden Nature Area Visitor Center in Berkeley, CA with naturalist Trent Pearce.
When the enslaved babies grow up, the kidnappers trick them into serving their captors – hunting, cleaning the nest, even chewing up their food for them.
Named for their transparent wings, glasswing butterflies have evolved a clever disappearing act to avoid their many predators in the rainforests of South and Central America.
Our digital video designer Teodros Hailye doesn't just create animations for our videos. He also makes cool replicas of some of the critters that we feature in our episodes, like this giant Western blacklegged tick we display at events! It's a 100 times larger than an actual tick and measures 12" long, 13" wide and 3" tall. (Fortunately, they don't grow this big in real life.)
Springtails' explosive jumps can propel them as high as the equivalent of a six-story building for humans. Here's our lead producer Josh Cassidy and Gabriela Quirós, the producer of this episode, filming them in action for our NEW episode!
Here's Josh Cassidy, our cinematographer and lead producer, on his quest to film the secret lives of sand dollars. He visited both land and sea to get a good look at them up close and shares some of his production techniques along the way. Amanda Heidt, a former Deep Look summer media fellow and dive master, joined him on his expedition.
Our intern Sean Cummings, a science and environment journalist who just earned his master's degree in Science Communication at the University of California, Santa Cruz in June, took a turn behind the camera and filmed our lead producer and cinematographer Josh Cassidy in Santa Cruz, California. The star of this #DeepLook episode is the scaled wormsnail, which lives its entire life underwater in a tube that it constructed from calcium carbonate.
Most people who pick them up don’t realize that they’ve collected the skeleton of an animal, washed up at the end of a long life. That skeleton -- also known as a test -- is really a tool, a remarkable feat of engineering that allows sand dollars to thrive on the shifting bottom of the sandy seafloor, an environment that most other sea creatures find inhospitable.
If you ever find yourself wanting to film at a tide pool – we hope these tips come in handy!
Producer Mimi Schiffman and lead producer and cinematographer Josh Cassidy hung out with cockroaches all day so you don't have to.
Ominous creatures that lurk deep underground in the desert, like the sandworms in the classic science fiction novel "Dune," aren’t just make-believe. For ants and other prey, wormlions are a terrifying reality.
Vinegaroons' weaponized vinegar is 16 times stronger than what’s in your salad.
Also called eyelash mites, they’re too small to see with the naked eye. They’re mostly transparent, and at about .3 millimeters long, it would take about five face adult mites laid end to end to stretch across the head of a pin.
These avian acrobats are the only birds that can fly sideways, backwards and hover for long stretches of time.
We've got a new Deep Look episode about acorn weevils, and producer Rosa Tuíran describes the behind the scenes action featuring Michael Jones, the UC Cooperative Extension Forest Advisor for Mendocino, Lake and Sonoma Counties, and Deep Look lead producer and cinematographer Josh Cassidy.
While humans started farming about 12,000 years ago, ants have been doing it for 60 million years. Humans have plows and shovels, while leafcutters use their mandibles to cut through leaves with incredible speed, leaving telltale crescent shapes.
Honeybees make honey from nectar to fuel their flight – and our sweet tooth. But they also need pollen for protein. So they trap, brush and pack it into baskets on their legs to make a special food called bee bread.
We really hope you enjoy Deep Look as much as we love making it for you! But did you know that it takes 6-8 weeks to research, write, film, edit, compose and animate each episode? That's why we rely on financial support from our fans. Join our Patreon today to access exclusive show updates, interviews, behind the scenes footage, cool swag and so much more!
We're behind the scenes at the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco, CA. Cinematographer and lead producer Josh Cassidy worked with marine biologist Mike McGill as he filmed moon jellyfish.
The tiny samurai wasp has a particularly nasty method of stopping stink bugs in their tracks.
Unlike honeybees, blue orchard bees don’t sting humans. And instead of building large colonies with thousands of worker bees caring for eggs laid by a queen bee, female blue orchard bees work alone to build their nests and stock them with food.
Ever wonder how @sethgsamuel composes the original music for all of our episodes? Watch this Short as he gives a tour of some of the "instruments" he used for our "Meeting a Wormlion is the Pits" video.
Ever wonder how @sethgsamuel composes the original music for all of our episodes? Watch this Short as he gives a tour of some of the "instruments" he used for our "Meeting a Wormlion is the Pits" video.
We've got a NEW episode about how corals reproduce! Take a look behind the scenes to learn how we filmed our video with the help of the Coral Regeneration Lab at the calacademy.
Producer Mimi Schiffman collaborated with UC Berkeley researcher Liz Clark and Georgia Tech researcher Elio Challita for our episode about sharpshooter pee.
The North American porcupine appears cute, but it has upward of 30,000 menacing quills over most of its body. The slow-moving herbivore delivers them only as a last-resort defense against predators.
For our slime molds episode, "This Pulsating Slime Mold Comes in Peace", our lead producer and cinematographer, Josh Cassidy, filmed Physarum slime molds in the lab of aerospace engineer Juan Carlos del Álamo. He was also kind enough to answer the question about slime molds that came from a student named Jackson who's a big Deep Look fan!
Our digital video designer Teodros Hailye reveals how he created the animated version of the adorable acorn weevil!
Meet Penelope the North American porcupine, the star of our episode, "Porcupines Give You 30,000 Reasons to Back Off".
Watch our NEW episode about fern sex now
Meet Andrew Saintsing, our current Deep Look intern! He's a science journalist and communicator who recently earned a PhD from the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. Learn more with his conversation with producer Mimi Schiffman.
Also called eyelash mites, they’re too small to see with the naked eye. They’re mostly transparent, and at about .3 millimeters long, it would take about five face adult mites laid end to end to stretch across the head of a pin.
Deep Look traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico to film cochineal insects! We collaborated with Ana Lilia Vigueras, a researcher at the University of Guadalajara’s Centro Universitario de Ciencias Biológicas y Agropecuaria.
Did you know some species of aquatic insects have been breathing underwater for millions of years?
Can you bee-lieve how hard they work?
The glow worm colonies of New Zealand's Waitomo Caves imitate stars to confuse flying insects, then trap them in sticky snares and eat them alive.
Did you know that jellyfish don’t have a heart, or blood, or even a brain?
Axolotl questions about these salamanders, you'll get alotl answers from us.
Deep Look producer Gabriela Quirós filmed with the Perez family in Oaxaca, Mexico for her episode about stingless bees. Beekeeper Emilio Perez keeps four different species of stingless bees at his home to sell their honey.
#DeepLook producer Rosa Tuirán and cinematographer Josh Cassidy traveled to Los Angeles, California to the ‪@LaBreaTarPitsandMuseum‬ in Los Angeles, CA to film the petroleum fly. This remarkable insect swims freely amidst the prehistoric fossils. Like the alkali fly in Mono Lake and other members of the shorefly family, it has adapted to an extreme environment and has turned this deadly trap into their home.
Dr. Martin Hall is a Scientific Associate the Natural History Museum in London, and his research about blow flies has been helpful to his work as forensic entomologist.
In our Deep Look episode, "Meet the Bug You Didn't Know You Were Eating", producer Rosa Tuíran featured several members of the Gonzalez family. They're fifth-generation Zapotec weavers working with natural dyes made from cochineal insects at Casa Don Juan, their family-run workshop.
These wasp houses are not homes exactly, but more akin to nurseries. The galls serve as an ideal environment for wasp larvae, whether it is a single offspring, or dozens.
Snakes have nostrils to smell, too — but their tongue is their secret weapon.
“Aquatic bird feathers are really different than those of other birds." --Jack Dumbacher, curator of ornithology and mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
Humans have bred these insects into weaving machines that can no longer survive in the wild.
Ducks and geese spend a lot of time preening their all-weather feathers. This obsessive grooming – and a little styling wax from a hidden spot on their back side – maintains the microscopic feather structure that keeps them warm and dry in frigid waters.
University of California, Davis, doctoral student Tracie Hayes helped our #DeepLook team film burying beetles for our NEW episode!
Once it's all grown up, the baby mussel goes to work filtering the water, keeping it clean for all the life that depends on it.
Why is an assassin bug called an assassin bug? Likely because it impales its insect and arachnid victims with its pointy mouthparts.
Sometimes, the ladybug larva starts on one end of the aphid and eats it alive ...
Our lead producer and cinematographer Josh Cassidy takes you on a behind-the-scenes tour of where he filmed his new Deep Look episode about sunflowers!
Thanks to all of you we’ve got over 2 million subscribers, 500 million views and almost 200 videos about the most amazing and also terrifying, shocking animals, plants and fungi! Many thanks to you, our deep peeps, for watching all these years!
A tiny insect called the Asian citrus psyllid is threatening your oranges, lemons and limes. So to protect the valuable citrus industry, Mark Hoddle and his UC Riverside team are going after the psyllids’ ant bodyguards.
Researcher Christian Brown worked with our Deep Look team on our episode about gliding salamanders.
