The Wild Episode

Come and meet the tortoise that went to the moon! The Russian Tortoise (Testudo or Agrionemys horsfieldii) was the first vertebrate animal to fly around the moon. It spends more time in hibernation/aestivation than just about any other vertebrate. And despite being probably the commonest and widespread tortoise in the world, it's vulnerable to extinction. What could humans possibly be doing to threaten such a common animal with disappearance?    

What is the biggest terrestrial animal native to Antarctica? It's the Antarctic Midge (Belgica antarctica), a wingless fly that at no more than a quarter of an inch in length is by some distance Antarctica's biggest pedestrian. This is life right on the edge of possibility ...

The gelada (Theropithecus gelada) is the only living member of the Theropithecus genus. It's the only grass-eating monkey on Earth. It's probably the most terrestrial primate on Earth. It's an amazing species. But it's also an excuse to ask interesting questions (though not necessarily answer them!). Questions like: what is a species, anyway?

The spider-tailed horned viper (Pseudocerastes urarachnoides) is in many ways an unremarkable snake. But in one very particular way - its tail, and what it does with it - it is utterly extraordinary. Welcome to the weird and whacky world of caudal luring, and the snake that has taken that behaviour to an amazing extreme ...

When the Mariana snailfish (Pseudoliparis swirei) was discovered a couple of years ago it was a big deal, because no fish has ever been brought up from greater depth. How do fish survive, kilometres down in the ocean? Why is this one named after someone called Swire? And what does it all have to do with The Lost World, a space shuttle and a famous film director?

The Crowned Eagle (Stephanoaetus coronatus) is one of the largest birds of prey in Africa. It's probably the most powerful and almost certainly the one that regularly goes after the biggest prey. But is the crowned eagle, as is sometimes suggested, the only living bird to qualify for the description 'man-eater'?

The violet oil beetle (Meloe violaceus) is our way into a discussion of leaky leg joints, toxic oil, aphrodisiacs, the cantharidin world, hitch-hiking, egg-laying on an industrial scale and hypermetamorphosism. There are not many animals that better illustrate just how weird and wonderful Nature can get ...

The biggest snail in the world, Syrinx aruanus, turns out to be a highly specialized and effective predator. And we'll get to it via dolphins, mistaken identity, a unique human culture and the sound of trumpets.

In recognition that Halloween is almost upon us, we pay a visit to Nature's dark side. A beetle, a crustacean and a wasp that do really pretty extraordinary things. But not, let's be honest, things that you could really call 'nice'. Predators and parasites that demonstrate just how surprising. and kind of merciless, the natural world can sometimes be ...

The northern fulmar (Fulmarus glacialis) is one of the commonest seabirds in the North Atlantic, and a true master of the air. It is also, slightly less romantically, a master of vomiting noxious oil. But most importantly for this episode, it is a central character in the story of an extraordinary human community - a key part in explaining how, for centuries, a village of perhaps two hundred people survived in one of Britain's most isolated, bleak locations ...

The Baikal seal is the only purely freshwater seal species in the world, and it lives in precisely one place: Lake Baikal in Siberia. A lake which is itself extraordinary - the deepest in the world - and which is home not only to that unique seal, but to a host of crustaceans, fish and other animals that occur nowhere else on Earth.

The Spectral Bat (Vampyrum spectrum - which is pretty cool as scientific names go) is the biggest bat in the Americas, and the biggest carnivorous bat in the world. A properly high-ranking predator in its environment, out there in the darkness enjoying a diet that makes its insectivorous, piscivorous and frugivorous relatives look like they're hardly even trying ... It deserves, I think, to be better known, so here's my tiny contribution to putting that right ...

Revisiting the subjects of the first three Wild Episodes! Just how common is the huge, ridiculously long-lived Greenland Shark? New research has the beginnings of an answer. The Lord Howe Island Stick Insect can't go home until someone gets rid of the rats. Those rats are still there, but elsewhere there's big, big news in the world of rat eradication from islands ... And finally, it turns out the truth about Scotland's corn crakes is not as cheerful as I suggested in the third episode.

If you're a little fish in a mangrove swamp in South-East Asia, what do you have to do to get the US Navy to name submarines after you? Answer, if you're the Archerfish, is use physics to develop one of Nature's most surprising hunting tools: a ridiculously effective water pistol. Or, to be more accurate, a water machine-gun ...

Welcome to the world of the King of the Sea. The Coelacanth must be amongst the most famous fish in the world, but it's also misunderstood and mysterious. It is neither a living fossil nor a missing link ... but it is a fish that gives birth to live young, that hunts by doing a headstand and that in some ways has more in common with you and me than it does with all the other fish in the oceans ...