The nonprofit founded by Adam McKay — writer and director of the popular climate film “Don’t Look Up” — has released a video lambasting Stanford University’s new climate school for its stance on accepting money from the fossil fuel industry.

In the tongue-in-cheek short film, Yellow Dot Studio videographers, alongside students and staff, call out what they say is a point of hypocrisy — officials with the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability saying it would take funds from oil and gas companies like Chevron or Exxon to pay for research.

The video, which has been viewed more than 200,000 times online, starts with school back in session and a recognition that the new college was founded two summers ago with a promise to come up with ways to combat climate change. But then comes the irony.

“So, we’re calling on the help of all our friends at Big Oil,” the narrator said.

Since its inception in the summer of 2022, the sustainability school — launched with a $1.1 billion gift from John and Ann Doerr, the largest gift in university history — hasn’t been able to shake this kind of criticism.

The school’s then-incoming inaugural dean, Arun Majumdar, told the New York Times that the school would accept funding and work with fossil fuel companies. Later in the year, he clarified that the dollars would not be used for general operations.

“If there are companies that are making measurably meaningful efforts to be part of the solution, I feel it would be prudent to be open to engaging such companies while remaining vigilant that their values align with ours,” Majumdar said in a statement from 2022.

The goal of the new college is to aid in coming up with climate solutions.

Over the past year, Stanford researchers have released studies on everything from water vulnerability to solar power to wildfire prevention.

However, some students and staff think accepting money from fossil fuel companies is a slippery slope that could shape research agendas. And argue that burning fossil fuels directly creates human-caused climate change.

On their website, the Coalition for a True School of Sustainability lists Stanford programs with past or current ‘Big Oil Entanglements.’ The group represents a coalition of Stanford scientists who believe fossil fuel money invested for research undercuts swift climate action.

“The fossil fuel industry for decades has misled the public on the reality of climate change,” said Mallory Harris, a graduate student in biology at the university and a member of the coalition. “When they’re talking about bringing them into this research space, it undermines the quality and integrity of the research that we’re doing.”

The advocates have pressed Stanford to be more transparent in disclosing the origins of their funding and to ensure that every corporate donor has a credible energy transition pathway. They also want to know if these companies are lobbying for or against climate legislation.

The group would like a third-party enforcement board to analyze funding from fossil fuel companies, especially for those who plan to continue expanding extraction.

“If by those criteria they find those companies are not trustworthy partners, then the university should dissociate from partnering with them,” said Thom Hersbach, a researcher at Stanford and member of the coalition.

The university created a working group in late 2022  to assess Stanford’s approach to funding research with money from fossil fuel companies. The committee’s job is to evaluate current funding, review the process of other universities and provide pros and cons of continuing accepting funds or different paths.

“We recognize this is an impassioned topic for members in our community, and the university is approaching this matter with the seriousness and rigor it deserves,” Amy Adams, associate dean of marketing and communications, told KQED in a statement.

“We look forward to the results from the thoughtful process being carried out by the committee,” she said.

Students and staff said they plan to continue to make a fuss over the issue because they want the college to succeed at reducing carbon emissions.

“I’m doing this because this school can do so much good, and I want to ensure it does,” Hersbach said.

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.

TRANSCRIPT

Here’s a go-to recipe for beekeepers. It’s called a “sugar shake.”

Take a half-cup of bees. That’s about 300.

Put them in a jar and cover them with a mesh lid.

Add two tablespoons confectioners’ sugar.

Shake for 30 seconds. We’re going for a nice, even coat.

Empty the sugar onto a tray. And there you have it: frosted varroa mites, aka Varroa destructor. They’re a honeybee’s worst enemy.

The fine-powdered sugar made them lose the grip they had on their hosts.

A minute ago, the mites were on the bees in the hive.

It’s as if you were carrying around a tick the size of a dinner plate.

Every year, up to half the managed honeybee hives in the United States die from hazards like pesticide exposure, lack of flowers to forage on year-round, and varroa mites.

To feed, a varroa mite nestles between the bees’ protective plates.

It digs in with its gnarly mouth, the gnathosoma. The mite sinks it into a crucial organ called the fat body. It’s a layer of tissue that lines the abdomen.

Sort of like the human liver, the fat body helps the bee break down harmful stuff, including pesticides. And it maintains the bee’s immune system. So, when varroa mites attack the fat body, they seriously weaken the bee.

The mites can also transmit a virus that causes a bee to be born with deformed wings, no good for flying.

Let’s go back to the “sugar shake.” Beekeepers use them to monitor the varroa mites in their hives.

As few as three mites per half-cup of bees could kill a hive within the year. That’s because varroa mites are great at sneaking into hives, hiding, and reproducing like mad.

The first mite gets into a hive by hitching a ride on a bee from another colony. Maybe the bee’s own colony wasn’t doing well and it was looking for a new home.

The mite sniffs around for a bee larva and sneaks in right before the bees cover the cell with wax.

The defenseless larva is now trapped with its enemy, which begins to feed.

As the larva grows into a pupa, the mite, called a foundress, starts her family. Take a look underneath this bee pupa.

The mite’s firstborn is always a son. The rest are daughters. They’re hard to tell apart when they’re young.

When the siblings come of age inside the cell, they’ll meet up on this pile of mite poop – maybe they’re guided by the scent. And they’ll mate … with each other.

Sometimes two foundresses make it into a cell. Then their offspring get to mate with someone they’re not related to.

The mites live off the bee pupa, but they don’t kill it.

When the bee is all grown up, it chews its way out of the cell.

The mite slips onto its next victim.

So, why don’t the bees just pick those mites off themselves?

Well, we didn’t start seeing varroa mites in the U.S. until the 1980s. They evolved on eastern honeybees, in Asia. That’s why the western honeybees in the Americas and Europe aren’t yet good at defending against them.

When beekeepers find mites in a sugar shake, they treat a hive with pesticide strips that kill the mites. But mites are becoming resistant.

So, researchers are selectively breeding honeybees to fight back.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and private companies are breeding bees that can sniff out varroa mites. When the bees find some, they uncap the cells and interrupt reproduction. The bees then, um, “recycle” the unlucky pupa. Yep, they’re eating it.

At Purdue and Central State universities, scientists breed honeybees known as “mite-biters.”

After collecting sperm from a male bee, they inseminate a queen.

Both the queen and the male come from colonies that are particularly good at killing mites by chewing off their legs.

It’s a grisly end for these tormentors and – just maybe – a fair shake for the honeybees.

Hey sugar, what’s shakin’? We’ve got more bee stories for you. Bindweed turret bees fill their underground nests with pollen. See those “pollen pants”? But freeloading flies drop their own eggs into the nests … from the air!

Also, PBS Digital Studios wants to know what you enjoy on YouTube and what you want more of. Follow the link in the description to take their annual survey. You even get to vote on new show ideas. Thanks for representing, and please tell them Deep Look sent you.

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.

TRANSCRIPT

The acorn weevil is fuzzy, tenacious and hungry. But what stands out the most is its supersized, skillful snout.

It’s called a rostrum, and it’s perfect for digging into the acorns brimming from these California oak trees.

See the acorn weevil right there? It blends right in.

She uses her sensitive antennae to sniff and taste her way to the perfect acorn.

She goes for the soft green ones. This one is too hard. This one’s too bitter! This one’s just right.

Her antennae don’t stick out right from her head; they would never reach the acorn. Instead they’re down here.

Her razor-sharp mouth sits at the very tip. She makes tiny cuts in the acorn’s surface to break through the hardest part of the nut. Once it’s weakened, she punches through.

The rostrum’s downward curve lets her bite into the acorn directly beneath her. She often digs in under the cap. Maybe it’s easier to grab on there, or softer underneath it.

Then, she bores in. Rotating her head and using her snout as a drill. She chows down as she goes.

When her antennae start to get in the way, no problem. She just tucks half of each one into these side channels called scrobes.

Inside, she creates an arrow-straight tunnel. The naturally arched rostrum straightens as it drills.

It can do this because the rostrum has two layers: a hard and thin outer cover, called the exocuticle, and a flexible and thick inside, the endocuticle.

You might be wondering: Where are the males? They’re here too. You’ll know them by their short rostrum. But that’s OK. They’re only tunneling into acorns for food. A female sports a rostrum as long as her body. Because she isn’t just eating. She’s building a nursery.

The deeper she digs, the safer her babies will be. After she’s done carving, she turns around and extends an egg-laying organ, her ovipositor. But it doesn’t just drop eggs. Its tip can smell and taste to make sure the environment will be suitable for her growing babies. Once she’s convinced, she deposits her eggs one by one.

But she still has more eggs to lay. And she can’t put them all in one basket. She lays her eggs all over the oak to increase the chance they’ll survive, drilling into dozens of acorns. But that’s exhausting. So sometimes, she tries to nab another weevil’s tunnel for her own babies.

This is mom vs. mom! Not this time! Go find your own acorn!

Over the next few weeks, the larva eats and grows. Once the acorns have darkened and matured, they fall to the ground. Using its powerful mandibles, the larva chews its way out of its safe home. That’s a tight squeeze!

Immediately, it burrows into the soil for protection. It will emerge in a coming season, waking up just as the new green acorns grow in the canopy above.

And then, the weevil will travel up the tree in search of its own perfect acorn, one that’s just right for its growing family.

Hey Deep Peeps! We’ve got more weevils for you. South American palm weevils are ready for their close-up, but their arrival could mean the end for California’s iconic palm trees. And PBS Terra has an awesome new insect series called — wait for it — Insectarium! Join invertebrate zoologist Dr. Jessica Ware as she explores insect habitats, meets bug enthusiasts, and visits incredible collections. Tell them Deep Look sent you!

Like its name suggests, the brown dog tick dines on dog blood. But as temperatures rise, they’re more likely to feast on you, too. That’s a problem, because the brown dog tick is a vector for Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a disease that’s deadly to both dogs and humans.

TRANSCRIPT

To pet a dog is to know peace.

But who’s this interloper?

That’s a brown dog tick.

They’re the most widespread tick in the world, and the most adapted to living among us.

Brown dog ticks are thought to have evolved alongside burrowing carnivores like foxes and weasels – and came indoors when we domesticated dogs.

They can be found in and around homes.

And what’s worse, they spread bacteria that can be deadly.

They aren’t the ticks known for carrying Lyme disease. Those are blacklegged ticks.

The brown dog tick has grooves along its back, and they’re a solid, reddish brown. See the difference?

No matter what kind of tick they are, they want one thing: blood.

And to find that blood, they use what’s called the Haller’s organ, one near the tip of each foreleg.

Ticks use them to pick up chemical signals from the air: carbon dioxide, pheromones and humidity.

Scientists believe the Haller’s organ even lets ticks detect the body heat of their prey.

All ticks have them, but they use them differently.

The blacklegged tick “quests” – it stays put, waving its forelegs to sense when it can hop aboard a host.

The brown dog tick hunts, using that Haller’s organ to home in on a potential target.

As its name suggests, a brown dog tick is happy to take all its meals from dogs.

But in the right conditions, the brown dog tick will dine on you, too.

That’s a problem, because they can transmit bacteria that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a terrible disease that can kill both dogs and humans.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever usually occurs in small clusters in the United States and is relatively rare. But outbreaks in northern Mexico have killed hundreds of people.

And rising temperatures due to climate change are sparking some troubling tick behavior.

When it’s particularly hot out, brown dog ticks start craving human blood.

To investigate this, University of California, Davis researchers put a very good dog in a box and a very good human in another, connected by a plastic tube with hungry brown dog ticks inside.

Don’t worry – there’s a screen here and here. The ticks can’t actually get them.

At room temperature, the ticks preferred dogs. But when researchers heated up the tube, to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, brown dog ticks preferred – you guessed it – us.

Scientists are still trying to determine why. In the meantime, researchers are developing vaccines to protect us from the disease.

Tick treatments can keep the pests off of dogs. But they’re expensive.

In the Sonoran Desert, in Southern California, volunteers remove ticks by putting their tweezers right up against a dog’s skin and pulling straight up.

This one is full of dog blood.

And they give the dogs oral medicine for free.

Look at these happy pals!

And then it’s back to the petting frenzy you both deserve.

Hi, it’s Laura. Wanna know more about those blacklegged ticks? Zoom in with us to see just how they dig in with a gnarly mouth covered in hooks.

Also, please don’t forget to subscribe and click that little notification bell. Thanks for watching!

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.

TRANSCRIPT

There’s a reason the ocean is full of jellyfish.

These creatures have mastered the ability to multiply themselves again and again.

Adult moon jellies grow to the size of dinner plates.

A mature jellyfish like this is called a medusa for its resemblance to the ancient Greek monster with snakes for hair.

But instead of snakes, this medusa has stinging tentacles that paralyze its prey.

It’s hard to tell by looking at them but there are male and female moon jellies.

The males release sperm into the water.

And the females collect it to fertilize their eggs.

Those eggs turn into larvae called planulae that mom sends out into the world.

They look like fuzzy little potatoes.

Each planula does its best to settle on something solid — like rock – and develops into this, a polyp the size of a pea.

The polyp clings to the rock with a sticky foot, like a miniature version of its colorful cousin, the sea anemone.

Its stinging tentacles catch prey that float by, like these tiny crustaceans.

With each mouthful it grows.

See that budding out of its side?

It’s a little clone!

After a few days the clone pops off, and settles in right next door.

The polyps make more polyps.

And more …

Until they form a whole neighborhood of clones …

So how do they go from tiny polyp stuck on a rock to giant medusa gliding through the open ocean?

When the water begins to cool at the end of summer, they go through yet another change.

They slow down, stop hunting and develop these ridges along their sides.

Over a few weeks, the ridges get more and more pronounced, until the polyp looks like a stack of pancakes.

Each individual pancake, called an ephyra, is a clone with the potential to grow into an adult.

That’s right, it’s a whole extra round of cloning called strobilation.

It begins with a twitch.

The ephyrae flex and convulse.

They impatiently work to free themselves … from themselves.

The next ones in line can’t wait for their turn either.

So they help push things along.

After all that effort, the ephyra on the very end finally breaks free.

Sometimes jellyfish are so successful that they explode in number, creating a jellyfish bloom.

That’s great for predators like barnacles that snatch them up when they’re young … and for sea turtles that scarf down the grown-ups.

That’s why moon jellies play the odds.

By making babies that clone themselves, and clone themselves again, jellies multiply their chances that some will make it all the way.

Hey, it’s Laura.

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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.

TRANSCRIPT

Ever wonder where those little insects crawling around your bathroom came from? Bad news: your drain.

With all that fluffy hair, it looks like a tiny moth. And some do call it a moth fly. But a fly it is … a drain fly.

It’s called Clogmia – how appropriate.

It grew up over several weeks, out of sight, among things you thought you’d washed away.

Drain flies sneak in from the outside, through a crack in an old pipe, for example, to sip some water they sensed with this long mustache – their maxillary palps.

And here, on the plentiful gunk in your pipes, they’ll grow a family.

Welcome, little one! The larva is the length of an eyelash.

That gunk it lives in? Those are bits of you: hair, saliva and food. They make a nice meal for bacteria and fungi, which form this dark, living slime called a biofilm. This is what the larvae feed on. It also keeps them well moisturized.

If the larva ends up submerged, it can still chow down. It sweeps slime particles out of the water with a hairy mouthpart called the labrum and rakes them in with its mandibles.

Underwater, it breathes with a bubble on its backside that it collected at the surface.

This allows it to venture through deep pools in your pipes.

When larvae, or the more grown-up pupae, like this guy here, end up in a toilet bowl, it can be a shock. You might think the squigglers came out of you. Ew! Don’t worry – they can’t live inside us.

And even though the drain flies in your bathroom muck around in bacteria, they don’t really spread it to humans. They’re not interested in landing on us. Or even leaving the bathroom.

They’re in their happy place. When you wash your hands? They protect themselves from the water with their hairy wings. Each hair has ridges that trap air so the drops roll right off.

And if they’re caught off-guard by a sudden surge, the flies skate across.

But they’re not invincible: When they get trapped underwater long enough, they can drown.

If you find you really need to get rid of them, drain cleaner helps, but it won’t keep them away forever. There’ll always be some slime left behind, deep in your pipes, that could attract the flies again. So, if they want it, why not let ‘em have it?

Hi. Laura here. Did you know that flies have a secret set of limbs beneath their wings? No? It’s one reason they’re so hard to swat. Watch that episode next! See you there.

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.

TRANSCRIPT

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Once a year, something astounding happens at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. It lasts barely half an hour.

If you jumped into the water at this very moment, it’d be like swimming through a snow globe, hundreds of kilometers across.

But these “snowflakes” are actually packets of eggs and sperm of coral. Corals might look like colorful rocks or undersea gardens, but they’re actually animals. A coral is a colony of hundreds of thousands of tiny individual animals called polyps.

Each of these flower-shaped polyps has a mouth and tentacles. Polyps secrete calcium carbonate that creates their skeleton. It gives them structure and anchors them to a rock or the seafloor.

Since they can’t move to find a partner and mix up the gene pool, most warm-water corals practice “broadcast spawning.”

But with such a short window to meet up, they have to sync it just right. The warming summer waters cue the right month. The light from a waning moon cues the right day, and the setting sun cues the exact minute. Good luck out there!

These bundles contain the coral’s gametes — its sperm and eggs. But the gametes don’t mix in there. The bundles float to the surface and burst open.

Sperm search out a new egg. Only one of these guys will get in. Look familiar?

Once fertilized, it starts dividing and transforms into this adventurous larva called a planula. The planula swims through the sea, searching for a place to settle down.

Chemical and light sensors on its backside guide the planula to the perfect spot. It wants what we want: a stable foundation, plenty of sunlight, and room to grow. The planula cements itself into place and morphs into a polyp.

As it grows, it absorbs algae called zooxanthellae from the surrounding water. See these green dots? They live inside the polyps.

The algae give the coral nutrition and its brilliant colors. Then something curious happens: The polyp clones itself. It grows copies right out of its side, that then bud their own clones. Through broadcast spawning and cloning, corals create the massive reefs we’re familiar with.

But reefs are in danger, and that’s not just a problem for the corals.They’re vital ecosystems that provide food and shelter for a quarter of marine life, like fish, crustaceans and sea turtles. Climate change is the main culprit.

When ocean waters warm up too much, stressed polyps expel their colorful and nutritious algae. This is coral bleaching.

When reefs die and spawning season comes, it’s harder and harder for the eggs and sperm to find each other.

So, researchers at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco have replicated the delicate spawning conditions in a lab.

Lights mimic moon cycles, and heaters simulate the change of seasons. Their goal is to discover the best ways to grow corals, so more scientists can help restore them to the oceans.

An underwater blizzard is a thing of beauty, even more so when you consider how this snowstorm can replenish a delicate and threatened ecosystem.

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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 you move it all out? They’ve perfected a super-propulsive urination technique using a special catapult in their butt.

TRANSCRIPT

Not a cloud in the sky. So how is it raining under this grapevine?

That’s not rain … that’s pee!

It comes from this insect, a sharpshooter.

And flinging pee rapid-fire like this is crucial to its survival.

The sharpshooter gets all its nutrition from the thin, watery liquid inside a plant, called xylem sap, which it sucks out with this tube-shaped stylet.

Both the brilliant blue adults and their translucent nymphs feed on the sap in grapevines and other plants.

The sap has so little nutrition that sharpshooters need to guzzle nonstop.

They consume more than 300 times their body weight a day.

That’d be like you downing over 80 bathtubs of cucumber water.

Yummmmmm.

The sharpshooter uses massive muscles in its head to suck out the liquid.

Taking all that liquid in presents a problem – how to move it out.

When you’re this small, gravity won’t just roll this effluent away.

Instead, surface tension makes the drops stick to the sharpshooter.

Gah!

And if it can’t remove those drops, the sharpshooter could get sick … or rot.

So, best to send that pee flying away as fast as possible.

And the sharpshooter has evolved the perfect tool for the job: an anal stylus – or butt flicker, if you will.

As the pee flows out of the sharpshooter, it accumulates. When enough of it collects, kapow! The flicker catapults the drop away with tremendous power.

They even do it while doing it.

Here’s something incredible: Each drop of pee actually travels faster than the speed at which the butt flicker launched it.

It’s called superpropulsion.

Scientists at Georgia Tech filmed sharpshooters peeing in slo-mo.

The researchers noticed that after the sharpshooter forms a pee droplet, it gets compressed.

Like what happens to a water balloon that hits the ground and flattens.

A force builds in that compression, which then springs the balloon back into shape and away from the surface.

The same goes for the drop of pee!

It picks up speed as it returns to its orb shape.

So, why would researchers want to study insect urination?

Learning how sharpshooters eject liquid could help our own tiny devices do the same and be more reliable. Things like hearing aids or phones.

Everyone has something they’re good at, right?

The sharpshooter, it’s a whiz at whizzing.

Hey Deep Look! It’s Laura. Check out our recent weevil episode, these furry insects with stupendous snoots.

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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 their body!

TRANSCRIPT

Those aren’t cornflakes.

This rock is absolutely covered with tiny marine flatworms, called acoels.

They’re not just an animal.

They’re also kind of a plant.

And they’re practically immortal.

They use simple eyes called ocelli to seek out the sunniest spots on tropical coral reefs.

Where they spread themselves out like beach blankets.

But they don’t just lay around sunbathing all day.

Acoels are also skilled hunters.

They catch prey by engulfing them with their body and jamming them into their mouth.

You can see their meal trying in vain to escape.

Also, they don’t have a butt.

Their poop just goes right back out through their mouth.

So you wouldn’t want to kiss one.

They aren’t just hunters.

These acoels are gardeners, too.

See those green dots?

Those are algae.

And those reddish cells belong to the acoel itself.

When the sun hits our flatworm friend, the algae inside produce sugars through photosynthesis.

Researchers think they share those sugars with their host.

In return, the acoel provides its, um, waste, which is kind of like fertilizer for the algae.

And the acoel protects its house guests.

Researchers think the acoels pack toxic chemicals in those reddish cells.

So predators tend to leave them alone.

Without its algae, the acoel would eventually die, even if it had plenty of prey to eat.

Scientists call a creature like this a holobiont, a single being made up of two or more completely different species.

In this case, a solar-powered predator.

But that’s not even the weirdest thing about them.

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of San Francisco are studying acoels, because of how they regenerate.

And to do that …

It’ll be OK, I promise.

You’d think getting cut in half would be a bad thing, but within minutes, the wounded front half seals up.

In a couple days, it’ll have a whole new tail.

And the back side?

It doesn’t just make a new head.

It makes two!

But it’s hard to share one body with two heads.

So each half eventually pulls away from the other.

Where there was once one acoel, now there are three!

What seemed like a moment of doom was actually one of rebirth.

But they don’t need the researcher’s scalpel; acoels can drop their tail and clone themselves on their own.

The acoel and their algae can multiply themselves like this over and over indefinitely, making them functionally immortal.

Acoels can do this because they’re packed with stem cells which morph into any body part the acoel needs to regrow.

And since they can’t hunt until they grow new heads, they’re extra reliant on the energy they get from their algae.

In these desperate times, the acoels even eat some of their algae.

Sorry!

Every relationship has its challenges.

But the acoel and its algae have a deal:

By taking advantage of each one’s abilities, they’re greater than the sum of their parts.

Hi. It’s Laura.

Guess who else could be considered a holobiont?

You!

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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.

TRANSCRIPT

The undersides of ferns have many looks.

But all these intricate structures do the same thing. They hold – and then launch – the fern’s spores.

Spores are the main way ferns make more ferns, but they’re not the eggs or sperm. Those come later.

Since before the dinosaurs roamed … and plants grew sex organs called flowers … ferns have been “doing it” through flying spores and swimming sperm.

When the spores mature, a fern leaf comes alive.

Look how things are moving under there.

Each of these clusters is called a sorus. And every worm-like thingy is a sporangium full of spores.

The sporangium has an outer ring filled with water. When it’s warm outside, that water starts to evaporate. The ring shrinks, making the sporangium crack open. The ring bends farther and farther back. The sporangium jerks forward … and catapults the spores out.

A single fern launches millions of spores.

Each one grows into a gametophyte. But these pea-sized plants aren’t baby ferns. Where their fern parent was asexual, the gametophytes make eggs and sperm in specialized organs.

Yep, fern sperm. It’s a thing. Look at these little curlicues.

When the rains come, sperm swim away from the gametophyte that made them – a tiny puddle will do. They follow a trail of pheromones to find eggs stored in nearby gametophytes.

When sperm meets egg, ta-da! A fern sprouts right out of its gametophyte mother, which it feeds on. Now, this is a baby fern. Finally. Awww.

Ferns don’t need to wait around for some insect to help them with pollination.

They can go it alone, as long as there’s water.

So, next time you go on a walk through a damp forest, think of the ferns getting busy all around you.

Happy Earth Month, everybody! Ferns aren’t the only ones that go it alone. Jellyfish can go through a “stack-of-pancakes” phase to clone themselves. You gotta see it to believe it.

All this month PBS is dropping new videos celebrating our amazing planet, like this episode of “Reactions,” which takes a deep look at geoengineering one of the deepest places on Earth: the ocean. Links to that video and the full Earth Month playlist in the description.

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!

TRANSCRIPT

You’ve seen this brilliant red before. In textiles, world-renowned paintings, even in the red coats once worn by the British army. In fact, you’ve probably even tasted this color. And it all comes from an insect deeply rooted in the history of Oaxaca, Mexico: cochineal.

Instead of blood, most insects and arachnids have hemolymph, which is clear. But the cochineal’s hemolymph is a rich crimson.

Despite the vibrant color they produce, their life isn’t exactly adventurous. They begin as a pinhead-sized nymph, also called a crawler, for obvious reasons.

It wanders around juicy cactus pads looking for a place to dig in. The nymph starts bright red, but within hours of hatching, it’s coated in fluffy white wax.

Filaments of wax ooze out of these pores and grow longer than the nymph’s own body. This coating prevents the insects from drying out in the hot sun.

When a female finds the perfect place to dine, she uses her mouth to hook in and hold on. She’ll stay here for the rest of her life, eating, ballooning in size and making even more wax.

Males, when they’re a few weeks old, encase themselves in cocoons. When they emerge, butt first, they’ve grown wings.

These can help them glide to other nearby cactus pads in search of a mate. But usually a female is just steps away. They get busy.

A few weeks after mating, female cochineals lay their eggs. Within minutes, bright red nymphs hatch, often before the eggs have even dropped!

So what’s responsible for the cochineal’s deep, dark red? Carminic acid, a bitter substance that deters nearly all predators. But not this hungry beetle larva. It gulps down so many cochineals it turns red itself.

No hiding what you had for lunch!

Carminic acid is most concentrated in female cochineals, which live three to four months. To harvest female cochineals, people gently brush them off cacti and dry them in the sun. Indigenous people in Mexico cultivated cochineal long before Spain made it a global commodity. In the 1700s, the insect was as valuable as silver. Not only was its pigment beautiful, it was also fade-resistant.

In Teotitlán del Valle, a Zapotec town outside Oaxaca city, weaver Marina González grinds dried cochineal on a metate. She dissolves the powder into large tubs of boiling water to dye wool. Next, her son Juan Carlos removes the wool, cleans it and dries it. Juan Carlos’ brother Alejandro uses a loom to transform the colored wool into stunning designs. It takes about 5,000 dried cochineals to dye this medium-sized tapestry.

Cochineal shows up in other places too, like your food. Manufacturers often use it as an alternative to artificial dyes. But it may cause allergies, and it is definitely not vegetarian.

The cochineal’s lasting, vibrant color may be the closest the natural world has come to making a perfect red. This insect may only live a few months. But its legacy will live on for generations.

Hey, it’s Laura! In food, cochineal is labeled “carmine,” “cochineal extract,” “E120” or “natural red 4.”
And speaking of red, let’s talk ladybugs! They fly huge distances to gather by the thousands – in a big ole cuddle puddle. Enjoy!

The honeybee that sweetened your tea isn’t the only kind of bee that makes the sweet stuff. More than 600 bee species across Mexico, Central and South America and tropical regions worldwide do too. 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?

TRANSCRIPT

At the break of dawn, in Oaxaca, Mexico, bees are tearing down the barrier they built last night to cover their nest entrance.

Another successful night protecting their honey and babies from thieving ants.

They make this lattice out of a blend of wax and a potent ant repellent. More on that later.

They’re not eating the waxy material – they’re stashing it to reuse tonight.

Just like the honeybees that sweeten your tea, these honeymakers live in a colony.

But they’re smaller and don’t have stingers to protect the sweet stuff.

That’s why they’re known as stingless bees.

There are more than 600 species of them in the tropics around the world, mostly in the Americas. And they’ve been around twice as long as honeybees.

No bee stingers? No bee suits needed!

Emilio Pérez is a stingless beekeeper in the highlands of Oaxaca, land inhabited by the Chinantec people.

This is Melipona beecheii, one of the four bee species he keeps. He only raises native bees. Scientists say moving species around can spread diseases that harm them.

So, how do these teensy bees without stingers protect their honey?

By annoying you. Some tangle in your hair … or eyebrow … and give you a bite.

It only feels like a pinprick. But they could summon a whole swarm of their sisters by releasing pheromones.

In any case, for these bees, the best offense is a good defense.

Guard bees stand watch at the nest entrance. Melipona beecheii has just one imposing guard, stationed on this ledge shaped like a flower.

Other species employ as many as 15 guards. They cover the perimeter of trumpet-shaped entrances.

If an outsider tries to come in – like this bee from another colony – the guards sniff it out and kill it.

These peculiar structures also make great runways, as bees go off to work in the flowers.

They’re not picky. They collect nectar and pollen from dozens of plants, which they pollinate in the process.

Stingless bees also collect resin.

It’s the sticky stuff that plants like this cedar make to keep out burrowing insects.

See how she stows the drops on her back legs?

Different plants have different hues of resin: yellow, white, red.

They mix the resin with wax to make a pliable building material called cerumen. Your average honeybee just uses wax.

Stingless bees shape cerumen into little capsules for their offspring, and stack them like a tiered cake.

They also use the material to make their honey pots … these orbs. Yum!

It’s a freewheeling architectural style, compared to honeybees’ hexagonal cells.

Now, remember this protective barrier? It’s made of cerumen. The resin mixed in with the wax is what keeps the ants away. They hate the resin’s smell and stickiness.

Once a year, Emilio and his daughter Salustia collect honey from their nests.

Stingless bee colonies are smaller and usually make less honey than honeybees.

Each of their Melipona beecheii colonies makes about 9 pounds a year, just one seventh of what a honeybee hive produces.

Salustia: We’re having a honey tasting.

The Deep Look team got to sample it.

Gabriela: A strong fermented flavor.

Josh: It tastes like SweeTarts.

Stingless bee honey is sold as a health product to treat things like sore throats.

All honeys contain hydrogen peroxide, which is antimicrobial.

Stingless bees visit a variety of plants, many in the rainforest. So, scientists are studying their honey and resins for chemicals that might have medicinal properties.

As the sun goes down, bees head in for the night and cover their nest entrance once again.

No effort is too great to protect the riches everyone is after.

Hi, I’m Deep Look producer Gabriela Quirós. Thank you to our Patreon supporters, who funded our trip to Mexico to film this episode and our video about cochineal, the brilliant red insects you might be eating. Go watch, and join our Patreon today. Links in the description.

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.

TRANSCRIPT

This little starfish has a secret.

She’s hiding something precious beneath her …

Her babies.

These chubby globes are her embryos, and these are her larvae that have already hatched.

Right now, they look nothing like her, but over the next couple of months, they’ll take after her in more ways than one.

She’s called a six-rayed sea star.

That’s one arm more than most sea stars.

And she’s way smaller, about the size of a bottle cap.

She lives in Northern California’s intertidal zone — where the land and sea collide.

The crashing waves and hungry predators make it a rough neighborhood to raise kids in.

So she protects them under that baby bump.

Scientists call this brooding, which is an unusual behavior for this type of sea creature.

Most sea stars and their cousins, like sand dollars … and sea urchins … take a sort of free-range approach to raising their kids.

They’re broadcast spawners.

Adults release enormous numbers of eggs … and sperm … right into the water.

They meet and develop into young.

They grow up all on their own.

Only the luckiest make it to adulthood.

Six-rayed sea star moms take the opposite approach.

They have fewer babies and are extremely involved in their kids’ lives.

She carefully cleans and caresses her growing brood with her delicate feet.

Tending to these cuties means their mom doesn’t eat for three whole months.

Because she cares so much … and because the babies are literally right in front of her mouth.

The growing kids hold onto her and their siblings with these three stubby, temporary limbs, called brachiolar arms.

As the larvae develop they don’t eat either.

They don’t even have a mouth!

Instead, they survive off of stored energy already inside them.

After about a month, six brand new arms start to pop out.

And, they grow their very first tube feet.

Awww.

They reabsorb those brachiolar arms.

And finally begin to resemble mini-versions of their mom.

When they’re big enough, the precious snowflakes venture out on their own.

You can’t stay with mom forever.

With their long, gangly tube feet, the baby sea stars are like puppies that haven’t grown into their oversized paws yet.

It’s time to track down their first meal.

Adult sea stars eat shellfish like barnacles and snails.

Baby sea stars go after the baby versions.

It’s a baby-eat-baby world out here!

The tiny sea star wraps its arms around its prey …

… and extends its stomach into the snail’s shell, digesting it alive.

Some may say they’re coddled, but all that extra attention during those crucial early months gives these little six-rayed sea stars a better chance of making it big.

Hey!

Deep Look could use some coddling too.

Join us on Patreon so we can keep making tiny ocean stories for you.

Like how sea urchins have a tumultuous youth.

Or how sand dollars munch on metal to keep from getting swept away.

Enjoy!

Within the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles, not far from West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, paleontologists are hard at work sorting through one of the richest collections of ice age fossils in the world.

Today, the La Brea Tar Pits, a public park and museum, lie between shopping centers and apartment buildings. But the sticky, black asphalt that fills the pits was oozing up from the ground long before people turned this land into a bustling city.

Across millenia, the tar pits captured over ten thousand mammals, creating a remarkably detailed record of the area’s natural history. But not every creature present in the asphalt is stuck in the past.

Any tourist who goes to watch scientists dig up the bones of saber-toothed cats and dire wolves should also keep an eye out for the plucky survivor whose ancestors likely watched those big mammals die: the petroleum fly.

There’s still a lot of mystery surrounding the petroleum fly, but one thing is clear: It has figured out how to make the most of a bad situation. Pools of asphalt are hell for most animals, but petroleum flies have turned them into a bountiful habitat.

“That’s their personal paradise,” says entomologist Martin Hauser, with the California Department of Food and Agriculture. “They have no competition in there because no one else can deal with it.”

Adult petroleum flies are fairly unassuming. They’re small and flecked like fruit flies. Though scientists don’t know exactly how, they are able to skate – and mate – on the asphalt pools. Their feet don’t get stuck, but if any other body part touches the sticky liquid, they’re out of luck.

The translucent maggots, on the other hand, are truly in their element – they can fully submerge in the dark, viscous liquid.

“This is something that kills everything else,” says Kenneth Nickerson, a microbiologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, who has studied petroleum flies.

Pools of natural asphalt form when petroleum from subterranean reservoirs seeps out of the ground. Most of the small molecules that make petroleum toxic to us quickly evaporate, but the asphalt that’s left behind is incredibly sticky.

Few animals that wade into a pool of asphalt manage to extricate themselves from it. In fact, the thick liquid keeps holding on even after an animal has succumbed to exhaustion or exposure, and its body has wasted away to bones. That’s why asphalt deposits around the world are particularly interesting to paleontologists.

“It just so happens that this extremophile organism lives in the medium that I dig fossils out of,” says Sean Campbell, a paleontologist with the Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County, which include the La Brea Tar Pits.

Scientists have also found petroleum flies in oil fields in Santa Paula and Ojai, south of Santa Barbara, as well as in seeps in Cuba and Trinidad, in the Caribbean.

By studying the flies in the La Brea Tar Pits, researchers are beginning to understand how their maggots are able to survive in this environment.

“They have multiple tricks,” says Hauser.

When Hauser examined petroleum fly maggots under a microscope, he noticed they’re a little more prickly than other fly larvae. He believes their rough skin keeps the asphalt away from their bodies.

Surprisingly, the maggots actually need a bit of asphalt on their backside to survive.

“They would dry out if they can’t get in contact with oil,” says Hauser.

As it turns out, the asphalt is also an essential moisturizer. While most insects are covered in a waxy layer that keeps moisture in, petroleum flies seem to lack this protection – likely because wax dissolves in asphalt.

As they swim in the asphalt, maggots breathe through snorkel-like tubes on their rear ends, ringed with hairs that keep them afloat.

“When the snorkel breaks the surface, the hairs just fold out,” says Hauser. “It’s a little bit like an umbrella.”

Maggots feed on insects that have been caught in the asphalt. Dragonflies and other insects that spend their lives near ponds often mistake shiny pools of asphalt for water. When they try to skim the surface or land on it, the sticky substance pulls them down, into the maggots’ domain. Without snorkels like the ones petroleum fly larvae breathe through, those other insects quickly drown.

Petroleum fly larvae aren’t picky: They’ll turn any dying insect into a meal. When the maggots sense an insect sinking into their home, they wriggle over to it. Then, they scrape at its hard exoskeleton with their two black mouth hooks, probing for an exposed bit of soft tissue. When they find one, they make a hole and crawl inside the dying insect’s body.

As they eat, petroleum fly maggots incidentally consume some asphalt. You can see it darkening their digestive tract through their translucent skin. It looks like their guts are filled with the black substance.

“That’s one of the big mysteries,” says Hauser. “How they can deal with this.”

Humans can handle eating a little bit of asphalt – medieval Persian doctors used to prescribe it for stomach ulcers. But the stuff would overwhelm our systems if we ate as much as a petroleum fly maggot. And even a little bit would expose us to carcinogens that short-lived insects don’t have to worry about.

Petroleum fly larvae eat asphalt regularly enough that scientists once thought they derived nourishment from it. Now, they know that’s not the case.

But it’s apparent that something happens to the asphalt as it passes through a maggot’s digestive tract. Between the mouth and the anus, the dark, viscous substance thins out and clears up. Whatever is responsible for that process could point to a better method for cleaning up oil spills.

That possibility piqued the interest of University of Nebraska-Lincoln microbiologist Nickerson. He had a hunch that bacteria inside the maggots might be breaking the asphalt down. So, he asked a paleontologist to collect some petroleum fly larvae from the La Brea Tar Pits and ship them to his lab in Lincoln.

First, Nickerson’s team identified the types of bacteria growing inside the maggots’ guts. Then, they tried growing the microorganisms in Petri dishes.

“Our goal at the time was to find microbes that would be good at degrading some of these complex hydrocarbons that you would find in the tar,” says Nickerson.

None of the bacteria that grew on Petri dishes proved capable of that feat. But Nickerson’s team found plenty of microbes that they couldn’t grow at the time, and he hopes more scientists will investigate them in the future.

Until then, the petroleum fly larva will continue to live in the present, swimming contentedly in its asphalt paradise.

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.

TRANSCRIPT

This salamander is about to leap off the tallest tree in the world. But it’s gonna be OK.

These tiny amphibians, called wandering salamanders, live at the tops of coast redwoods in California, which can grow as tall as 30-floor skyscrapers.

The wandering salamander can spend the entirety of its 20-year-long life never once touching the forest floor.

Lush fern mats that grow high up on massive branches and burls make a perfect home.

But as damp and cozy as these fern mats are, they’re not without peril. Hungry neighbors like this Steller’s jay patrol the canopy. When they get too close, the wandering salamander goes skydiving. They don’t usually glide all the way to the ground, just to the next safe spot in the tree.

So, without wings, skin flaps, or webbed toes, how does the salamander steer itself in the air?

Scientists at the University of South Florida and UC Berkeley put wandering salamanders in a wind tunnel to learn more about their tricks.

The researchers also gave other salamanders the chance to try out that wind tunnel. They didn’t perform so well.

OK, who’s ready for skydiving academy?

The wandering salamander can control its upwards or downwards angle, or pitch, by swinging its long flexible tail up or down.

To turn while staying level, it swings that tail side to side, controlling its yaw.

To roll one way, it rotates its tail in the opposite direction. That’s called roll.

It can even make banked turns.

See how it dips its foot into the airstream – like a paddle changing the course of a canoe?

And this parachute posture slows them down and prepares them for landing.

Now how do they stick that landing?

The answer’s in their fabulous feet. Scientists think the forceful impact of their landing causes the feet to flex. That traps blood in their toes, swelling and stiffening them into grippy claws.

Those toes are a huge asset as the salamander makes its long, arduous climb.

Once it reaches the crown of the tree, it’ll be ready to take that leap of faith again and again and again.

Hi, it’s Laura. Question for all you amphibian lovers: How are toads so amazing at catching bugs? Well, they smack ’em with a supersoft tongue covered in special spit! How special? Watch our episode to find out. See you there.

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—and free itself to buzz around your kitchen.

TRANSCRIPT

Thank you to Opera for supporting PBS.

Coming of age is awkward, messy, challenging. Even for a house fly.

See this pulsing sac on the fly’s head?

It’s a specialized organ that the fly uses just once … to break free from its pupal casing.

Whew. What a headache!

It all started a few weeks back, when mom and dad had a brief but spirited courtship.

Which resulted in these delicate, oblong eggs. And from the eggs: maggots.

Hi!

The little squirmers dig right in wherever mom laid them!

After chowing down for a few days, this chonker is now five times its original size.

What it wants now is privacy.

Over the next four days or so, the maggot’s ivory exoskeleton hardens …

“Ughhh, I’m going to my room.”

… and darkens to a deep mahogany.

The fly is now a pupa.

See these holes? This is how it gets oxygen … and that air just happens to flow through its butt.

While things may look quiet on the outside, there’s a lot happening beneath the surface.

This is a blowfly – a house fly’s cousin.

Scientists at the Natural History Museum in London X-rayed the pupa to reveal the transformation behind its opaque shell.

See them go from chubby tube to a complex creature with legs and wings and big eyes?

The once blobby maggot has totally transformed.

But the cozy casing that protected it now holds it captive.

That’s why this inflatable organ, called the ptilinum, is essential.

The fly pumps it full of clear-colored insect blood called hemolymph – and pops the lid off its casing.

Once the head’s out, the struggle continues.

Next come the front legs, abdomen and back legs.

The process of freeing itself is called eclosion.

But not everyone makes it: Some get stuck right in the middle. Forever.

The ones that do survive pull the ptilinum into their head.

All that remains is the ptilinal suture. It’s a scar the adult fly will carry around as a reminder of the heroic effort it made to start its life on the outside.

Now what to do with all these new body parts?

Its wings extend from crumpled to elegant as they fill with hemolymph.

This insect has now realized its full potential – to fly off into your house and drive you mad.

Thank you to Opera for supporting PBS. One new way to explore complex topics and the world around us is with Opera’s completely redesigned AI-integrated browser. Opera has a multitude of new functionalities including Aria — their own artificial intelligence. While browsing with Aria, you’ll have commands such as “Explore,” which provides an overview of the context of highlighted text and suggests how to explore further by providing links and keywords. And “Translate,” which translates highlighted text into the detected browser language. Plus, you’ll be able to do all this exploration with the tab islands feature that automatically builds collapsible groups of tabs arranged by context into dedicated tab islands. Additionally, private browsing with a VPN hides your location and activity, while offering unlimited usage without logging or collecting personal information, all integrated into the browser without the need for additional extensions. To learn more about Opera, there’s a link in the description and the pinned comment below.

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.

TRANSCRIPT

Why is this dead mouse moving?!

Well, death is a magnet for life. And there’s something down there. It’s a yellow-bellied burying beetle, hustling to hide this mouse, before, say, a raccoon gets it.

It also has to work faster than these ants, which are here for bits of mouse to feed their larvae.

And there’s this fly, too, looking for a place to lay her eggs. More on that later.

The beetle, also known as a carrion beetle, doesn’t do the killing. It just profits off creatures whose time has run out, here on the California coast.

Just as small carcasses begin to get fragrant, the beetle sniffs them out with its sensitive clubbed antennae.

Over the next few hours, it digs up dirt from below the mouse. It pushes and pulls.

Yes, that is just one beetle doing the hauling, moving that carcass safely underground.

This carcass is about to become a nursery and a buffet.

Now it’s time to get something else done. The beetle hooks up with a partner. Underground, they roll the carcass into a ball. This reduces the amount of flesh exposed to bacteria … and decay. That’s one way to bond on a date!

The mouse takes on the color of dirt. The beetles dab the ball with microbes, from their butts, that work like a preservative, slowing down the rotting. The meal has to keep so they can feed their offspring. See that?

A few days later, larvae hatch from the eggs mom laid right next to the carcass. They’re hungry and mom feeds them bits of prechewed mouse into their mouths. When they’re big enough, the larvae crawl right into that “pantry” and help themselves. It’s a party in here!

Meanwhile, some other creatures are also flourishing on this mouse carcass: mites that rode in on the beetles. They’re called “phoretic,” which means they’re piggybackers. They reproduce like mad and look like a huge nuisance to their carriers.

“What? Do I have something on my face?”

But the mites actually help the beetles.

Remember the fly that laid her eggs on the carcass? Well, the mites devour fly eggs, which would otherwise grow into maggots hungry for this delicacy.

The mites also eat a few beetle eggs from time to time. It’s the price the beetles pay so their larvae have the mouse to themselves.

But if a beetle family is large, a carcass sometimes isn’t enough to feed all the hungry mouths. So, mom gets rid of a few of her larvae … by eating them.

She eats some so that others can thrive … continuing that strange dance between life and death.

Hi, it’s Laura. If you love learning about animals and nature, subscribe to our free Deep Look weekly newsletter, called “Nature Unseen.” Link in the description. You know what other animals perform great feats to survive? Red fire ants. During hurricane season, when floodwater flows into their nest, they build a raft with their own bodies. And they use their larvae as giant floaties. Stay dry!

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.

TRANSCRIPT

Watch out … you might not always see these five tiny creatures coming for you, but chances are you’ve got one lurking nearby ready to suck your blood.

We show you how they do it and how you can get rid of them. Enjoy!

How Mosquitoes Use Six Needles to Suck Your Blood

This is the deadliest animal in the world.

Mosquitoes kill hundreds of thousands of people each year … the most vulnerable people: children, pregnant women.

No other bite kills more humans … or makes more of us sick.

So what makes a mosquito’s bite so effective?

For starters, they’re motivated. Only females bite us. They need blood to make eggs … and a pool of water for their babies to hatch in.

Even a piece of trash can hold enough.

At first glance, it looks simple — this mosquito digging her proboscis into us.

But the tools she’s using here are sophisticated.

First, a protective sheath retracts – see it bending back?

If you look at a mosquito’s head under a microscope, you can see what that sheath protects.

And inside there are six needles!

Two of them have tiny teeth. She uses those to saw through the skin. They’re so sharp you can barely feel her pushing.

These other two needles hold the tissues apart while she works.

From under the skin, you can see her probing, looking for a blood vessel.

Receptors on the tip of one of her other needles pick up on chemicals that our blood vessels exude naturally and guide her to it.

Then she uses this same needle like a straw.

As her gut fills up, she separates water from the blood and squeezes it out. See that drop?

That frees up space to stuff herself with more nutritious red blood cells.

With another needle, she spits chemicals into us. They get our blood flowing more easily and give us itchy welts afterwards.

And sometimes, before she pries herself away, she leaves a parting gift in her saliva: a virus or a parasite that can sicken or kill us.

There’s nothing in it for her. The viruses and parasites are just hitching a ride.

But this is what makes mortal enemies out of us and mosquitoes.

They take our blood. Sometimes we take theirs. But often, not soon enough.

If you like this video, please hit the like and subscribe buttons. It really helps us reach more people, and we truly appreciate your support!

On to our next miniature vampire. Let’s see how ticks dig into you with a mouth full of hooks, and the best way to pry them loose.

How Ticks Dig In With a Mouth Full of Hooks

The hills are alive … with silent, waiting ticks.

Their bites can transmit bacteria that cause Lyme disease, and other things that can make us very sick.

Protected by these palps is a menacing mouth covered in hooks.

First she has to find a host.

She can sense animals like us by the carbon dioxide we give off.

She reaches out with her front legs. Scientists call this questing. It will use that claw to latch onto something … like your sleeve. Now you see her, now you don’t.

Once aboard, she searches out a nice spot to bite into … for blood.

She lives three years, but in that time she only eats three meals.

A tick needs enough blood to grow from larva to nymph, nymph to adult, and then for females to lay their eggs. Gross.

Let’s check out a nymph, a young tick. It’s tiny, smaller than a freckle.

To grow into an adult, it needs one blood meal, a big one.

The front of its body is all mouth.

It digs into us using two sets of hooks. The hooks wriggle into the skin.

They pull our flesh out of the way and push in this mouthpart: the hypostome.

Those hooks anchor the tick to us for the long haul, like mini-harpoons.

While the speedy mosquito digs in, sucks our blood and splits, all within seconds, a tick nymph stays on for days. Three days, if we don’t find it before then.

Compounds in their saliva help blood pool under the surface of our skin.

The nymph sips it through its mouthparts, like drinking from a straw.

When a tick is full – and I mean completely full – it falls off wherever it may be. Maybe onto your bed.

That’s if you don’t nab it first.

You might have heard that you should twist or burn the tick. Not true. Grab the tick close to your skin and just pull straight out. That’s how you win the fight against those tenacious hooks.

If that didn’t make your skin crawl, this will definitely make your scalp itch. It’s time to find out how lice turn your hair into their personal jungle gym.

How Lice Turn Your Hair Into Their Jungle Gym

It can start as an itch. Maybe a tickle on your scalp.

It’s head lice. Tiny and tenacious.

Thanks to millions of years of evolution, these suckers are not easy to get rid of.

You might end up in a salon, but not the kind for haircuts.

Young lice are so small they’re almost impossible to see with the naked eye.

Our scalp is their buffet.

They feed on our blood. You can see it inside this adult louse. It’s that brownish stuff that’s moving.

The secret to their success?

Their claws – called tarsal claws – and this little part, called a spine. A pair on each of its six legs. They’ve evolved to fit perfectly around a human hair.

They make lice into speedy little acrobats, using our hair like a tightrope.

They can’t jump or fly, but they get around.

Say two kids – one blond, one brunette – touch heads. The louse just scoots right over.

It’s been one long game of hopscotch, from human head to human head.

And it has to be us. Our head lice can’t live on other animals.

In fact, other primates have their own species of lice, adapted to their unique hair.

Birds have lice that hide in their feathers. Ooh. Cozy.

And we all want them gone.

Common insecticides won’t kill our head lice anymore. They’ve become resistant to them.

Even their eggs have serious staying power, glued to individual strands of hair.

But lice do have a weakness. They can’t survive away from our moist, warm scalp. Head lice cannot even live on other hairy parts of our body.

So if you – or a professional – painstakingly comb them out, they’ll starve, and die within hours.

OK, it’s not fun. But it’s just a temporary encounter with a tiny hitchhiker that is biologically destined just for you.

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These beauties are kissing bugs, but you wouldn’t want to kiss one – because pretty quickly they swell into a balloon full of your blood.

How a Kissing Bug Becomes a Balloon Full of Your Blood

This kissing bug isn’t going to give you a loving peck when it sticks you with that tucked-away proboscis.

It could actually make you really sick, even kill you.

It makes its move at night, while you’re sleeping. It likes your warm body.

Kissing bugs get their name because they often bite near the lips or eyes, but they’ll dig in anywhere you’ve left uncovered.

A little anesthetic guarantees you won’t wake up while they feed on you for 10,
20, even 30 minutes.

Every kissing bug needs several huge meals during the year or two it lives.

As it gulps, its exoskeleton stretches like a balloon, to fit up to 12 times its weight in blood.

This pliability is called plasticization.

How it started.

How it’s going.

All that hot liquid could stress an insect’s body and stunt its growth.

So the kissing bug cools it down – inside its head.

Your warm blood flows in.

The cool insect blood, called hemolymph, absorbs the heat and releases it through the top of the bug’s long head.

In this infrared video, you can see the blood cool down by more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit before it reaches the bug’s abdomen.

So the bug is safe. You, on the other hand, are not.

It injects saliva as it sucks your blood.

Here’s a scientist squeezing some out. The saliva has proteins that can give people a deadly allergic reaction called anaphylaxis.

And it gets much, much worse. OK. This is super gross.

After eating – sometimes while it’s eating – the bug poops.

And that poop – and urine – might contain the parasite that causes Chagas disease.

If the bug’s victim rubs these feces and urine into the bite wound or their eyes, the parasite can infect them.

Years later, as many as one third of the people who got the parasite develop heart disease that can kill them, sometimes suddenly.

Pregnant women can even pass the parasite onto their babies.

Few contract the parasite in the U.S., even though kissing bugs live here.

But in Latin America, millions of people have become infected.

There, kissing bugs are known by many different names: chinche besucona …
chinche … pito … vinchuca … barbeiro.

In rural areas, these kissing bug species live in people’s homes, in the cracks of the walls. And in animal coops.

Spraying has helped bring down infections.

But hundreds of thousands of people have left their home countries for the U.S., not knowing the bug gave them the parasite. A simple blood test can find it and medications can often kill it.

In the American Southwest, the bugs live in the nests of wild animals, like this pack rat den in Arizona, where biologists Anita and Chuck Kristensen collect them.

Chuck Kristensen (off camera): Kissing bug, kissing bug!

Chuck Kristensen (off camera): Genuine kissing bug.

For the most part, they feed on the pack rats.

But in late spring and summer, the bugs sometimes travel from these nests into someone’s home.

So sealing off your house, with screens on your windows – and even vents –, is one way to keep out these stealthy bloodsuckers.

When they feed on your blood, tsetse flies can spread disease. But their motherly instincts are surprisingly familiar to us.

A Tsetse Fly Births One Enormous Milk-Fed Baby

We mammals like to think we’re pretty special, right? We don’t lay eggs. We feed our babies milk. Well, this very pregnant fly is about to prove us wrong.

Yep, this tsetse fly is in labor. And that emerging bundle of joy is her larva.

While other insects can lay hundreds of eggs, she grows one baby at a time inside her, just like us.

Congratulations!

Scientists think tsetse flies started growing their young like this long ago to guard them from parasites.

For that same reason, the larva doesn’t stick around. It burrows into the dirt for protection.

It’s already gotten all the nutrition it needs from its mom’s milk. That’s right, this fly makes milk.

Here’s a drop of it under the microscope. It’s made up of protein and fat, a lot like breast milk.

The fly doesn’t exactly breastfeed, though.

Inside its mom, the larva got milk through these tubes … which it drank with this pair of straw-like mouthparts on its head.

A female tsetse fly needs a lot of fuel, because over her 10-day pregnancy she produces her own body weight in milk.

And that fuel comes from us. Tsetses feed exclusively on blood … from humans and other animals.

That’s bad news because where the flies live in Africa they spread a debilitating disease called sleeping sickness in humans and nagana in livestock.

Tsetses make cattle so sick that they can’t be raised efficiently in a region of Africa the size of the United States.

Geoff Attardo (off-camera): All right. Coming back to the first trap we set.

People are trying to control them with things like baited traps.

Geoff Attardo (off-camera): It looks like it has a lot of tsetse flies.

Man (off-camera): Tsetse.

Geoff Attardo (off-camera): Holy cow! That’s a lot of flies.

Man (off-camera): Tsetse flies.

They’re effective, but more defenses are needed.

That’s where Geoff Attardo, at the University of California, Davis, hopes to help. He’s trying to stop tsetse flies from making babies in the first place.

A female only mates once in her life, enough to make the 10 or so babies she’ll have.

The male makes sure she doesn’t mate again by delivering a substance that makes her lose interest in sex. Scientists are trying to figure out what it is. If they could bottle it and spray it, female tsetse flies may never get busy at all. No more tsetse offspring to worry about.

After spending about a month below ground in a hard shell, the fly emerges as an adult and unfurls its wings.

Like us, tsetse flies ensure the next generation by investing a lot in a few offspring, instead of investing very little in a lot of them.

They grow up so fast, don’t they?

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And watch more Deep Look videos in this playlist of our most creepy crawly animals or this one all about busy bees. See you there!

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.

TRANSCRIPT

See how all these sunflowers are facing the same direction?

They’ve been preparing for this moment their entire lives – to be pointing towards the sun just as the bee flies by.

Attracted by the warm, bright blossoms, the bee loads up on pollen and sugary nectar, pollinating the flowers as it goes.

So, how did the sunflowers position themselves so perfectly?

It all started way before the plants even bloomed.

Young sunflower plants start each morning facing east to greet the sunrise.

They follow the sun all day, angling themselves towards it as it travels across the sky.

It’s a behavior called heliotropism, after the Greek word for the sun: helios

More exposure to sunlight means more photosynthesis … and more growth.

When the sun sets, sunflower plants do something curious: They spend all night growing back towards the east, in anticipation of the sun’s return the next morning.

Scientists think the first rays of sun activate a morning crew of genes.

They signal cells on the plant’s east side to swell and elongate faster than those on the west side.

The afternoon genes keep them growing in the same direction.

But then, after sunset, the night shift takes over and signals the cells on the other side to swell, resetting the plant to face east.

Sunflowers follow this rhythm day after day until it becomes a habit.

Researchers at University of California, Berkeley and University of California, Davis took sunflowers grown outside and placed them inside under constant overhead light.

The sunflowers kept up their back-and-forth movement for a few days.

That’s because plants have an internal rhythm called a circadian clock.

We have one too.

Ours tells us when to wake up and when to go to sleep.

Scientists think the sunflowers’ 24-hour clock tells them when and in which direction to grow.

When the plant is ready to bloom, it gives up all that back and forth and fixes itself in place facing east … for the rest of its days.

Why east?

Because bees are out working first thing in the morning. And they like warm, bright flowers lit up by the sun.

So, the flowers need to be in place before the bees arrive.

Researchers found that if they rotated sunflowers to face west they got way fewer visitors.

The bees are after the bright pollen on these tiny things called anthers.

Each sunflower blossom, called an inflorescence, is actually a collection of hundreds or thousands of individual flowers … called florets.

Just before dawn, the plant’s internal clock signals florets at the outside edge to bloom.

They push pollen from deep inside, out to the tips.

Later in the day, another part called the style extends up and out of the floret.

Its end splits open, ready to receive pollen from other plants.

This is why the bees are so essential.

As they fly from flower to flower, they move pollen into those curled-back styles.

Each pollinated floret grows into a seed.

When all the florets have blossomed, the sunflower hangs its head and dries out.

Those seeds aren’t just a snack. They’re an important source of cooking oil grown in huge quantities.

And growers are always breeding new varieties to maximize their yield. But sometimes they accidentally mess with the sunflower’s biological clock, and throw it out of sync with the sunrise.

By learning what makes sunflowers tick, researchers want to ensure new varieties show up right on time.

Before you go we want to tell you about “Weathered: Earth’s Extremes.” If you’re familiar with the YouTube series on PBS Terra, you’ll be excited to know that it’s expanding into a TV miniseries which tells the definitive story about our changing weather and climate. Link in the description

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.

TRANSCRIPT

There are over 20 thousand species of bees on the planet, and each one is full of surprises.

These bees prove there’s more to bees than just honey and stingers …

Like, did you know that honeybees turn the pollen they collect into a special food called bee bread?

Check it out!

Honeybees Make Honey … and Bread?

OK, time to head to work.

But before this honeybee starts her commute, she’s prepping her tools.

Because honeybees collect pollen. You knew that.

But it’s not as simple as you might think.

Plants want the bees to carry the pollen away and spread it to other flowers. That’s pollination, how plants reproduce.

But bees also need to carry lots of it home – pollen is a protein-packed food for the hive.

Luckily, they have the right gear.

They’re hairy, like tiny flying teddy bears. She’s covered in 3 million hairs for trapping pollen. They’re even on her eyes.

Here on her legs, they’re shaped into spiky brushes and flat combs.

When she lands on a bloom, she really gets in there.

Nibbling on the flower’s anthers detaches the pollen.

Time to pack up her haul.

She cleans it off her eyes and antennae with those brushes on her front legs, like windshield wipers.

Here it is up close.

That leg wipes the pollen right off her eye.

Then she moves the pollen from leg to leg, like a conveyor belt – front to middle to back.

The bee does this super fast, while she flies from bloom to bloom, moving the pollen into special baskets on her back legs called corbiculae.

She bends her leg, using it to squish the pollen into a ball, packing it together with a little saliva and nectar.

She can get as many as 160,000 pollen grains into each ball. She’s hauling as much as one-third of her weight.

Back at the hive, meal prep is about to start.

But the pollen isn’t for making honey.

The honey, under this wax, is made from nectar. They eat it for its sugar.

Bees turn pollen into something completely different: bee bread.

That’s their source of protein.

Step one: Find an open spot.

Step two: Deposit your goods and pack them neatly.

Step three: Let the pollen “marinate” with a hint of honey.

And voilà! It’s ready.

The pantry is stocked – both for adult bees and the babies that are growing in the cells next door.

The adults pop in to drop off a special bee bread snack … a little home cooking for the hive’s future hardworking flyers.

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Next time you enjoy an ice cream cone, thank an alfalfa leafcutting bee.

These bees are so tough, they get punched in the face by flowers.

This Bee Gets Punched by Flowers For Your Ice Cream

OK, this bee seems confused.

That leaf she’s gnawing on is no flower.

But this is an alfalfa leafcutting bee.

She needs hunks of leaves to build her nest.

A lot of them.

All this is her lacy handiwork.

She hauls the pieces back home.

Leafcutters use them to line the inside of their nest.

In nature, she might use a nook and cranny in a log.

But here, her nest is in what’s basically a bee apartment building. A high-rise made of Styrofoam.

These markings help the bee find her way back to her personal condo. You know, like, 7B.

And furnishing it takes a while, because, see that pile? These are the pieces they dropped.

The bees are here to work in this alfalfa field in California.

They’re from Europe originally, but farmers here use them because they have a real knack for pollinating alfalfa flowers, which grow tiny seeds inside these curly pods.

Farmers use the seeds to plant new fields of alfalfa … which is grown to make hay … to feed these gals.

So, really, your glass of milk comes courtesy of these bees.

But pollinating alfalfa flowers is a lot trickier than it looks.

Even honeybees can’t really hack it.

Here’s why.

Alfalfa keeps its pollen locked away inside its flowers.

To get it, the bees have to step on a spring-loaded petal called a keel petal.

Here’s how it works.

Pop! It releases this column that has the pollen at the end.

It’s called “tripping” the flower.

Here it is again.

The column has some force – the bee might get a good thwack in the face.

Leafcutting bees just don’t care; they can take a punch.

Pop.

Pop.

Honeybees don’t really like to tangle with that. They’ll usually step around gingerly, trying to sip nectar from the side without setting it off.

Leafcutting bees get coated in pollen and bring it back home to their nest so they can pack it in there to feed their growing babies.

Each one is bundled in a little leaf-wrapped bassinet.

Aw, there they are. The siblings all lined up together.

A new generation of the toughest little bees around.

Why would these bees be digging into the dirt?

Well, building your nest underground is a great way to protect it from invaders.

Unless, of course, freeloading flies torpedo the nest.

This Fly Torpedoes a Bindweed Bee’s Nest

Life for bindweed turret bees is violent and unfair.

It’s spring in California, and these male bees are in an all-out brawl, desperate to mate with the female trapped at the bottom of this pile.

Sometimes the fight is so intense that the female they’re going after gets crushed to death.

But if she survives … she and the winner steal away and mate.

Until another male wants in. Buzz kill!

Now she starts an epic dig, prepping a place to lay her eggs underground.

She tirelessly scoops earth with her mandibles, dousing it with nectar she collected earlier to soften it.

The majority of the world’s bee species – 70 percent – nest in the ground. These ones chose a dirt parking lot. Some nice folks cordoned it off to protect the bees.

Females work side by side. Each is “queen” of her own funky little castle.

They build turrets, but only some of them are vertical.

Many are tunnel-like, with a sideways entrance.

Others curve down.

You’ll see why that’s important in a bit.

Once the bees are done digging, they head off on another mission. They gather pollen from one plant only: morning glories, also known as bindweeds.

She rubs her shaggy legs all over that pollen.

And down she goes with her haul.

Pollen pants!

Inside her nest, she packs the pollen into neat balls – each one in its own chamber – and lays an egg on top.

When the egg hatches into a larva, it will live off the pollen.

As she toils, freeloaders show up.

They look like a bee, but their huge eyes give them away.

They’re called … wait for it … bee flies.

The fly doesn’t dig or gather pollen for her young. She just hovers over a bee’s nest and … yup, she’s dropping her own eggs in there. She’ll drop 200 eggs over her lifetime.

This is where those tunnels and curved turrets are useful. They make it harder for the flies to drop their eggs in from the air.

But when the fly does succeed, the fly’s egg hatches into a larva that digs tiny hooks into the bee larva.

As the bee eats the pollen and grows, the fly larva sucks it dry.

Sometimes the flies are so successful, they can nearly wipe out a population of bees.

But these bees don’t give up.

Two or three months of mating, foraging and warding off parasites come to an end when they seal up their nests with dirt.

Below ground, babies will grow.

The following spring, if the bees are lucky, a new tiny city will burst to life, full of bees persevering just as their mothers did before them.

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Bees may be famous for their sting, but these stingless bees defend their delicious honey with barricades, bouncers and bites.

Take a look!

Stingless Bees Guard Tasty Honey With Barricades, Bouncers and Bites

At the break of dawn, in Oaxaca, Mexico, bees are tearing down the barrier they built last night to cover their nest entrance.

Another successful night protecting their honey and babies from thieving ants.

They make this lattice out of a blend of wax and a potent ant repellent.

More on that later.

They’re not eating the waxy material – they’re stashing it to reuse tonight.

Just like the honeybees that sweeten your tea, these honeymakers live in a colony.

But they’re smaller and don’t have stingers to protect the sweet stuff.

That’s why they’re known as stingless bees.

There are more than 600 species of them in the tropics around the world, mostly in the Americas.

And they’ve been around twice as long as honeybees.

No bee stingers? No bee suits needed!

Emilio Pérez is a stingless beekeeper in the highlands of Oaxaca, land inhabited by the Chinantec people.

This is Melipona beecheii, one of the four bee species he keeps.

He only raises native bees.

Scientists say moving species around can spread diseases that harm them.

So, how do these teensy bees without stingers protect their honey?

By annoying you.

Some tangle in your hair … or eyebrow … and give you a bite.

It only feels like a pinprick. But they could summon a whole swarm of their sisters by releasing pheromones.

In any case, for these bees, the best offense is a good defense.

Guard bees stand watch at the nest entrance.

Melipona beecheii has just one imposing guard, stationed on this ledge shaped like a flower.

Other species employ as many as 15 guards.

They cover the perimeter of trumpet-shaped entrances.

If an outsider tries to come in – like this bee from another colony – the guards sniff it out and kill it.

These peculiar structures also make great runways, as bees go off to work in the flowers.

They’re not picky.

They collect nectar and pollen from dozens of plants, which they pollinate in the process.

Stingless bees also collect resin.

It’s the sticky stuff that plants like this cedar make to keep out burrowing insects.

See how she stows the drops on her back legs?

Different plants have different hues of resin: yellow … white … red.

They mix the resin with wax to make a pliable building material called cerumen.

Your average honeybee just uses wax.

Stingless bees shape cerumen into little capsules for their offspring, and stack them like a tiered cake.

They also use the material to make their honey pots … these orbs. Yum!

It’s a freewheeling architectural style, compared to honeybees’ hexagonal cells.

Now, remember this protective barrier?

It’s made of cerumen.

The resin mixed in with the wax is what keeps the ants away. They hate the resin’s smell and stickiness.

Once a year, Emilio and his daughter Salustia collect honey from their nests.

Stingless bee colonies are smaller and usually make less honey than honeybees.

Each of their Melipona beecheii colonies makes about nine pounds a year, just one seventh of what a honeybee hive produces.

Salustia: We’re having a honey tasting.

The Deep Look team got to sample it.

Gabriela: A strong fermented flavor.

Josh: It tastes like SweeTarts. Yeah. Really good.

Stingless bee honey is sold as a health product to treat things like sore throats.

All honeys contain hydrogen peroxide, which is antimicrobial.

Stingless bees visit a variety of plants, many in the rainforest.

So, scientists are studying their honey and resins for chemicals that might have medicinal properties.

As the sun goes down, bees head in for the night and cover their nest entrance once again.

No effort is too great to protect the riches everyone is after.

These bees build nests out of mud that they pack with purple pollen for their young.

And in the process, they help us grow nuts and fruits.

Watch This Bee Build Her Bee-jeweled Nest

What’s this bee up to digging around in the mud?

This blue orchard bee is a mason, a builder. Her material is – you guessed it – mud.

And she works alone.

In fact, unlike those honeybee hives you might think of, most of the 4,000 types of bees in North America are solitary.

See how she scrapes the wet earth? She collects it with two huge pincerlike tools on her face called mandibles.

She’s gathering mud to make her nest.

The nest is long and thin. In nature, she goes into places like hollow twigs.

At the University of California, Davis, she uses a six-inch-long paper straw provided by researchers.

In this nest without a straw you can see how she builds a wall of mud.

Then she gathers food from spring flowers, but not only to feed herself.

See the pretty purple pollen on the anther of this flower?

She grabs the anthers with her legs and rubs the pollen onto hairs on her abdomen called scopa.

And while she’s at it, she sips a little nectar from the blooms.

When she climbs back into her nest, she turns the pollen and nectar into a sweet morsel next to the mud wall.

On this purple ball she lays a single egg.

She repeats this several times in her narrow nest. Egg. Wall. Egg. Wall.

When she’s done, she seals it all up with more mud.

A cross section of the nest shows her incredible craftsmanship: It looks like a piece of jewelry.

Soon, the eggs hatch.

The hungry larvae feed on their pollen provision, the purple lunchbox their mom packed for them.

Still in the safety of the nest, the well-fed larva spins a cocoon.

The following spring, the adult bee chews its way out.

Just like their name says, blue orchard bees love orchards: fields of almonds and sweet cherries.

And they’re really good at pollinating them.

A few hundred females can pollinate as many almonds as thousands of honeybees.

And their tube nest means they’re portable.

That makes it easy to distribute them to farmers.

So why haven’t they taken over the fields?

Well, they reproduce slowly. They only have 15 babies a year.

A queen honeybee has 500 … a day.

So there just aren’t that many blue orchard bees around.

But some farmers are enlisting them anyway, hoping they can provide some relief to their struggling honeybee cousins.

If you look carefully, you might just spot a blue orchard bee foraging out in a field, helping keep fruits and nuts on our plates.

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Now check out our playlist on hungry caterpillars and beautiful butterflies.

Or see if you can survive these five bloodsuckers.

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.

TRANSCRIPT

A mating call that pulses like a heartbeat. An alfalfa field full of potential. In the search for green lacewing love, which romances will bloom and which will wither?

Here in California’s Central Valley, this lacewing bachelor is single and ready to mingle. Sure, he’s a looker with those glassy wings and shimmering eyes. But it’s his vibes that really matter. Which we can hear because scientists have amplified them.

He shakes his abdomen to announce he’s on the market. His vibration travels through the plant he’s perched on. But no one’s around to appreciate it. He tries again on a different leaf. This time, she’s feeling it.

“Will you accept this vibration?”

“I will.”

But even when they find each other, their songs don’t guarantee they’re a match. Is she here for the right reasons? To find out, they enter this leafy fantasy suite. They touch antennae and taste each other. They’re headed for their most intimate moment yet. That escalated quickly!

But sometimes more than one lacewing responds to a call, and the drama heats up. With two ladies here, one is certainly going home. Please take a moment to say your goodbyes.

Male and female lacewings of the same species sing each other essentially the same romantic song. It’s encoded in their DNA. One lacewing species sounds a bit like a purring cat, another one more like a growling stomach.

A few weeks later, we catch up with the family. Look who’s arrived, a baby! Yes, it is theirs. It’s so cute? And so hungry. Each lacewing larva devours hundreds of aphids and other orchard pests each week. It liquefies their insides and slurps them up.

That’s why gardeners and growers love these babies born of romantic vibrations. The larva will need that energy to transform into a beautiful adult, that will put its own heart, and vibration, on the line.

Hey Deep Peeps, we want your feedback! Every year, PBS Digital Studios sends out an audience survey. We want to know what you like on YouTube and what you want more of. Plus, you get to vote on new show ideas. We’d love Deep Look representation at the polls! Link is in the description, thanks!

Known as sand piranhas, Excirolana chiltoni are tiny crustaceans that nibble at your feet – and draw blood – if you hang out on the wet sand at the beach. They live on the Pacific coast of the U.S. and Canada, and the shorelines of Japan. Here’s how to keep them from ruining your vacation!

TRANSCRIPT

Narrator:
What is this creature taking a bite out of your toe?

Beachgoer:
-Ow!

Narrator:
And ruining your day at the beach?

Some people call them sand piranhas.

Scientific name: Excirolana chiltoni.

These tiny crustaceans are on the prowl for protein, and they don’t care where they get it.

From dead animals – like this pipefish – that washed up on the shore, to beachgoers’ flesh … in this case, your ankle.

One bite feels like the nick of a razor blade – sharp and then stinging.

But with enough time, a large group could likely clean the flesh straight off ya.

Here’s one, biting away at a foot, spinning in a full circle to get as much of you as it can.

They’re relatives of roly polies, which actually evolved from ocean animals.

Excirolana chiltoni are found in shallow waters on the coasts of places like Canada, the United States, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

But because they’re tiny, travel in small groups and have sand-colored camouflage, they’re pretty easy to miss.

Sand piranhas live in the swash zone, where saturated sand is washed over by waves.

Out of the whole wide beach, they stay in a band about the width of a car.

Once in a while they get stuck in a tidepool, but mostly these crustaceans burrow in wet sand between waves, taking cover from predators like these shore birds.

The sand piranha digs in with some fearsome tools.

It holds steady with these hooks on its legs, then deploys this pair of mandibles. They scrape away at their meal.

And these front legs, called maxillipeds, sweep food into its piehole.

And right now, you’re on the menu.

It doesn’t even try to ease your pain with anesthetic.

How rude!

And once it’s down the hatch, there’s no hiding what it had for lunch.

Don’t worry! That’s not human blood.

This sand piranha is chowing down on something called a bloodworm, named for its bright red worm blood.

Sand piranhas travel up and down the beach as the tides change.

Few creatures can survive the rough-and-tumble life here in the swash zone.

So these crustaceans get priority access to whatever washes up.

They help clean up all kinds of wayward corpses … like this sea pickle.

Keeping your favorite beach a little less stinky.

Now, you don’t have to wait ‘til one of these tiny piranhas starts chomping on your foot to know they’re around.

Watch out for these distinctive scribbles in the sand.

If you see them, keep moving your feet through that swash zone.

Or better yet – dive in.

Wanna meet some bloodsuckers that are kind enough to numb you before they dine? Watch our episode about how exactly mosquitoes, ticks, lice, kissing bugs and tsetse flies feed on us. And how you can keep them away. Also, join our community on Patreon to get sneak peeks of our new episodes.

As a caterpillar, a grass skipper butterfly is an architect. It builds its home by weaving skeins of silk, which the caterpillar uses to fold shut a blade of grass. After growing up inside this “grass taco,” it emerges as a fuzzy butterfly that woos a mate with flirty courtship dances.

TRANSCRIPT

With each sway of its head, this caterpillar lays a strand of silk. It’s weaving to survive.

As the silk dries, it shrinks, pulling the edges of this blade of grass together.

In just a few minutes, this butterfly babe has made its very own grass taco … a safe place to call home. And now, it’s time for its first nap.

When it grows up, it’ll get its wings. It’s a kind of butterfly called a skipper.
Look close enough and you might find one of these caterpillar homes in your backyard.

Grass skipper caterpillars build with grass.

Other skipper species use leaves, cutting and folding them to make tiny houses.
And a banana skipper rolls up banana leaves into little “cigars.”

A grass skipper caterpillar tucks into its shelter to hide from weather, parasites and predators … like paper wasps.

When it’s hungry, it ventures out for some fresh grass … like a nearby blade or even the end of its own house.

Yum, house!

And don’t worry, it keeps its place clean. Time to take out the trash!

As the caterpillar grows, it builds itself new homes. It’s making a silk pad so it won’t slip. The silk comes out of this pointy mouthpart called the spinneret.

A skipper caterpillar’s skinny neck gives it plenty of room to sway its head back and forth.

Over a few weeks, the caterpillar fills out.

Ugh, this belt is tight!

It turns into a pupa. And within weeks, an adult.

Skippers look fuzzier than your average butterfly.

You might mistake one for a moth. But most moths fly at night, and skippers fly during the day, some at dawn or dusk.

Check out their wings. See how the two sets spread out at different angles?

It makes them look like a tiny jet plane. It’s known as the bombardier position … even though skippers always come in peace.

Most butterflies keep their two sets of wings on the same plane.

Skippers’ chonky bodies are made up of strong flying muscles. They’re some of the speediest butterflies out there, skipping away from predators like birds. Yes, that is how they got their name.

They also fan their wings in flirty courtship dances. By fluttering, they spread their pheromones to attract a mate.

Males release their pheromones from a gland on their front wings – see that big splotch? It’s called a brand.

She has a gland on her backside. Maybe that’s why he keeps nudging her.

These dances can be truly acrobatic.

The male is trying to lure her with his scent.

But her fluttering is telling him he’s not her type. Literally. He’s the wrong species of grass skipper.

After she does find “the one,” she lays pinhead-sized white eggs.

The caterpillars eat through them to break free.

And they’ll go on to make a fresh batch of their very own grass tacos.

Hi, it’s Laura. Have you ever wondered why caterpillars are so dang hungry? Well, they need to stuff themselves before they transform into a chrysalis and literally lose their mouths. Watch that amazing metamorphosis in our episode. See you there!

Watch turret spiders, wormlions, assassin bugs and dragonfly babies use stealth, speed and lethal weapons to dispatch their prey.

TRANSCRIPT

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.

Turret Spiders Launch Sneak Attacks From Tiny Towers

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 inches underground. The spider spends its days down there.

As the last rays of the 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.

Whew! 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.

Our next creature is straight out of science fiction.

The wormlion ambushes its prey from the bottom of its tidy – and terrifying – sand pit.

Meeting a Wormlion Is the Pits

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 wormlion. 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 wormlions 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 wormlion 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 wormlion is done feeding on the juicy innards, it flicks the empty carcass away.

And tidies up its pit for its next meal.

Ehhh, careful!

After a couple of years of the good life, this wormlion will leave this dusty ditch behind and take to the skies.

Because really, it’s not a worm at all. It’s a fly larva.

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.

You Can’t Unsee the Assassin Bug’s Dirty Work

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. Pselliopus spinicollis, 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 hit man. 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 tarweeds.

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.

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.

A Baby Dragonfly’s Mouth Will Give You Nightmares

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-degree 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 larva.

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 skeeters don’t stand a chance. And that’s good for us. Let’s hope it stays this way for a few million more years.

Praying mantises, barnacles, newts and earthworms have some of the strangest love lives.

TRANSCRIPT

We get it, dating is hard.

From meeting the right special someone, to getting to know them, to avoiding imminent death.

The bizarre romantic lives of these four tiny creatures sometimes end in strange and tragic ways.

Especially for the praying mantis.

When it comes to hooking up, a male mantis has good reason to fear commitment.

Praying Mantis Love is Waaay Weirder Than You Think

This mantis is at the top of her game.

All summer, she’s been bulking up on grasshoppers and flies.

They’re called bordered mantises. Ambush hunters, cloaked by camouflage – some green and some brown.

And check out those forelimbs. They’re lined with sharp spikes – almost like a couple extra sets of jaws to grab her prey.

They’ve served her well.

But summer is coming to an end here in California’s Owens Valley.

The one thing left for them to do is start the next generation.

She sends out a chemical signal – an alluring cocktail of pheromones – into the air.

This guy picks up the message.

He’s way, way smaller than she is, simply outclassed when it comes to strength and deadliness.

He makes his move, to pass on his genes …

Uh …

That’s one way to go.

And he’s not the only male to meet his end this way.

So why would praying mantises do this – eat their own kind at a rather intimate moment? Seems like they wouldn’t last long as a species.

Well, it takes a ton of energy for females to produce their eggs, about a hundred of them developing inside her. She’ll lay them in a foamy cluster like this called an ootheca.

So that male is fueling the survival of his species, nutritionally speaking.

When they hatch in the spring, there will be plenty more mantises to replace this one.

And these bordered mantises weren’t going to live much longer anyway. They can’t survive the cold autumn nights. So males might as well take a shot.

Aww … This time it worked out.

He delivers a packet of sperm to fertilize her eggs.

But each time, it’s a serious gamble.

Well, that didn’t go so well.

But wait, look.

He’s been decapitated, but his body is still moving, like it’s on autopilot – kind of a zombie mating machine.

It’s being controlled by nerves in the mantis’ abdomen and can still get the job done.

In fact, males who successfully mate and get eaten in the process may father more eggs than those who get away.

So, while it may not really seem that way, this guy may be the ultimate winner in the primal quest to pass on his genes.

Barnacles might look like jagged little rocks at low tide. But they’re surprisingly well-equipped when it comes to finding a date.

Barnacles Go To Unbelievable Lengths To Hook Up

Finding a date is hard enough in San Francisco.

But it’s especially tricky when you’re stuck to a rock in the middle of the bay.

Still, acorn barnacles don’t get discouraged.

These crusty little animals actually have a pretty wild sex life.

At low tide each one is sealed up inside its own miniature fortress. shielded by a ring of armored plates. The two central plates press together to form a water-tight seal so they don’t dry out in the open air.

They’re ready and waiting for the tide to rise so they can get down to business.

But first they need to freshen up a bit.

The barnacle unfurls eight pairs of delicate feathery legs called cirri, which they use to absorb oxygen from the water. The legs filter out plankton and debris churned up by the waves, bringing the catch inside to the mouth.

They may not look like it from the outside, but beneath their shell it’s easier to see that barnacles are crustaceans related to crabs and shrimp.

After a nice meal, it’s ready for some action.

The little barnacle lets loose the longest penis of any animal – relative to its body size of course – stretching up to eight times the length of the barnacle itself.

And this penis has skills.

It can taste and smell.

And the tip can feel around, probing to see which neighbors have ripe eggs inside.

When it finds what it’s looking for the barnacle delivers sperm to fertilize the eggs.

Barnacles aren’t exactly prudes.

Pretty much everyone is fair play. Because they’re all hermaphrodites, simultaneously male and female.

Sometimes it’s one-on-one, sometimes more.

Barnacles are nurturing parents, too.

They hold on to their fertilized eggs and protect them until they hatch.

These cuties are their baby larvae called nauplii.

This is the young barnacles’ chance for adventure. They roam the sea searching for food and growing.

If they survive long enough the barnacle larvae mature into cyprids. At this stage the barnacle doesn’t eat. The cyprid’s only mission is to find the ideal spot to glom onto before it starves.

Having survived the trials of youth, the barnacle settles in.

Now it’s time to get to know the neighbors.

How far would you go for love?

California newts make an epic journey back to the pond where they were born. Check it out.

Newt Sex: Buff Males! Writhing Females! Cannibalism!

Life is struggle. Sex. Death.

It’s true across nature. It’s especially true for a newt.

Most of the time, California newts live quiet, hidden lives in the forest.

But every winter – and newts can live for 20 years – they experience an uncontrollable urge.

It’s called water drive.

They leave the safety of their burrows to go mate.

They begin a treacherous odyssey, a migration back to the pond in which they were born.

It begins with a hormone called prolactin, the same one that helps women produce breast milk. In newts, prolactin sparks a need to become aquatic.

Water could be miles away, like three miles. That’s the equivalent of 36 miles for you and me.

Scientists don’t know for sure, but some think newts use their sense of smell to help guide them.

And they only have one real defense against snakes hiding in the brush: their skin. It’s covered in a poison strong enough to kill a person, if you ate one. Newts’ yellow eyes and belly tell predators to stay away.

But poison isn’t always enough to protect them. Many never make it.

As they move toward water, newts’ skin starts to lose its bumps and becomes smooth.

Their long tails flatten into fins.

Their amphibian bodies transform from terrestrial to aquatic to prepare for a mating frenzy.

The male newt bulks up. It grows thick pads on its feet, perfect for clamping onto a female.

The word is “amplexus,” Latin for “embrace,” which is one word for it.

Newts can stay like this for hours, or days.

The result: egg clusters that females lay in the pond. So many eggs that newts sometimes eat a few for extra protein.

The ones that survive will grow into larvae and stay in the water for several months, transforming into adults. In the fall, they’ll leave the pond.

And then, if they’re lucky, they’ll come back here, again, and again, and again.

Or at least, they’ll try.

Earthworm Love Is Cuddly … and Complicated

Earthworm love.

It’s cuddly … and complicated.

From the start, the earthworm is built for romance, with four or five pairs of hearts.

Finding a match, though, that’s a challenge for these mostly solitary animals.

They go out looking when they’re a few months to a year old, and they’ve grown this fleshy, saddle-shaped patch, called a clitellum.

They’re now mature enough to get down to business.

Tube-shaped invertebrate seeks mate to share loamy soil and good times.

The earthworm follows tastes and smells through dirt or leaf litter to find its valentine.

It crawls around by anchoring its body with these bristles called setae … then pushing forward with its muscles.

Along the way, it fuels up on bacteria and tiny fungi in the soil and leaves, sucking them in with its mouth.

Such a luscious … lip?

Every earthworm has some non-negotiables: Must breathe through iridescent skin. Must want kids.

But male or female is not one of them. All earthworms are both. They’re hermaphrodites, which automatically doubles their chances of finding a mate.

When they do, they waste no time.

Side by side, they surround each other with rings of slime they exude from their skin, bodies pointing in opposite directions.

And they embrace with these flaps on their clitella.

They can canoodle like this for an hour, swapping sperm. It travels outside their bodies, here, where they press up against each other, and flows between these segments into storage sacs inside.

But their tender act has a dark side. As they do the deed, the earthworms stab each other with their pointy setae.

Those wounds mean the injured lovers won’t be hooking up with others anytime soon. Jealous much?

After they’ve parted ways, each earthworm produces a sheath with its clitellum and shimmies it down its tubular body. The protein-rich ring moves over tiny holes where it gathers eggs and some of the collected sperm.

Then, it slips right off the worm and becomes a cocoon.

Baby worms flourish inside, growing beating hearts that one day they’ll give to their special someone.

While it has a cute snoot, a rice weevil is a stowaway. It sneaks into your pantry as an egg that its mom laid inside a single grain of rice. Once it hatches, it turns your rice into its new home.

TRANSCRIPT

Something is after your rice. And it’s coming from inside the pantry. But how’d it get there?
The rice weevil is smaller than a grain of rice, but it could reduce your precious bounty to this. If you gave them eight months or so. They’re just like us: They love carbs. Their long snout, called a rostrum, is strong enough to pierce raw grains of rice.

Sharp mandibles at the tip cut through the hardest of grains. They gorge as they go. If they think they’re in danger, they’ll play dead. Don’t they totally blend in?

Now, I bet you didn’t think *this* was happening in your cupboard. To prepare for her babies, mom does what she knows best. She carves out a hole, then she turns around and lays an egg inside, down here. But sometimes she misses! An egg outside a grain of rice won’t survive, so she recycles it, by slurping it up. When she does lay her egg inside the rice, it grows into a larva.

The developing weevil devours the rice and emerges fully grown after about 30 days. All that’s left is a hollow husk. Weevil moms lay their eggs inside rice in the fields or when it’s stored. Those rice grains become tiny trojan horses, making their way into your kitchen. Despite their name, they’re not picky eaters.

To keep weevils out, warehouses fumigate grains. But scientists are exploring an alternative. Using sensitive microphones, they pick up the sounds of larvae chewing, to find where they’re hiding. This listening technique could one day lead to less spraying.

If you discover unwelcome visitors in your rice, toss out the infested grains. Weevils won’t reproduce if it’s cold, and they need some moisture to live. So store your good stash in airtight containers in a cool, dry place. This will keep stowaways from spreading. If you do end up eating one, don’t panic. Rice weevils won’t make you sick. You’ve just gotten a touch more protein.

We hope your spring cleaning doesn’t uncover bed bugs, dust mites, termites, drain flies or cockroaches.

TRANSCRIPT

Dread them. Run from them. But that won’t stop these unwelcome house guests from coming to visit you anyway. In fact, you’ve probably got them in your home right now making themselves comfortable.

Let’s start with the tiny dust mite. It might seem harmless but in large numbers they can cause serious problems.

Meet the Dust Mites, Tiny Roommates That Feast On Your Skin

Long ago – around the time we started growing our own food – humans settled down. We went home, inside. We built permanent shelters to protect us from the elements and keep the wild animals at bay.

Or so we thought. Surprise! The animals were right there with us. They still are.

This is dust. Zoom in and you find an ecosystem almost as elaborate as the one we left outside. But small enough for us to forget it exists.

Dust is pretty much anything small. But the most important ingredient of dust – at least for the purposes of this story – is skin. Your skin. Her skin. His skin. Tiny flakes that fall off our bodies all day long.

Researchers at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco collect and study house dust to find out what exactly makes up this micro-universe.

Even the cleanest homes are teeming with tiny, almost invisible roommates. And even more so if you have pets or kids or live on the ground floor.

Most homes have over 100 species, no matter how often you vacuum.

Not just these guys. But these. And these. And these. Most of these microscopic roommates are harmless. Just freeloaders, basically.

But one can cause real trouble: the house dust mite. This is like the roommate who leaves his crap around and makes you sick.

Dust mites don’t bite people. They don’t need to. We feed them constantly.

Skin flakes are hard to digest. It’s like eating hair, or feathers. So dust mites have powerful digestive enzymes to break the skin down. Those enzymes turn up in dust mite poop. And let’s just say you really don’t want to know how much dust mite poop is in your house.

When people breathe dust, they breathe in the poop – and the enzymes, too, which irritate the lungs and can aggravate asthma, especially in kids.

Like us humans, dust mites haven’t always lived inside either. These tiny relatives of spiders and scorpions once lived in birds’ nests. But then, some intrepid dust mites made the jump from birds’ homes to ours. And as our society thrived and grew, so did theirs.

These bed bugs are after your blood and they go for it while you’re sleeping. Keep watching to see how researchers stop them dead in their tracks.

Watch Bed Bugs Get Stopped in Their Tracks

Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the … OK, you know where this is going.

Lured in by our breath, bed bugs come for us when we’re most vulnerable.

In dreamland, we’re oblivious to bed bug chow time. You won’t even feel it. It’s a quick meal. Just a few minutes. But it’s a filling one.

Stuffed with blood, it scurries to a nearby cranny: the seam of your mattress or behind a baseboard.

There, they get to work growing their families. Until you get …

You can recognize them by their signature work of art: these tiny splotches. It’s the digested blood they leave behind.

In the 1950s, we made bed bugs retreat with DDT. But some became resistant and now they’re back. We help them spread – in our clothes or luggage – when we travel around.

You can kill them with other insecticides or heat, but their game of hide-and-seek makes it tricky.

Turns out, there might be another way to stop them in their tracks.

Watch this. It’s just taking a stroll and … Gotcha! Its foot is stuck.

This bean leaf can incapacitate the bloodsuckers. People in the Balkans discovered that years ago and would spread the leaves around their beds as a trap.

The leaf’s surface is covered in these tiny hooked hairs called trichomes. They pierce right through the bed bug’s feet, impaling their soft joints.

Many bean plants – like kidney and green beans – developed the hooks to defend against aphids and other plant-eating pests. But it just so happens to work on our bloodthirsty pest too.

Biologist and engineer Catherine Loudon is trying to copy the plant at the University of California, Irvine.

She’s creating a synthetic material that can pierce bed bug feet just like bean leaves do. It’s not quite as effective as a real bean leaf, but she’s working on it.

In the meantime, bed bugs are still a step ahead. So keep an eye out. Spot them early and maybe you can get them before they get you.

Termites can infiltrate your home without being seen, and the results can be catastrophic. But these tiny homewreckers wouldn’t be able to do so much damage without the help of special microorganisms hidden in their gut.

These Termites Turn Your House into a Palace of Poop

That lump on the side of this tree in the Amazon? It’s packed with termites. In the rainforest, that’s a good thing. They break down wood into stuff other creatures can eat.

But inside our homes, termites are pests. They cost us billions of dollars of damage every year.

Take these dampwood termites that live on the cool California coast. They eat wood that’s wet or decayed, maybe from a leak in your house. Slowly, but surely, they gnaw and scrape away.

What comes out the other end isn’t waste. It serves as a kind of mortar. And dried poop pellets make perfect building blocks for their nests.

In other words, they’re turning your house into theirs.

What’s amazing is that they can digest wood, which is so hard, and get nutrients out of it. We certainly can’t do that. Termites are one of the only animals that can.

It turns out they don’t do this alone. Researchers are looking inside termites to figure out who’s actually responsible for this feat.

At the Exploratorium, in San Francisco, museum biologists give the insect a little puff of carbon dioxide. When it’s nice and relaxed, the termite poops itself.

Under the microscope, multitudes appear. Hundreds of species of microbes live packed inside a termite’s gut, about one one-thousandth of a teaspoon.

This big one is called Trichonympha. It’s not an animal, plant or fungus. It’s a protist. Watch it move with the help of its flagella.

Protists like Trichonympha are essential for termites to turn the wood into a source of energy. They do this by fermenting the wood, much the same way a brewer turns grain into beer.

Something else is hidden deep in the termite’s gut: a powerful bacterium that combines nitrogen from the air and calories from the wood to make protein. That’s like turning a potato into a steak.

Termites can’t live without their microbes. And many of these microbes can’t live outside the termite. So what if we used the microbes against their hosts?

Right now, when we want to get rid of termites, we fumigate our houses with poison. But maybe we could just kill the protists instead.

Louisiana State University entomologists are engineering a gut bacterium to kill gut protists. They’d sneak the bacteria into the termite colony on something the termites would eat. The bacteria would kill the protists that help the termites digest wood, leaving them surrounded by food but starving.

These cuties are experts in making their way into your house through some secret and slimy passageways. Check it out.

Why Does This Fly Live in Your Bathroom?

Ever wonder where those little insects crawling around your bathroom came from?

Bad news: your drain.

With all that fluffy hair, it looks like a tiny moth. And some do call it a moth fly. But a fly it is. A drain fly. It’s called Clogmia – how appropriate.

It grew up over several weeks, out of sight, among things you thought you’d washed away.

Drain flies sneak in from the outside, through a crack in an old pipe, for example, to sip some water they sensed with this long mustache – their maxillary palps.

And here, on the plentiful gunk in your pipes, they’ll grow a family. Welcome, little one! The larva is the length of an eyelash.

That gunk it lives in? Those are bits of you: hair, saliva and food. They make a nice meal for bacteria and fungi, which form this dark, living slime called a biofilm. This is what the larvae feed on. It also keeps them well moisturized.

If the larva ends up submerged, it can still chow down. It sweeps slime particles out of the water with a hairy mouthpart called the labrum and rakes them in with its mandibles.

Underwater, it breathes with a bubble on its backside that it collected at the surface. This allows it to venture through deep pools in your pipes.

When larvae, or the more grown-up pupae, like this guy here, end up in a toilet bowl, it can be a shock. You might think the squigglers came out of you. Ew! Don’t worry – they can’t live inside us.

And even though the drain flies in your bathroom muck around in bacteria, they don’t really spread it to humans. They’re not interested in landing on us. Or even leaving the bathroom. They’re in their happy place.

When you wash your hands? They protect themselves from the water with their hairy wings. Each hair has ridges that trap air so the drops roll right off.

And if they’re caught off-guard by a sudden surge, the flies skate across.

But they’re not invincible. When they get trapped underwater long enough, they can drown.

If you find you really need to get rid of them, drain cleaner helps, but it won’t keep them away forever. There will always be some slime left behind, deep in your pipes, that could attract the flies again. So, if they want it, why not let ‘em have it?

Are cockroaches – those disgusting disease-spreading roommates – good for anything at all?

Scientists think their super-strength might teach us some tricks that could someday save lives.

Cockroach vs. Hydraulic Press: Who Wins?

The American cockroach is one of the fastest insects on the planet. It can run up to 3.4 miles per hour. That’d be like a human knocking out eight marathons over their lunch break.

It uses hooks, called tarsal claws, to flip over ledges.

And not even a wall can stop it. Better to keep up the momentum and figure it out as you go.

The roach is both tough and flexible. Its exoskeleton isn’t one large piece of armor, but many shield-like plates made of a tough material called chitin.

They’re held together by lots of pliable joints. And they use all those bendy joints to fold up, origami-style, and push through impossibly small cracks, like that gap you never knew existed in your kitchen cupboard.

The cockroach can army-crawl through a space a quarter of its normal standing height. That’s one reason it’s so good at surviving your thwack.

So how much pressure can the cockroach take?

Scientists at UC Berkeley found it can withstand a thwack equivalent to 900 times its body weight and walk away unscathed.

Why are researchers so interested in all this? They think the roach, despite its ability to make us sick, can teach us to save lives.

One of those researchers is now building robots the size of insects to squeeze into places you and I cannot. Like piles of rubble left by major earthquakes or hurricanes.

And maybe down the line, much smaller versions of these robots could even enter our bodies to perform life-saving tasks.

On the one hand, we want to keep these creatures out – by sealing cracks, caulking windows and storing food in airtight containers.

But we also want to learn from them. The cockroach teaches us that the key to overcoming adversity isn’t just toughness. It’s also flexibility.

Regal jumping spiders train themselves from a young age to become masterful hunters. From the day they leave mom’s silk nest, the tiny spiderlings practice, practice, practice, using some of the best vision in the animal world, athletic leaps, sharp fangs and lethal venom.

TRANSCRIPT

With fangs that bite …

venom that paralyzes …

and liquifies.

This regal jumping spider rules her tiny garden domain.

She squeezes out every last drop, leaving nothing but a crumpled husk behind.

The size of a bottle cap, she had to teach herself how to be this fearsome, starting when she was smaller than a sesame seed.

Every jumping spider must learn to stalk and pounce — they don’t use a web to catch prey.

To make the next generation of killers-in-training, she’ll need a mate.

A male arrives in formal attire — jet black with white markings. And blue-green iridescent chelicerae. That’s the name for these appendages that house their venom glands and end in their fangs.

Quite dashing, indeed.

He captivates her attention with his dance moves.

They embrace, and things get intimate.

A couple of weeks after mating, the female jumping spider lays 50-200 eggs inside her cozy nest.

She spins a protective silk sac around them … and guards them.

When they hatch, the nest serves as both their nursery and a silky jungle gym.

They grow up here under the many watchful eyes of their mom.

They don’t eat during these first few weeks, surviving off of yolk, an energy source left over from when they were in their eggs.

Their exoskeletons harden and darken.

As they grow, so does their curiosity … and their appetite.

They have to venture out into the world to find their first meal.

Jumping spiders’ keen eyesight is fine-tuned for daylight hunting.

They have eight eyes.

You can see them more clearly on their mom.

The three smaller pairs on the sides see motion, making it hard for predators to sneak up on them.

Their central pair are their principal eyes that allow them to see crisp detail and vivid color. They also help these cuties judge distance so they can land on target.

Something catches the spiderling’s attention.

But at first, the spiderling is a bit unsure of what to do.

It doesn’t have a teacher. So it’s gotta improvise.

OK, that could have gone better.

Got it!

But now what?

Aww!

All right, this time, no messing around.

The spiderling tries out its fangs for the very first time. It doesn’t take long before this tiny hunter enjoys the sweet taste of success.

With practice, the spiderling improves its technique.

As she grows, she gets fuzzy, like really fuzzy. And gains the confidence to take on bigger and stronger prey.

Over six to nine months, this self-made spider has become a stone cold killer.

She’s the apex predator … at least on this twig.

In order to mate, a male long-jawed orb weaver spider has to hook his huge jaws into those of a larger female. If he doesn’t get it right, he could become her next meal.

TRANSCRIPT

These spiders aren’t fighting. They’re hooking up, literally. But one of them could easily lose its life in the process.

They’re called long-jawed orb weavers, named for their huge jaws tipped with lethal curved fangs. And these bulbous pedipalps? Only males have them. You’ll see them in action later.

Long-jawed orb weavers spin their web right over a river or pond. A sticky trap for insects that hatch from the water.

When an unlucky fly gets caught, she impales it with her fangs. She squishes the fly into a slimy ball and slurps it all up.

But catching prey isn’t the only thing her web is good for. She coats each strand of silk with pheromones that males find irresistible. So when he’s searching for a mate, he follows the scent – with his legs. Spiders smell with these specialized hairs that can detect pheromones.

In a lab experiment, a male repeatedly follows the unique perfume that females of his species leave behind, like a trail of breadcrumbs. In nature, the stakes are much higher. When this guy goes after a scent, he’s putting his life on the line.

Females are bigger; one wrong move and she could overpower and eat him. He rushes towards her; he has to act fast to get a good grip. He locks his jaws on to hers to keep her deadly fangs away from him.

This tiny hook latches on to her fangs on each jaw. They become a beautifully dangerous entanglement. Face to face, they curve towards each other. He raises his skinny pedipalp, ending in what looks like a boxing glove.

Then he twists it in like a lightbulb. Inside each boxing glove is his sperm. Once he connects, elastic membranes inflate and deflate, each movement propelling his sperm onward.

Okay, this isn’t exactly a quickie. After a few minutes he moves on to the second boxing glove. It takes both, alternating, to deliver his goods. The whole time, he’s still holding her back. His jaws. Her jaws.

He prepared for this moment earlier by collecting sperm from his abdomen with his gloves.

When he’s done, there’s no time to cuddle, because if he sticks around for too long he might still become her next meal.

Sometimes, love really is a battlefield.

The mosquito buzzing that you find annoying and disgusting is irresistible to a male mosquito. He follows the sound of a female mosquito’s beating wings to find a mate. It turns out, male mosquitoes are really good listeners.

TRANSCRIPT

You’re settling in for a nap.

Just as you drift off … That’s the sound of a female mosquito’s wings. Shoo!

She’s on her way to bite you.

When Aedes aegypti females dig in, they can transmit dangerous diseases, like yellow fever and dengue.

Only females bite us. She needs your nutritious blood to make her eggs.

Of course, she also needs a date. An aerial romance. Scientists are studying how exactly mosquitoes hook up.

The sound of a female’s wings flapping helps a male find her. It turns out, male mosquitoes are really good listeners.

My, what hairy antennae you have!

His antennae give him exquisitely sensitive hearing. And for him, sound is the stuff of life.

As he flies, he can beat his wings over 1,000 times per second. This churns out a whiny tone, with the loudest frequency around 600 hertz.

A female beats her wings slower, with her loudest frequency around 400 hertz.

Check this out. If you blast a tone around 400 hertz out of your headphones, a male is drawn in like a magnet. Even this electronic sound does the trick.

The male hears the difference between his sound and hers.

First, he’s gotta go where the ladies hang out. So, even though he doesn’t bite, he makes the rounds at one of their favorite lunch spots: your ankles. Our foot stink attracts them.

When she flies by, her wings move the air, which moves his antennae and all its hairs.

This triggers sensors inside these round pedicels at the base of his antennae: his ears … between his eyes. The sensors – 16,000 of them – send information to the brain. That’s as many sensory cells as we have in each ear.

He follows his ears to a female. But, buzzkill, she just kicks him away. Turns out, this happens a lot. In one experiment, researchers tethered females to strands of hair so they could film them flying in slow motion.

They found that males get rejected 85% of the time. Ouch!

If a male doesn’t get the boot, he moves to face her and hangs on to her with his legs. Then he curves his abdomen towards her and uses these tiny claspers to attach to her body and mate in midair – for up to 30 seconds.

She only mates once. Then she finds a small pool of water and lays her eggs right above the surface.

They become aquatic larvae … then, grow into pupae.

A few days later, an adult pulls itself out. From air to water and back to the air again.

Great, more mosquitoes in the world.

By studying how mosquitoes listen carefully to find a mate, maybe scientists can mess with their buzz.