Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Engaging small talk
NATURE’S MINIATURE MIRACLES BBC2, 8pm LIFE is tough for the little guy. And if you’re surrounded by big animals and wild weather, you’ll need to develop some tough survival skills to avoid certain death.
With snippets of stunning close-up footage from all over the world, this film is like a whistlestop tour of some amazing, tiny heroes. In order to survive, they have evolved extraordinary skills and achieved mind-boggling feats. In the Caribbean, the hermit crab needs to find abandoned sea shells to use as a mobile home – moving house constantly as he grows. The tiny crabs have formed a sort of housing scheme, where they all share sea shells according to size. On the Great Barrier Reef, the epaulette shark (at less than 1m long) hunts for food when the tide is out and he knows that the 12m-long whale sharks have swum out to deeper waters. But that’s not the best bit. To avoid danger, epaulette sharks can also walk across land using their fins. Elsewhere, marvel at the escape strategy of a toad. Faced with a predator, he transforms into a ball, tensing his muscles rigid, before simply bouncing off out of harm’s way. There’s also a scorpion with Uv-sensitive marks on its shell which warn him about the approaching moonlight, which would give his location away. There are geckos with super water-repellent skin which means they literally don’t get wet – handy when you live in the jungle. And in the Sahara Desert, a dried-out ball of twigs looks like it has been dead for years, but the ‘resurrection plant’ literally ups sticks at the first sign of water and comes back to life in a puddle. But even stranger than that is the sight of an Australian peacock spider’s bizarre mating dance. And don’t even mention its amazing post-coital routine!