In the natural world, you need to be smart to stay alive.
But we're only just discovering that some animals are brighter
than we ever imagined.
I've never failed to be impressed by nature's sheer ingenuity.
Now, brand-new science,
using innovative techniques and the latest technology,
is revealing some surprising brainboxes.
You can get bees to learn almost anything.
Researchers across the globe...
BOTH: Ah!
..are uncovering the mind-blowing tricks...
..and clever strategies that give certain species the upper hand...
It is an animal showcasing its intelligence in front of your eyes.
..as they build their homes...
..navigate their world...
..and raise their young.
It's time to get inside the minds of nature's savviest species.
But I warn you, there's going to be a few surprises
and some controversial candidates.
But most importantly, it's going to give us an opportunity to learn
from these Animal Einsteins
and that's really exciting.
In this programme, I'll discover how nature's smartest animals
seemingly con their way to success,
how cheetah cubs fool predators into thinking they're too feisty
to mess with...
..how gulls rob us by reading our body language...
..and how an octopus can hide in plain sight.
In the animal kingdom, you need to use every trick
in the book to survive and prosper.
Now, you might be wondering why I've chosen to play poker
with a magpie, an animal with a reputation for being cunning,
deceitful and, worst of all, a thief.
But what about that reputation?
Is it genuinely deserved?
Well, not entirely.
That fondness for stealing shiny things,
it's all folklore, I'm afraid.
And actually, as it turns out, they prefer things which are dull.
All right, play fairly.
They are undeniably very smart birds, members of the corvid family,
famed for being the most brainy of all.
They're constantly curious, always on the lookout
for anything of interest.
If you're out and about and you see a magpie up to no good,
keep an eye on it. You're bound to learn something.
Magpies work together to see off competition and will snatch
a meal whenever they can.
It's this crafty behaviour that's given these birds
an undeserved reputation. They're simply opportunistic omnivores,
using their brains to get by.
And what we're dealing with here is our perceptions
of a very smart bird.
Thank you very much.
At least they pay their debts.
The animal kingdom is rife with deceit and trickery, though.
And arguably the single most important reason to con...
..is to avoid being eaten.
Wow.
So alien.
It's one of the most protein-packed meals on the coral reef
and it comes without a protective shell.
Yes, it's the octopus - the cephalopod.
It has the remarkable ability to totally
transform its colour and texture.
It's a master of disguise.
So how do they do it?
Like other cephalopods, cuttlefish and squid,
they share this extraordinary superpower
of being able to change the colour of their skin.
They do this to communicate with one another, as well as disguising
themselves to creep up on prey or evade predators.
Cephalopods have millions of ink sacs in their skin
called chromatophores, each filled with colour pigments,
which they can contract or expand to produce the desired colour.
Not only that, octopus and cuttlefish have another trick
up their tentacles.
They can adjust their texture, too,
using muscle fibres in their skin called papillae,
which they can turn into all manner of three-dimensional shapes,
mimicking the reef around them.
For an octopus, these are amazing tools to conceal yourself.
But it's knowing how to use them, which colour and pattern to choose
and when, that's truly astonishing.
They have a very sophisticated Ferrari-type brain.
Professor Roger Hanlon is one of the top cephalopod scientists
in the Western Hemisphere.
He prefers the direct route on his commute to
the marine biological lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
Roger and his team have studied this rapid camouflage behaviour
in over 800 individuals.
It's lively, it's bright, it's exciting and it's confusing.
And we biologists love those things.
He's spent the last 20 years in the field
capturing these incredible masters of disguise on camera
to later analyse in the lab.
They're changing their appearance on average about 170 times per hour.
Every one of those is a discrete decision the animal has to make
based on what's around it and where the food and the predators
are and deciding what pattern to put on his body
so that it can be like the ultimate con artist.
This requires some serious coordination,
strategising and planning.
However, despite all of this, there's one mind-boggling fact.
Guess what.
The octopus is colour-blind.
So how do you achieve colour-blind camouflage?
Roger and his colleagues have discovered that cephalopod skin
contains opsin, a light-sensitive molecule
normally found in the retina of the eye.
So, can they see with their skin?
The answer is...don't know...yet, but we're working on it.
Exactly how the octopus senses its surroundings
may still be a mystery,
but we do know that their quick decision-making is helped
by their highly efficient brain structure.
They have one central doughnut- shaped brain and eight smaller
brains, essentially nerve clusters called ganglia,
in each of their eight arms.
They can outsource some of this sensory processing work
to their ganglia, creating one of the most
neurologically efficient decision-making pathways
in the animal kingdom.
This allows them to change their appearance in just 200
milliseconds, literally the blink of an eye.
Roger's footage shows how they use this sensory ability
to match both the colour and contours of their surroundings,
effectively becoming shape shifters.
The animal sees these spiky things in the distance,
so it makes itself like a moving piece of algae or seaweed.
These animals are really paying attention to making decisions
on the go and they're taking in a lot of information and some
of that information is metres away from them.
But being able to change their skin colour and texture
is not a foolproof con.
Sooner or later, camouflage might fail.
Sometimes they do catch the eye of a predator.
So what then?
Roger and his team have discovered the octopus
has another clever ploy to buy itself time to escape.
They flash something very dramatically and very quickly.
In the visual field of the predator approaching them,
what they were about to eat turns into something else.
And if that fails,
they have an emergency all-guns-blazing trump card.
It's called "protean behaviour",
named after the Greek god Proteus, the god of unpredictability.
Which means by turning yourself into something so bizarre,
the predator is conned into thinking you are not an octopus.
They cycle fast through dazzling shapes and colours -
this one reminiscent of a venomous lionfish.
The point is to be bamboozling and unpredictable.
Deciding whether to camouflage, startle or switch
to protean behaviour requires ridiculously quick decision making.
This superfast change is a bit analogous to a supercomputer,
and this is not a vertebrate animal.
We think all vertebrates are the smartest things around
and invertebrates, that don't have a skeleton or backbone,
are not as smart.
Nonsense.
Absolute nonsense indeed.
And they have a final ruse in their repertoire.
They may have evolved without a protective shell,
but that doesn't mean they can't acquire one to deceive others,
whether to hide from predators...
..ambush their prey...
..or make a quick escape.
They are the only known invertebrates to use tools like this,
placing them in an intellectually elite group alongside a mere handful
of vertebrate species.
What incredible animals - speedy and complex brain power,
matched with sophisticated camouflage.
It's a winning combination.
Disguising yourself to be something you're not isn't just a tactic
the octopus relies on,
it's used by many a con artist.
In fact, faking it can get you a long way.
Forgery is one of the oldest tricks in the book.
If you can make two things look identical,
you can con people out of almost anything.
Take these banknotes, for example.
One is real and the other is a fake.
So if I put you on the spot, which would you choose?
Well, if you went for the single fiver, you could get yourself a nice
slice of cake perfectly legally.
But if you got greedy and chose the wodge here and tried to pass
these off down the supermarket, you could get yourself
into a lot of trouble.
But this sort of visual deception has been going on in nature
for millions of years with one difference, and that is,
if you get caught out, the consequences are far greater.
For one con artist in the Maasai Mara, in Kenya,
pulling off a convincing illusion could be a matter of life and death.
These savannah grasslands are teeming with prey and predators alike,
including the cheetah.
They may be the fastest land mammal in the world,
but their young, who can't use their famed speed to escape,
are particularly vulnerable to lions and hyenas,
who would kill a rival predator's cubs, given half a chance.
But there's a theory that cheetah cubs may have deception
on their side.
Sophie Sadera has been a ranger in the Maasai Mara for over ten years.
I spot a cheetah under the tree, there.
She's seen how cheetah cubs survive,
despite living in such close proximity to other predators.
This is a fully-grown one, but if you look at the babies,
they have that fluffy coat,
and very hairy at the back.
It's this fluffy hair that could be a vital clue as to how they keep safe.
These cubs are just a few months old, but younger, newborn cubs
look decidedly different.
Their blond mohican top, alongside their dark black flanks,
bears a striking resemblance to another animal.
When you look at the hair, starting from the head, the neck
and then all the way to the back,
it looks exactly like that of a honey badger.
Honey badgers have a fearsome reputation on the savannah.
BADGER GROWLS
They're ferocious and aggressive.
Even lions know to keep their distance.
It's a very, very small animal, but it doesn't matter which animal
will try to go for them.
It doesn't matter how big it is,
but they'll always fight back.
Nothing messes with a honey badger.
And they have a distinctive mane of coarse, erect, dirty blond hair
on their backs and heads.
Look familiar?
The newborn cheetah cub's shaggy mane does look remarkably similar.
So could it be more than a coincidence?
Like others, Sophie believes it's a clever form of mammalian
mimicry to con predators into keeping well clear.
From her years on the savannah,
she reckons that this cunning camouflage might work best
with airborne threats like eagles.
I've never seen a bird of prey picking up a baby cheetah,
but I've seen a bird of prey picking up a baby lion.
That colour of the honey badger
on their backs really helps them because these birds of prey
will be scared of picking up the honey badger.
And perhaps it's not just visual mimicry
that's keeping them out of trouble.
They call like, um...
MIMICS BABY CHEETAH'S HIGH-PITCH CALL
CHEETAH CALLS
That call is very different to that of a lion cub
or young leopard.
Biologists have speculated that the cub's call mimics
that of a bird, allowing them to communicate with Mum,
but crucially, remain under the radar to predators.
Who knew that cheetahs are cheating rival predators
right under their noses?
And with only one in three making it to adulthood,
they need every con artist trick in the book.
Whilst cheetah cubs pretend to be something they're not to keep
danger at bay,
some animals use imitation to sneak into a nice, warm home.
Like the Alcon blue butterfly.
As a caterpillar, it emits rhythmical noises to con others.
Just listen to this.
RHYTHMIC PULSING
It's remarkable, isn't it?
Remarkable and essential
because its musical abilities are absolutely imperative
to its survival and that of the species.
Alcon caterpillars must survive the European winter,
which means not freezing to death and finding enough food until the spring.
So they look to pull off one of the cleverest cons in the animal
world by disguising themselves as ant larvae.
Not the obvious choice, you might think.
They produce a cocktail of chemicals which mimic the smell
of the Myrmica ants' own larvae.
Thinking one of their own has gone AWOL,
the worker ants are then conned into rescuing them,
bringing them back into their warm underground nest.
Having tricked their way into finding shelter,
the caterpillars then carry out another audacious scam
in an effort to get fed.
Yes, this is where that musical ability comes in.
RHYTHMIC PULSING They create sounds
that mimic a queen ant.
Now considered royalty,
they get preferential treatment over the ants' own larvae,
being regularly cleaned and fed.
Then when the warmer weather arrives in spring, they pupate,
bid their hosts goodbye and make their way back
to the great outdoors.
A picture of innocence that belies their duplicitous start in life.
Which goes to show -
looks can be deceiving.
There are some animals that you expect to be a bit sneaky,
but come on, not sea otters.
Surely butter wouldn't melt in their mouths.
Look at this scene, here, a pup playing with its parents.
Or is it?
I've got to tell you, what's going on here is probably not quite
as innocent as it might seem.
Let me just rewind this.
We need to take a look at what happened right before.
Here's our cute pup, with its mother...
..frolicking in the Californian waves. Nothing sinister here.
And here's a male cruising the harbour.
This is clearly his territory.
Now, he has a problem of sorts.
Staying warm in cold water requires a high metabolic rate,
which means he needs to eat a lot, 25% of his body weight each day,
to be precise.
So he has a choice - dive down to find it, expending time and energy,
or devise a way to get a free meal.
He waits for the female to dive on a foraging mission,
leaving her pup alone at the surface.
PUP SQUEALS
This gives the male an opportunity.
He's kidnapped the pup.
When the mother surfaces with food and hears her distressed pup,
of course, she gives up her goods in exchange for her baby.
It's classic hostage-taking behaviour, deliberate manipulation
of the females and surprisingly frequent in sea otters.
They pick exactly the right time because they know what the outcome
will be - free food.
Kidnap in exchange for food
is thought to be unique to sea otters, and it earns some males
a large portion of their food.
It's cruel, but it's clever and it proves the crime pays.
And just like in our species,
they're not afraid to do over their own for an easy life.
Conning one's own kind isn't the preserve of sea otters.
There's another species that kidnaps its own, not for food,
but to protect the next generation.
To see it in action, we're travelling to eastern Australia
on the trail of a devilishly clever bird, endemic to these parts.
The gregarious white-winged chough lives in a super-social family group
of up to 20.
And when two different families meet,
something curious often plays out.
What you're seeing here is an unsuspecting chick being conned,
through the medium of dance, to join a rival gang...
..much like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
So, what's going on?
It's crazy, it's actually too crazy to work.
Biologist Dr Constanza Leon,
from the Australian National University, studies chough society.
Many times I feel like I'm serving a group of primates,
just because of how many social interactions you observe.
Most group members are teenage offspring,
with just one dominant pair of adults that breed.
Somewhere, there, is the breeding pair and all the rest are helpers
that stay in the group and help their own parents
to rear their siblings.
Nothing too unusual about that.
In nature, older siblings often help raise later broods.
It makes sense, if you can't yet breed yourself,
to support your brothers and sisters so that some of your genes
are passed down.
The difference is in chough society, new chicks are so needy
that they simply won't survive without the help
from the extended family.
Scientists estimate it takes a minimum of seven choughs
to raise just one chick.
Baby choughs are very useless.
They can't feed on their own,
they can defend themselves and they can't even fly properly
for a month.
So they need as much help as they can get.
So, for choughs, rearing chicks has to be a joint effort.
Every member of the group helps with every breeding task.
That's all they do all day, taking care of these fledglings.
From preening, feeding, defending,
that's their lives during the breeding season.
This communal childcare frees up the breeding pair
to produce another brood.
But when times get tough and drought hits,
foraging enough insects becomes even harder.
So choughs turn to devious means to recruit extra labour.
The key to their con is this innocent display here.
The wing-wave tail-wag.
A display looks like chough opening
their wings and showing the white tips of their...of their feathers.
And then they enlarge their eyes
and they move their tails up and down.
Usually adults display to their fledglings after they feed them.
When they do this to young chicks, chicks follow them.
And that's the key.
Choughs manipulate the signals they use to feed their own chicks
to cleverly lure youngsters from other groups into their family.
Young choughs are easily fooled.
They don't know really who's their family, so they can, yeah,
they would follow any adult that displays.
Kidnapping another family's youngsters to help raise your own
chicks might seem like a dastardly trick, but it works.
The bigger the group, the more fledglings a group can rear.
So this kidnapping works as a way of making the groups bigger.
There's a saying, "Many hands make light work",
and there's no doubt that, like us, choughs value teamwork.
Like mass-producing goods on a production line,
choughs can churn out more chicks per breeding season
with many labourers.
You can't argue.
Their behaviour leaves groups better equipped
to ensure the future of their own offspring.
It's certainly cunning, but is it intelligent?
I think it does take intelligence to be able to recognise,
not only who belongs to your group, but also make decisions
about who you want to form a relationship with.
I think that's a sign of intelligence, for sure.
CHOUGHS CAW
Choughs might exploit youngsters to raise their own chicks,
but when it comes to protecting their legacy,
bottlenose dolphins do something far more sinister.
Around the world, there have been cases of baby dolphins dying
in suspicious circumstances.
Scientists were stumped.
You see, they didn't seem to be diseased,
nor had they suffered from malnutrition.
So what was going on?
Well, let me talk you through the crime file.
Firstly, let's take a look at the victims.
They had both internal and external bruising,
some of them had broken ribs and a broken spine.
What could have inflicted that injury in the sea?
Well, the obvious prime suspect is a ship strike,
but not agile young dolphins, like this.
Could it have been predators?
After all, there are plenty of sharks out there
and very occasionally orca, too.
But if a predator takes the trouble to kill its prey,
it normally takes the trouble to eat its prey.
But there was some other evidence on their bodies, in the form
of this deep raking carved into the flesh.
What could have caused that?
Well, this is a dolphin skull.
And if you look at the spacing of the teeth here,
they almost exactly correspond to the spacing of these slashes
of the young deceased animals.
It appears that this was a classic case of cetaceal infanticide
and the culprit was, in fact, another bottlenose dolphin.
It's certainly disturbing behaviour.
So why might dolphins kill young of their own species?
Well, it's the males who are responsible for these attacks.
And by killing calves they've not fathered, they'll bring the mother
into season more quickly, ready to carry THEIR young instead.
It's a devastating loss for the mothers.
They're powerless to stop the larger males...
..or are they?
Actually, the females may have a cunning method to help
protect their babies.
The females will mate with up to 13 different males.
Now, this isn't unusual.
In many species, females will have multiple partners.
Often, this is attributed to sperm competition,
a strategy to secure the best genes for your offspring.
But interestingly, bottlenose females continue to mate
with multiple males even after they become pregnant.
There's a theory that this is a clever strategy,
a con to fool each of the males into believing THEY could be the father
so THEY won't harm the calf.
It may not always work.
For example, a new male might arrive from outside the area
who could never be fooled into thinking he was the father.
But infanticide is a rare enough occurrence to suggest
that this con is successful most of the time.
It's a smart deception that could ensure
the survival of their offspring.
So dolphins use sneaky mating as a tactic to protect their young.
But what if you have to be plain sneaky in the first place
just to be able to mate?
Cuttlefish, just like the octopus from earlier,
can also con predators and prey by changing the colour and texture
of their skin.
But they also use this colour-changing prowess
to deceive each other.
And they're particularly two-faced when it comes to mating.
In giant Australian cuttlefish society, size matters.
The larger males fight off the smaller rivals
and get the ladies.
So what's a little male cuttlefish to do?
These sly con artists employ a daring ruse.
They camouflage themselves to look like the females.
Disguise on, with submissive female body language and nerves of steel,
this one approaches the large male guarding a lady under his body.
The big male thinks his luck is in.
It's not unusual for males to guard several females beneath them,
so he warmly invites the fake female into his lair.
The sneaky male makes full use of his hospitality...
..and manages to mate with the female right under the nose
of his far larger rival,
without him ever noticing.
Otherwise, he'd aggressively separate the duo.
The sneaky male's life mission is now complete,
ensuring that some of the next generation carry his cunning genes.
Proof, then, that brains can outsmart brawn.
But it's a daredevil, high-risk strategy.
There's another species of cuttlefish, the mourning cuttlefish,
which outsmarts rival males by using two-faced deception
of a slightly different kind.
By quite literally turning the other cheek.
Oh, yes, they have the capacity to appear to be female on one side
and male on the other at the same time.
I discovered this con artist cuttlefish behaviour
almost by accident.
Martin Garwood is the marine biologist who first witnessed
this sneaky new behaviour in his lab
at the Macquarie University in Sydney.
I had three animals in a tank.
They were spread out - one, two, three...
..and I just happened to look over and the one in the middle
had split its body in half...
..with male colours on one side
and female colours on the other.
The more I looked, the more I realised he was showing male colours
to a female and female colours to this other male
that was watching.
To the rival male, it looked like two females hanging out,
a potential double mating opportunity.
To the female, she could see this male trying to court her.
You see, using this side, they can approach that rival male
and he thinks, "I'm in with a chance of getting a second female."
And then once there, using this side, they can attract
the female and mate with her.
The key is to delay the rival male's advances until the con artist
has mated with the female.
It's a pretty bold, brazen con,
requiring some sophisticated brain power to pull it off.
The more I was watching, the more intricate it became.
And he finally ended up mating with the female.
So it allowed this con artist male in the middle to court a female
and con a rival simultaneously, which was just kind of mind-blowing
to me in that moment.
This observation had never been documented.
It was brand-new behaviour to science.
No other animal on the planet has been observed carrying out
this split display, appearing both male and female at the same time.
That was really kind of amazing light-bulb moment.
It was almost the cuttlefish behaviour equivalent of discovering
penicillin in bread mould.
The discovery may have come about fortuitously,
but Martin had only seen this behaviour
in the artificial setting of the lab.
So he took to the ocean around Sydney Harbour to find out,
crucially, if it happened in the wild, too.
So I was scuba diving with a camera and came across a group of two
cuttlefish and I got a little excited because I could see
the split display was happening.
He was half-male-half-female, but I hadn't yet seen a rival male.
So I zoomed in on the cuttlefish so I could see the split display.
And then out of the side came this rival.
It was the proof Martin was looking for,
that this complex con does indeed happen in the wild as well.
But more than that, he discovered, in their subterfuge,
an extra layer of complex decision making.
The cuttlefish were evaluating their surroundings to calculate
precisely when to use it.
One of the most interesting aspects of this deceptive behaviour
is it only occurs with a single rival watching.
So when we saw larger groups of cuttlefish,
with more than one rival, we never saw the deceptive con.
And here's why.
The deceptive con can only work when both the female
and the competing male are perfectly positioned at 90 degrees
either side of him.
He must constantly assess his surroundings and adjust
his position to stay orientated in such a way that the competing male
can only see his female side.
But what if another male arrives on the scene?
With two male competitors at different angles,
it's now impossible to maintain the ruse.
Knowing the game is up, that clever cuttlefish would,
in all likelihood, call off the con.
It really leads me to believe that mourning cuttlefish
are kind of expert con artists of the animal kingdom.
But how do you measure the intelligence of this behaviour?
So it's difficult to compare cuttlefish to humans and think
we're not the same because they can't do maths like us
or build cities.
But their intelligence is perfectly designed for their own world
and their own lifestyle.
Normally, these complex cognitive behaviours happen in mammals
like ourselves, dolphins, gorillas.
So what cuttlefish can teach us about cognition
is that a more simple life form can still have their own version
of intelligence to get a leg up in the mating game.
It's no surprise that underhand tactics are used left, right
and centre in the mating game.
After all, every animal's ultimate
goal is to pass on their genes to the next generation
and make sure their offspring survives.
In the eastern United States is a female whose double-crossing
is deadly - all for the sake of her young.
We're in search of these.
Fireflies are this really sort of friendly gateway insect.
But it turns out that they have this really dastardly side.
THUNDER RUMBLES
And that's really exciting biology.
Let's go find some.
Professor Sarah Lower is a passionate advocate
for the firefly's treacherous ways.
But to understand their deceit,
first, you need a crash course in firefly mating habits.
The males are the ones up in the air flashing as they scout for females.
Each species communicates with its own specific code.
One species might have a long flash like this.
Another species might have a faster flesh like this.
It's like a Morse code that they use to identify and choose mates.
The males are communicating with the females.
They're the ones hunkered down in the grass,
assessing the males flying along.
When a female sees a pattern that she likes,
she will reply to it with a flash of her own.
The male, seeing the female flash, will flash again at her
and they'll go back and forth and back and forth until the male
finds the female and they mate.
Now, here's the crucial bit.
Most fireflies only speak their own species' language...
..except for one con artist on the block.
Meet the Photuris firefly, commonly known as the femme fatale...
..for reasons that will soon become clear.
They can speak the language of the other fireflies.
They will eavesdrop on the conversations of these mating
prey species and use those conversations to their own advantage.
Immediately after a femme fatale has mated with her own species,
she switches languages, signalling to males of other species,
luring them in on the pretext of mating.
But instead, she has them for dinner.
Digesting their prey while they're still alive
and sucking their juices out.
We get the picture, Sarah - pure, unadulterated cannibalism.
Now, we'll get on to why this species chooses to munch
on its neighbours in a moment, but first, let's think
about what it takes to be a multilingual insect.
Well, it turns out that their system of flashing is very similar
to our Morse code.
In fact, there's been some flashing going on for some time.
Give me a minute to translate.
"Hello, stranger.
"Do you want to come to my room...
"..for coffee?"
Be rude not to answer, wouldn't it?
Give me a sec.
Getting back to that code -
I was able to translate that because it was Morse, in English,
but it occurs in a whole range of different languages
and that is perhaps what these fireflies are doing,
because in order to properly mimic that system of communication,
they would have to get the flashes, the duration of those flashes
and the pauses in between exactly right
to convince those other insects.
Why go to all of that trouble?
To understand why the so-called femme fatale has developed
this ingenious strategy to consume her suitors,
we need to track down those poor, unsuspecting males.
We are surrounded by femme fatale food right now.
Oh. Oh, yeah.
There you go, there he is.
That's a tasty morsel.
You're coming with me, bud.
Full of lucibufagins.
Say that again, Sarah.
Lucibufagins.
That's it. They are the key to what's going on here.
Most of the Earth's 2,000 species of firefly contain toxic chemicals,
lucibufagins, that ward off predators and, importantly,
protect their eggs from being eaten. Most, but not the femme fatale.
Oh, there's a female. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Ha-ha.
So right there is a femme fatale.
Femme fatale fireflies have lost the ability to produce the toxin,
and so the only way that they can get that is to eat other fireflies.
To protect her progeny, this multilingual assassin steals
the toxins from other species.
Toxins are chemically complex -
they take a lot of energy to produce.
So stealing them is more efficient than making them,
an evolutionary stroke of genius that has earned the femme fatale her name.
That is one intimidating female.
But I've got to tell you, there's a twist in the tail of this story,
which I absolutely love.
Imagine for a moment that you are male of the femme fatale firefly
species, flying around looking for a mate, but all the females
are mimicking the prey species.
How on earth do you find them?
What's a male to do?
Well, they mimic the flashing of the male prey species
so they can fly down and very quickly mate with THEIR females
before beating a hasty retreat.
That is the ultimate double bluff - dress up as a wolf in sheep's
clothing to get close to a wolf in sheep's clothing.
But the million-dollar question is, is all of this multilingual
deception nature or nurture?
We don't know. SHE LAUGHS
This could be an innate behaviour that's preprogramed genetically.
This could be a learned behaviour and maybe they are thinking
about which flash to emit.
We don't know yet, but it's still sort of the Wild West
and the new frontier of genetics research.
Either way, the femme fatale's alluring flashes are essentially
to safeguard the next generation.
For other animals, though, luring in prey is very simply
about surviving from one day to the next.
QUACKING
I've got a pond here, and I'd quite like to lure some ducks in,
add to the biodiversity,
so I'm trying to do so using this duck caller, here.
What's interesting is that many of these devices are species-specific.
There's a particular caller for a particular type of duck.
And what's more, the person using it needs to know how to quack
exactly like that species of duck.
I think I need a bit more practice.
And very obviously, I'm not going to be shooting them
and nor am I going to be eating them.
But there are many other species of animals that lure other species
of animals in so they can eat them.
CONTINUES CALLING
As I just failed to demonstrate,
to lure in your prey, you have to really know your prey.
The alligator snapping turtle is the biological equivalent
of a fishing line.
It's evolved over millennia to be able to use its tongue as bait.
This fraudster is a snake that mimics a spider.
I kid you not.
Until 2006, the curious structure on the spider-tailed viper's
rear end was written off as an abnormal growth.
But no, this brilliant deceitful arachnid-shaped appendage
lures hungry birds to an untimely death.
I'm in love.
Look at this.
When it comes to animal lures, surely nothing beats
the beautiful orchid mantid.
And for more than 100 years, much misunderstood.
You see, we used to think that it was purely using camouflage,
that it would sit on flowers perfectly matching its background
and any pollinators that approached those flowers would be seized
instantaneously and munched up.
It turns out that we were wrong.
They're not camouflaged on a flower.
They're mimicking an actual flower.
How does it do it?
Well, those insects spot the mantid and their little brains
say, "Whoopee, masses of nectar. Here we go."
And then when it gets closer, they get to see its body - what a body.
Can you see those ephemeral flanges, there,
the way that its legs have thickened to look like petals?
Well, they convince those insects that it is a flower,
and when they try to pitch on it, it's the last thing they do.
But do you know what's even more clever?
The mantid is even better at attracting insects than a flower.
You see, this insect emits pheromones to attract
those pollinators with a greater degree of efficiency
than the flowers do.
They've beaten botany.
You couldn't make it up.
Most animals, though, don't have thousands of years of evolution
offering them the perfect alluring body.
No, most have to think a little more laterally and use their minds.
They have to strategise to get dinner.
It's something not lost on the hoodwinking heron family.
Take these black egrets.
They're partial to the smallest fish in this big pond,
which are quite hard to find.
But knowing that their nervous prey like to shelter in a safe,
shady spot, they create their own shade
to con fish within gobbling range.
Clever.
Other species of heron use food to con prey.
Hank is a wild night heron who makes the most
of living a comfortable life in an all-inclusive Hawaiian resort.
And he, too, gets free meals,
if he can beat the swans.
Now he faces a choice...
..eat the food or forego it to lure in something tastier.
He uses the bread to con fish into coming to the surface.
That's more like it.
Protein over carbs any day.
Planning has paid off.
Bait fishing like this has been reported
in several species of wild heron.
It takes supreme self-control...
..and the ability to consider the future...
..both marks of complex behaviour and problem-solving ability.
Luring prey to come to you is one approach to finding food,
but some con artists simply use old-fashioned criminal tactics
and steal instead.
Like the gulls,
in particular the lesser black-backed dull
and the herring gull.
These canny birds don't just scavenge our leftovers
and there's more to their thieving than a simple snatch and grab.
LAUGHTER
To work out how to rob a bakery,
you have to be brainy as well as bold.
As generalists with varied diets, they adapt quickly to new foods,
giving them the edge over other birds.
Unsurprisingly, their brazen daylight robbery has given gulls
a pretty poor reputation.
But with coastal gull populations in sharp decline,
taking advantage of our urban areas has been a vital lifeline,
as well as a shrewd move.
Here, they only need forage for two to three hours a day.
Hundreds of thousands are now living it up in towns across Europe,
sampling the gastronomic delights.
Adjusting to a new habitat normally takes millennia of evolution.
Only the smartest of species have, in a few short decades,
learned to thrive in our concrete world.
So thief or brilliant opportunist?
Just how do these accomplished con artists pull it off?
We really hate it when gulls take our food.
I suppose you could liken it to how a human mugger
will take something from another person.
Obviously, gulls don't have this sense of morality, so we can't
really compare them to humans.
Exeter University researcher Madeleine Goumas
suspected there was something clever about their thieving behaviour.
So she made it her mission to study their modus operandi.
Having seen gulls take food from people, from behind,
I wondered if they were paying attention to human gaze.
Gulls have excellent eyesight.
So if you feel like you're being watched, you probably are.
Madeleine hypothesised that, just like the most adept pickpocket,
gulls only target victims who aren't paying attention
to their surroundings.
I devised an experiment to test this.
I got a bag of chips and I put them on the ground in front of me.
After placing a tempting belt on the floor,
she observed how the gulls responded when she looked at them
and when she didn't.
As Madeleine suspected, most gulls are more scheming than we thought.
In fact, they're astute observers of eye line and body language.
Her latest research has found that herring gulls
actively avoid our gaze.
They play the waiting game and won't approach
food until we're off guard.
They know where we're looking and they're using this information
to be able to get the food without being detected.
These wily birds constantly keep an eye out,
waiting until our backs are turned to take their chance.
Madeleine's research showed that only a quarter of gulls
will touch food when a human is watching.
Obviously, there are gulls that do snatch food,
but they seem to be in the minority.
We know from some anecdotal evidence that it's the same gulls
the tend to take people's food.
A species of brazen thieves?
No.
Only the reckless personalities dare take big risks.
Evolution rewards the right amount of caution.
Too bold risks harm, too meek goes hungry.
Like any successful con artist, most gulls only make a move
when the coast is clear.
So next time you're out clutching a precious pasty,
keep your wits about you and stare any hungry-looking gulls right in the eye.
From shrewd trickery to the most elegant of deceptions...
..you have to admire the cunning solutions that our animal Einsteins
have evolved to overcome life's challenges.
Clever duplicity and apparently criminal tactics are central
in allowing animals to eat well,
cheat death
and successfully pass on their genes.
Now, if you've pulled a few cons and you've survived in this big
wide world, then very obviously you're ahead in the game of life.
And as we've seen for some animal species, a little bit of camouflage
can confer an enormous advantage.
But you know, with a bit of artistic licence,
even we humans can give some species a run for their money.
I could have been predated.
Next time, I'll discover the clever methods that animals use to get
from A to B and how they find their way,
as we reveal more ingenious animal Einsteins.