When life feels overwhelming, this animal just curls up into a ball. Thanks to a segmented body structure, it can hide its vulnerable underside and head, drawing its antennae inside to form an uninterrupted sphere. Zoologists call the behavior conglobulation. Conglobulation can be triggered by st...

Sit for a spell in wonder at the silently raucously chrysalis of a Phoebis philia butterfly.

Under the surface of a freshwater pond, microscopic organisms graze on shimmering reefs of photosynthesizing algae and bacteria. Explore a jewel-like aquatic realm, home to single-celled ciliates like Euplotes, Coleps, and Paramecia, as well as miniscule animals called Rotifers. Created in collab...

Meet a tiny 1000-celled animal living among single-cell organisms. Rotifers are weird and wonderful, like aliens on earth! Rotifers are among Earth's smallest animals, tied with Tardigrades. Despite their tiny size, these multicellular creatures display a surprising complexity that is both fascin...

Swirling green energy factories capture the energy of sunlight, thus enabling life on earth. Cytoplasmic streaming inside plant cells is very efficient -- the slow turning of each round chloroplast means every square micron gets a chance to create energy and oxygen from sunlight. Here, we're able...

Only a few will be Queen. Discover what it takes to start a new ant colony in this rare visit inside a founding queen's underground brood chamber.

Millipedes have the most legs of any animal. The distinctive traveling wave in its walk is a kind of auto-pilot. Using innovative slow-motion macro video, we observe the traveling wave motion of the legs move from the back to the front of the animal's long body. The workings of the walk involve a...

Harvester ants search a lovely variety of flowers for nectar and water. Ants are attracted to sweet foods (as well as fatty), and these are on the lookout for flower nectar, along with hydration from giant water droplets. This program was made with assistance from Les Greenberg and the University...

Ornithologist Richard Prum shares his knowledge of the natural math of feather patterning. Simple feather patterns can be predicted using mathematical models called Turing reaction-diffusion equations. As a feather grows, each new cell must decide whether it will receive pigment or not, depending...

Over a billion years ago, tiny jewel-like cyanobacteria oxygenated earth's atmosphere. These single-cell organisms are the reason we have air to breathe. Cyanobacteria are also believed to be the precursors responsible for photosynthesis and multicellularity as a whole. Cyanobacteria are found in...

Encounter hundreds of species of microbe that exist nowhere else on the planet outside of a termite's gut. These microbes enable their termite host to digest the wood it infamously devours. The termite and these microbes share what is called an obligate endosymbiotic relationship. That is, neithe...

Float along with colorful butterflies filmed in macro slow-motion. Featuring macro slow-motion video and thermal imaging, this program was made with the participation of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, as well as contributions of bio-mimetics footage and thermal imaging animations from...

A recently-mated ant queen digs a tunnel underground in a vigorous attempt to start a new colony. Only 2% of ant queens successfully found new colonies. The initial challenge is to select a suitable location for the new colony. Next, a newly-mated queen ant must dig down into the ground, where sh...

Cyanobacteria oxygenated Earth's atmosphere billions of years ago, allowing oxygen-using creatures to evolve. Cyanobacteria are also credited with devising photosynthesis and multicellularity. Today they provide 20% of Earth's oxygen. These photosynthesizing bacteria are found in many environment...

The first generation of ants raised by a new ant queen are called minims, and they are smaller than subsequent generations of ants. Right off the bat, the young female ants will tend the developing brood and venture above ground to find food to bring back to the queen and other colony members. Ov...

Harvester ants climbing on plants, drinking from giant water droplets, and foraging for food. Ant colony members are constantly communicating with one another through their chemical language of pheromones, as well as tactile cues and even moving air molecules. To be able to drink the water, the a...

The history of every ant colony traces back to the founding queen's first clutch of eggs. The queen patiently and attentively tends them while they develop into the subsequent immature life stages. The ant queen holds the eggs, stimulating them with touch. She must keep the eggs clean and safe fr...

Rare vantage of a new ant queen raising her first batch of brood through the immature life stages. Before it becomes an ant, an egg develops through three immature life stages. The 1st stage is egg, the 2nd is larvae, and the 3d is pupae. The queen constantly cleans her brood which protects them ...

Recording the anthill in its splendor of minute sprawling activities. A colony of Harvester ants patrols the ground, on-duty and at rest. An ant colony is optimized for efficiency, but that doesn't mean that all ants are working all the time. In fact, having a surplus of members is an important f...