Meet the animals who will steal, cheat and fight to get food, including kleptomaniac crabs, thieving macaques, con artist spiders, tricky tigers and cannibalistic lizards.
Noteworthy Facts:
- Coconut crabs weigh up to nine pounds and may be the world’s largest land crab. More than one million coconut crabs reside on Christmas Island, where they are known to locals as “robber crabs” for stealing anything they can get their claws on in a competition for food.
- Deer, the main prey of the tiger, are dichromats, which means their color vision comes from just two color receptors – they can only see greens and blues. This makes it harder to spot the orange stripes of tigers who wish to prey on them.
- Hummingbirds have to eat more than twice their bodyweight in food each day. Most hummingbirds get their food from the nectar of surrounding flowers in exchange for pollination. The Wedge-bill cheats this process by going straight to the base of the flower, opting out of pollination, but gaining the nectar. Scientists call this “floral larceny.”
Buzzworthy Moments:
- A jumping spider in the rainforest of Queensland must pass through an army of ants to feed on a nest full of delicious larvae. Feeding on ant larvae from birth gives the spider the ants’ chemical code and an identical smell so it can pass through the nest undetected.
- In Madagascar, chimpanzee families compete for the fruit of a fig tree. The groups must fight each other for rights to the territory: loud calls announce the start of battle, which escalates into a frenzied situation aimed to terrorize and intimidate. After a violent skirmish, one group emerges victorious.
- On a remote and barren island off the coast of Naxos, Greece, wall lizards resort to eating their own kind to not starve. Some even catch and swallow their victims whole.
About the Series
From a promiscuous prairie dog to a kleptomaniac crab and an alpha chimpanzee who reigns with an iron fist, this three-part miniseries explores the most rebellious animals in the natural world. But are these creatures really breaking bad? Across the world, new studies are uncovering an astonishing variety of insubordinate animal behaviors, and despite how it appears on the surface, researchers are discovering the complex and fascinating science behind why these animals behave the way they do. In fact, being a rebel could be the key to success in the wild.
Episode 1, “Hunger Wars” premiered Wednesday, April 25
Meet the animals who will steal, cheat and fight to get food, including kleptomaniac crabs, thieving macaques, con artist spiders, tricky tigers and cannibalistic lizards.
Episode 2, “Survival” premiered Wednesday, May 2
Some animals will do whatever it takes to survive. Cockatoos turn to vandalism, boxer crabs hold anemones hostage, sloths become filthy, puff adders have an ‘invisibility cloak’ to hide themselves, and chimps use violence to stay in power.
Episode 3, “The Mating Game” premiered Wednesday, May 9
Getting ahead in the mating game requires some astonishing behavior –from promiscuous prairie dogs to manakin pick-up artists, kidnapping macaques and hyenas with a bad case of sibling rivalry.
