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Your Inner Fish – Neil Shubin – PBS (2014)

September 24, 2024 at 4:06 pm / Evolution, Nova Documentaries, PBS Nature, Video

Your Inner Fish, is the first installment of a three part PBS series by Neil Shubin. After a quick review of our shared anatomy with the fish and a whirlwind tour along the evolutionary timeline, the program plunges us into the fascinating saga of discovery of the tetrapods that explains how limbs of the terrestrial vertebrates came to be. Watch how the legendary 375 million year old (Devonian) tetrapod fossil Tiktaalik was discovered after a series of adventurous Arctic expeditions. […]

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Mudskippers of the Tidal Mangrove Mudflats at the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve, Singapore

August 9, 2024 at 10:23 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Habitats along the land-sea interphase provided the setting for evolution of vertebrate adaptations needed to move onto the land. Mangrove mudflats formed within the intertidal zone provide a fantastic array of habitat qualities that enable selection of amphibious traits. These gently sloping habitats can extend hundreds of meters between the land and the sea and are exposed to air on a regular basis following tides. The extensive root systems of the semi-aquatic mangrove trees stabilize the coasts, providing a dependable […]

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Antifreeze Proteins in Virtual Reality – Nanome (2022)

May 9, 2024 at 2:04 pm / Evolution, Molecular Nature, Video

Dr. Mike Kuiper, a biomodeler at CSIRO’s Data61 explains how antifreeze proteins work in a metaverse compatible virtual reality environment enabled by Nanome. These ice structuring proteins, is a basis of survival for organisms evolved to live in very cold environments with temperatures below the freezing point of water. Essentially, these proteins can bind to the surface of ice crystals and create a surface effect leading to freezing-point depression. Bacteria, insects, fishes and many more organisms from different evolutionary backgrounds […]

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Eyed Click Bug (Alaus oculatus) Ovipositing

January 20, 2024 at 10:01 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Molecular Nature, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video

On May 26th 2012, this click beetle began laying her eggs on a log along the Orange trail of the State Botanical Garden of Georgia in Athens, GA. These beetles are quite noticeable due to their large size and distinctive eye patterns on their pronotum. At the beginning of the video (while she is stationary), you can see some very tiny red mites walking across her body. She wondered around on a downed tree and assessed possible egg laying sites. […]

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Chase Tag Championship and the Evolutionary Dynamics of Predator Prey Interaction

November 4, 2023 at 11:10 am / Evolution, Human Nature, Video

Playing chase is arguably one of the oldest in the game repertoire of human and non-human mammals. Chase Tag Championship is a sport event that has its roots in the parkour movement. Here, we see a fantastically beautiful demonstration of performance and human agility with fairly clear rules. Of course, biologically speaking there’s also a quite interesting story in terms of evolution of the predator-prey dynamics in the game. In the anatomy of a hunt researchers have shown that predators […]

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Cannonball Tree – Couroupita guianensis (Lecythidaceae) – Singapore Botanical Gardens

June 28, 2023 at 9:59 am / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Filmed on location at the Singapore Botanical Gardens on Nov 22nd 2016. The cannonball tree (Couroupita guianensis) from the Lecythidaceae (Brazil nut family) family is native to Neotropical forests. Its flowers are adapted for bat pollination possibly from an ancestral state of euglossine bee pollination. Here far away from its natural home, the flowers are being visited by stingless Meliponini bees. The flowers produce impressive levels of fragrance but yield no nectar. Therefore the reward for its visitors comes in […]

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Drone Footage of the Geldingadalur Volcano, Iceland – Olivier Grunewald (2021)

May 12, 2023 at 11:38 am / Evolution, Global Patterns

The drone footage by Olivier Grunewald shows the crater filling up and forming a short lived lava lake like the one that was present in the crater of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or that of Erta Alé in Ethiopia. Subsequently. the lava begins to cascade at high speed through an opening in the walls of the crater. The surface of the lava lake experiences bubbly explosions releasing hot gasses similar to Bembow and Marum craters […]

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Into Peru in Search of Plants – NYBG (2018)

October 22, 2022 at 12:20 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Video

Dr. Fabian Michelangeli is a curator at the New York Botanical Garden. Here in this short documentary, we see snaphots of phases of an expedition he organized to the Yanachaga–Chemillén National Park located in the cloud forests of Peru located in search of plants that help us better understand the state of global biodiversity, climate change, and other factors that contribute to far-reaching conservation efforts. The Andes mountain range of South America is a geological marvel that initiated the speciation […]

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The Passionate Wait

October 6, 2022 at 12:23 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

This short documentary highlights events before the opening of the passionflower (Passiflora incarnata) flowers. Drought conditions during the summer of 2011 increased the activity of many insects and spiders around the extrafloral nectaries of the plant. The water budget of the plants is strongest early in the morning. Flowers do not open until the middle of the day. At first, passion flower is generous especially to the ants in the morning providing ample volume of nectar. Ants provide protection to […]

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Acid Attack

September 22, 2022 at 10:22 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, NatureDocumentaries.org, Short Observations, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Nectar is an effective concoction for establishment and maintenance of plant-animal interactions. Using nectar, plants can build a community of allies for defense and even manipulate the behavior of pollinators. We are accustomed to nectaries found in flowers. Plants however, have evolved nectaries in other locations in their above-ground parts including the base of the flowers and petioles. These are called extrafloral nectaries. The sugary reward coming from the extrafloral nectaries invites ants to defend them. Here we can see […]

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Prominent Features of Leaf-footed Stinkbugs

August 5, 2022 at 8:18 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, Video

The leaf-footed stinkbugs have quite a few eye-catching body features including highly specialized mouthparts, offensive and defensive adaptations. This is an order of insects on which evolutionary pressures are visibly active shaping their morphologies. The evolutionary trade-offs underpinning these structures are an active research subject by biologists. Here, three characteristic body parts in leaf-footed stink bugs are highlighted: The labium, the pronotum and the components of the hind leg (femur and tibia). Entomologically, the femur and the tibia are the […]

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Popped Secret: The Mysterious Origin of Corn – Nathan Dappen & Neil Losin – HHMI (2015)

May 1, 2022 at 10:02 am / Evolution, Human Nature, Molecular Nature, Video

Domestication of plants and animals is a key transformation in recent Human evolutionary history leading to sedentary farming societies. Domestication of Maize particularly followed a different trajectory from the agricultural crops of the old world. This HHMI documentary tells how the ancestral wild grass called Teosinte was domesticated to evolve into Maize. In the old world, most domesticated grasses had a surprisingly similar “first step” that paved the way towards agriculture. In old world grasses including rice, wheat, barley and […]

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Great White Shark Pup off the Northern Aegean Coast of Turkey

April 6, 2022 at 1:03 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Video, Wildlife Documentaries

Be prepared to hear a fascinating piece of natural history about the Mediterranean great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias). The story is fascinating for multiple reasons. First, the great whites are one of the most charismatic, vulnerable, cryptic and misunderstood predator fish species. Second, it takes place in a quite unexpected location. Altınoluk is a town on the northern Aegean coast of Turkey. It is located to the south of Troy on a legendary sea route known as the Argonaut route […]

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Australian Walking Stick Insects are Three Times Weirder Than You Think | PBS – Deep Look (2022)

February 11, 2022 at 3:20 pm / Ecological Documentaries, Evolution, Natural history, PBS Nature, Short Observations

It is a seed, no it is an ant, no it is a leaf, no it is a stick,… Actually, it is all of the above through a temporally spaced sequence of disguises (*): It is the Australian walking stick (Extatosoma tiaratum). This insect is indeed a master of deception. It is a fascinating example of a series of adaptations that maximized its survival by multiple versions of mimicry successfully fooling predators at every stage of their life cycle. (*) […]

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Cone-headed Planthoppers (Acanalonia conica) on Passion Flower

February 5, 2022 at 2:11 pm / Evolution, Natural history, Short Observations, Video

This observation has been registered in the iNaturalist database with the following accession 105647409. Observed on August 9, 2014 at the Georgia State Botanical Garden in Athens, GA, USA. Here, you can see a number of cone-headed planthoppers (Acanalonia conica) feeding on a passion flower vine (Passiflora incarnata). The passion flower family (Passifloraceae) is well known for its sugar producing glands called extrafloral nectaries. These nectaries attract ants and here in this observation we see two species of ants (Formica […]

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