In poem and song, man has paid tribute to the butterfly, the beauty of its wings, setting it apart from the billions of insects that inhabit the earth.
Most are anonymous, sharing our environment, but living and dying without recognition, going busily about as though the earth belonged to them alone.
Yet, to feel their presence, one has but to look and listen.
This is a journey into the hidden world of insects.
Music
Hello, I'm Mike Ferrell, your host for the best of the National Geographic specials, a landmark series from the National Geographic Society.
Discover with us man's quest for our world's hidden wonders and enduring drama.
The adventures we embark on may lead to a better understanding of ourselves.
There were insects on this planet more than 300 million years before we came on the scene, yet few of us show even the slightest respect for what is, after all, a far more permanent and heartier existence than our own.
Some insects are pests, but most are critical to the delicate balance of nature, and all are worthy of our close attention.
As the naturalist Sir Thomas Blunt observed, every flower of the field, every fiber of a plant, every particle of an insect carries with it the impress of its maker.
So let's take that closer look and journey into the fascinating world of butterflies, bees, termites, army ants, locusts, just to name a few.
Here, then, is the hidden world of nature's marvels, the insects.
Within our world exists still another, inhabited by creatures who live tucked away just beneath the surface of our lives, almost beyond the realm of man's awareness.
This is the hidden world, domain of the insects, and anywhere on earth one has but to turn back the petal of a flower to uncover the tranquil beauty and the terrifying violence of their existence.
A philosopher has written,
Something in the insect seems alien to the habits, morals, and psychology of this world, as if it had come from some other planet more monstrous, more infernal than our own.
What is known of this alien world has been learned mostly in the last hundred years.
Now, realizing the wealth of knowledge it contains, science is beginning to catch up to understand these tiny creatures.
At the California Institute of Technology, a multimillion-dollar computer complex is directly linked to a common housefly to trace a detailed picture of its entire nervous system.
Slowly, one by one, the secrets of the hidden world are being probed and deciphered, and man is only now beginning to fathom the mysteries of a life force that preceded him on earth by more than 300 million years.
An eternal sea, endlessly rocking, a cradle of life.
Here, over half a billion years ago, the story began.
Shrouded by the mists of time, minute creatures grasped the mysterious spark of life, holding it a moment, and then passing it on.
In the eons, the land remained barren and empty, but in the warm sunlit tidal pools, life endured.
Delicate marine creatures populated the waters, slowly finding form and function.
With the coming of plant life to the land, a new era of evolution began.
Ancestors of the scorpion were among the first creatures to struggle for survival in this new realm.
In the millenniums that followed, new life forms evolved.
The millipede, a harmless animal propelled by its hundreds of legs.
The centipede, a hunter armed with poisonous fangs.
And the spider, a superbly adapted predator whose species number in the thousands.
It was in this hostile environment that the insects appeared.
At first, they were tiny, wingless, and defenseless, much like the silverfish of today.
But the predecessors of the dragonfly assured the destiny of the insects.
These delicate creatures could escape their countless enemies because they had grown wings.
Some giants attaining wingspans nearly a yard wide.
Flight was a major breakthrough for the insects.
Away from the dangers of the forest floor, they took to the air, spreading across the face of the earth.
Insects ruled the skies long before any other creature could fly.
Succeeding where others failed, they overcame the violent upheavals of a changing earth,
relentlessly adapting in shape and function.
Nothing could stop them.
Sheer numbers gave them an enormous advantage.
Their reproductive powers are so staggering that within a single summer,
the offspring of a pair of insects could, if unmolested, blanket the globe from pole to pole.
The insects' impressions of the world around them come in odd and unexpected ways.
Some hear through their legs. Others taste through their feet.
Insects have compound eyes, extremely sensitive to movement.
Each of the many facets of the eye is a tiny lens system,
helping piece together in the insect's brain a mosaic picture of the total scene.
For defenseless insects, the key to survival is camouflage.
They weave shape, coloring, and movement into a fascinating tapestry of disguise.
African termite mounds stand as monuments to the success of their builders.
Within these fortresses, termites have ensured their survival
by combining the special talents of individuals to create an insect society.
Inside the hard, rock-like walls of these miniature mountains,
a well-developed caste system exists.
The majority of the population are workers.
Blind and defenseless, their task is to repair and extend
the intricate maze of subterranean passages and highways.
Soldier termites are dedicated to the defense of the nest.
Their powerful jaws are so large that they cannot feed themselves
and must be fed by workers.
Deep inside the mound is the royal chamber of the queen termite.
Swollen so large that her feet can no longer touch the floor,
she will spend the rest of her life in this hidden room.
Like a whale among minnows, she is a grotesque egg-laying machine
whose heaving bulk produces several thousand eggs each day
in a lifetime that may last as long as 50 years.
When conditions of climate and population reach a certain point,
a great exodus of winged males and females takes place.
Their sole mission is to found new colonies of termites.
Eventually, they flutter to the ground and begin shedding their wings.
And now, a strange ritual begins.
When a male finally selects a female, she releases her remaining wings,
and the pair immediately begins looking for a suitable spot to build their nest.
But few will survive the natural gauntlet that all must run.
Birds and bats inflict heavy casualties in mid-flight.
Many termites are ensnared in spider webs,
while others are caught on the ground by a host of predators.
But one pair survives.
A male and a female slip through the gauntlet.
In their new home, they will soon mate.
Passing on to each of their countless offspring,
their instinct developed through millions of years of struggle,
so that another tower may rise here,
a sign that a permanent place for their kind has been assured in the hidden world.
More than any other insects,
butterflies and moths embody the beauty of the hidden world.
The magic eye of the camera reflects the hidden world with special enchantment.
Campbell Norsgaard has proven this.
Professional cameraman and amateur naturalist,
he has amassed a stunning scrapbook of nature on film.
His daughter, Melody, has assisted him for nearly all of her 19 years,
spent here at their home in Englewood, New Jersey.
What began as a hobby has now become a life's dedication.
Monarch butterflies have been one of his principal subjects.
Each spring, he has filmed the females as they arrive from their wintering grounds in the south,
laying their eggs on milkweed plants.
The tiny, sculptured egg is as small as the eye of a needle.
Five days later, life stirs, and a tiny caterpillar emerges.
It begins to feed immediately, first devouring the casing of its own egg.
Born with a ravenous appetite, in the course of a few weeks,
the caterpillar will grow several thousand times its size at birth.
When it has matured, the caterpillar will become sluggish and stop eating.
Seeking a suitable branch, it attaches a small button of silk.
The caterpillar hangs itself head-downward by a special hook at the base of its tail.
Now, Campbell-Norsgaard's time-lapse camera shows the incredible process known as metamorphosis.
The caterpillar's skin is shed, revealing the pupa underneath.
In a few hours, the pupa hardens into a beautiful jade-green chrysalis, ornamented with gold decorations.
The cells of the caterpillar are rearranged into the body of a mature monarch butterfly.
The chrysalis is transparent just before the butterfly is ready to emerge.
The wonder of metamorphosis has come full turn.
After working on a monarch butterfly for many years,
I got the idea to make a small tree and hang monarch chrysalis on the branch like ornaments.
The neighborhood children call it my chrysalis tree.
For over a week, we watched the tree every day, and then finally the monarchs began emerging.
At one time, there were several dozen butterflies on the tree, and it was really a beautiful sight.
I have tried during many years of working with nature to give my daughter Melody
the same appreciation of living things that I have myself.
I've taken many children on various nature walks, and they seem to want to grasp what I have to offer them.
You don't necessarily have to know the individual names of the various insects,
but as long as you have a love in your heart for it, I think that's the most important thing.
In 1962, Campbell Northgard captured on film one of nature's rarest sights,
the emergence of the 17-year cicada.
One day, I was attracted by a special sound that I hadn't heard previously,
and by investigating it, I discovered we had the invasion of the 17-year cicada.
Immediately, I was interested to film it, but it so happened the cicada, or the nymph,
will emerge from the ground at night time.
With artificial light, I was able to film the nymph coming out of the ground for the first time in 17 years.
They go to the closest tree and start climbing up the trunk.
At certain intervals, they stop and attach themselves with their claws to the bark.
Now the back of its skin breaks open, and the adult cicada emerges looking like a white mouse with beautiful red eyes.
After emerging, they begin to pump up their wings, and several hours later, the cicada is ready to fly.
By this time, it is usually morning.
Now they begin calling to attract a mate.
After mating, they bore into a soft branch with a special drill and insert the eggs, pumping them into the branch.
A few hours later, the adult cicada will die.
The branch containing the eggs also dies later.
Melody helped me by opening the branch to show the eggs inside.
Now the eggs will hatch in the branch, and the tiny nymph will fall to the ground and bury into the soil,
and there they will remain for 17 years.
I have noticed that the years after the cicada invasion, the trees are richer in foliage.
Therefore, I believe that the cicada is a natural pruner of our forest.
With art, history, and devotion, Campbell Norsgaard will continue to peer into the hidden world,
recording all that he sees so that others may share his unique vision of nature.
This is nature's showplace, the great rainforests of the tropics,
a dense belt of vegetation straddling the equator, covering almost one-tenth of the Earth's land surface.
Moist and warm, these vast forests are natural hothouses, stimulating plant life
and providing a unique home for a myriad of different insects.
The tropics are the home of such curiosities as the goliath beetle, one of the heaviest and most powerful of insects.
The lanternfly is one of nature's enigmas. Its alligator-like snout is hollow, the teeth and eyes simply color patterned.
Does this grotesque face frighten enemies, or is it merely a random design? No one is certain.
The most dramatic inhabitant of the tropical zone is the giant walking stick.
Slender and delicate, he is a master of mimicry.
Nearly a million species of insects have been formally classified, and each year several thousand new subjects are discovered,
mostly here in the tropical regions of the world.
One man has devoted nearly all of his adult life to this task.
He is Dr. Graham Bell Fairchild, an American scientist living in Panama,
and one of the world's leading authorities on insect life in the tropical rainforest.
There are probably yard for yard or acre for acre about ten times as many kinds of insects in the rainforest
than there are anywhere in the temperate region.
Many things in the tropics are primitive. They resemble their ancestors or the animals that have been found as fossils.
Peripetus is one of these so-called fossils. It has many of the structures of an insect and many of the structures of a worm.
Most entomologists know of peripetus because it's the famous missing link.
The smaller an insect is, of course the less conspicuous it is, the less it needs to eat, the more easy it is to hide.
At the other extreme you have a few giant insects, including giant rhinoceros beetles.
They are probably successful because of their size, and they're so thick and hard that they're pretty much immune to anything but the largest animals.
Then you have another group of insects which are defended against their enemies by a bad taste, a bad odor, or by stinging spines.
These are often brilliantly colored, but the stinging in some of them is very violent.
Even after some 28 years I still find things that I have never seen before.
Some of them turn out to be new to science, others are common somewhere else, but they're new to me, and after all that's the most important thing.
One of the best ways of collecting insects at night is by the use of a light, and insects will swarm into this light in perfectly incredible numbers.
One of the drawbacks to working in the tropics is the richness of the insect life.
You can collect the year around, and in two or three weeks of intensive collecting you can get enough material to keep you busy for a year.
And until we get all the insects named, we don't know exactly what we're dealing with.
Dr. Graham Belfairchild is a pioneer for entomology, the study of insects, is a young science, but his work cannot be completed in his lifetime.
It will remain for future generations to finish the task Dr. Belfairchild has begun.
The insect is man's greatest competitor for the food of the land.
This is the battlefield. Here the insect can often be more than a match for even the most sophisticated weapons of twentieth century science.
The locusts, the eighth plague of Egypt, as destructive today as in the time of the pharaoh.
Native farmers still fight these invaders with the hopeless weapons of another age, a grim reminder of the misery man has suffered in the past.
Modern science enters the battle with specialists and technicians, with a widespread communication network, with chemicals and equipment.
The first attack is with poison bait, a powerful insecticide mixed with bran, the object to wipe out as many locusts as possible before they mature and take wing.
Poison slaughters them by the millions, but there are millions more behind.
The battle moves from ground to air.
This swarm is 23 miles long and five miles deep. Aerial spraying is the only weapon left.
There are clouds ahead, not rain, but clouds of locusts.
Pilots risk their lives, but their efforts are in vain. Enough locusts will get through to lay bare vast stretches of land.
The
The battle ends, and man has not won.
To defeat the locust, he must be prepared to wage war on yet a larger scale, for the
enemy he faces knows no surrender.
Insects devour a third of all that we grow and all that we store.
The damage they do in America costs every man, woman, and child over $100 a year.
In other parts of the world, their ravages can mean famine and starvation.
Whatever advantage that man maintains over the insect is due primarily to the widespread
use of pesticides.
This is a costly and controversial method of control, yet without pesticides we would
surely lose the war.
One center in the search for newer and safer methods of pest control is in the laboratories
of the Entomology Research Division of the United States Department of Agriculture.
The combined talents of specialists have produced a means of duplicating the scent that attracts
male insects, such as these cockroaches, to the female.
Scientists hope the artificial scent will lure great numbers of male insects to a given
point where they can be sterilized or destroyed.
Near Riverside, California, a unique business venture is underway.
This is a bug farm, and these converted boxcars are the breeding ground for millions of predatory
insects.
Plant Manager Richard Morrison inspects one of his most popular commodities, the green
lacewing.
These harmless-looking creatures are a powerful ally in a technique known as biological control.
Adult lacewings lay eggs on the inner lids of their containers, which are lined with
rice husks.
Each day, the husks are scraped from the lids and packaged for sale and shipment to farmers
across the nation.
Once the eggs hatch in their new environment, the larvae set to work devouring insect pests
like the aphid, turning insect against insect.
This is the technique of biological control.
The forests and jungles, the plains and deserts of the earth, all are home to the ants.
They're social insects, relying on the group to make up for what they lack as individuals.
Together, their many species accomplish surprising feats, harvesting, cultivating, weaving, even
making slaves of other ants.
But the most highly accomplished ant society is bent on destruction, the army ants.
These nomads have no permanent home.
They form temporary bivouacs constructed of their own bodies.
Inside are tunnels, storage rooms, and nurseries, a seething nest made entirely of living ants.
With the first light of dawn, the bivouac begins to stir.
Another day of raiding begins.
Hundreds of thousands of workers swarm from the bivouac, streaming across the forest floor
in search of prey.
Following chemical trails laid down by the leaders, battalions swiftly fan out in different
directions, probing for every likely source of food.
They will converge on any unfortunate creature that crosses their path.
Katie did will be torn apart, and its dismembered body carried back to the bivouac.
By the end of the day, raiding parties return along the main trail, carrying pieces of their
slaughtered victims, along with the eggs, pupae, and larvae of other insects.
Behind the living walls of the bivouac, several gallons of booty will be distributed to the
ranks.
The army remains in one bivouac for about 20 days, while a new brood of ants is raised.
Then, one night, the walls begin to break apart, as the colony prepares to launch a
new expedition.
Carrying food supplies and their newborn recruits, the entire force moves out, advancing into
fresh territory.
Each day they will hunt, and at night push on to another site.
In a few weeks, they will settle down again to replenish their ranks.
Which new ant, instinctively carrying out his grim assignment, within an army whose
march will never end.
One insect creates beauty as a byproduct of its work.
It gave ancient man his first taste of honey, and over 4,000 years ago, man domesticated
and began to observe the well-ordered world of the honeybee.
The hive exists as a selfless society, functioning as a unit to care for the queen bee, and thereby
ensure its own preservation.
It is the worker bees who gather honey, tend the hive, and serve the queen by cleaning
her, grooming her, feeding her.
The workers are barren females.
New life can come from the queen alone.
Twice the size of the ordinary bee, the queen inspects the cells for cleanliness, before
laying some 2,000 eggs each day.
Pulsing with life, the egg begins its 20-day transformation.
The worker bees must feed each larva 1,300 times daily.
In 12 days, the pupae will assume adult form.
Later, the young bee emerges, chewing its way through the wax covering of its cell.
The young bee begins working inside the hive.
Forming chains to repair honeycombs, workers launch an existence of perpetual labor, preserving
the colony, gathering food, and serving the queen.
After four weeks of ceaseless toil, they will die.
The male bees cannot sustain themselves.
These are the drones, kept alive by the workers to perform a single function, mate with the
queen.
After that, they're driven from the hive to perish.
There is only one tragedy which can affect a colony, the death of the queen bee.
Now, in a frenzy seen only when survival of the hive is in question, the workers begin
production of a new queen.
Ordinary worker eggs are selected, but special cells are built around them.
The cells are filled with royal jelly, an extraordinary substance which transforms an
ordinary larva into a queen.
There are several potential queen bees.
The first to emerge will immediately sting the other cells, killing her rivals.
If two queens emerge simultaneously, they must battle.
The worker bees surround them, forcing them to fight.
One can only come with victory, one must die.
The workers will act to prevent both queens from being mortally wounded.
One must survive while the colony faces extinction.
The dead queen is carried off while workers attack the other royal eggs and the royal
cells so carefully built and cared for.
With a new queen and a mating, the desperate time is passed and tranquility returns to
the hive.
To a few men, sheer wonder of this insect has motivated a life's work.
Dr. Carl von Frisch is one of the world's most famous entomologists.
Fifty years ago, he began his preoccupation with bees.
In the decades which followed, his discoveries added more knowledge to this subject than
man possessed for the past 4,000 years.
Now he is forced to confine his studies to dead bees.
He has been stung so often that one more sting could prove fatal.
It was at this Austrian chalet that Dr. von Frisch discovered bees can discern color.
It was here that he learned a new sophistication to this insect, its previously unimagined
abilities.
This information was garnered through the classic von Frisch experiment.
It started with the knowledge that when one bee finds nectar, others soon follow.
The first bee is marked and his subsequent actions observed.
Returning to the hive, the marked bee can be seen communicating his discovery through
a peculiar dance.
Each movement transmits key information.
The marked bee is informing the others of the distance to the nectar, its quantity,
even the direction in its relation to the angle of the sun.
The marked bee could now be killed and the colony would still find the nectar.
With the knowledge communicated through the dance, the workers now know what food awaits
them and precisely where it is.
Such experiments, though varied to answer additional questions, have failed to answer
the most intriguing one of all.
Can this evidence of communication be explained through instinct or reflex?
The bees' many abilities, their incredible and diverse work for the preservation of the
hive, all this meets its most severe challenge when the hive comes under attack.
Perhaps their greatest enemies are the wasps.
They are giants in relation to the bees, so devastating in their attacks on hives that
they are sometimes called bee-wolves.
They crush the work of bees in their jaws and throw them to the ground.
So other wasps carry off the dead victims to feed them to their young.
As alarm spreads through the colony, a desperate battle begins.
The bees, as always, act in unison, their weapon a stinger, and a wasp must be stung
many times.
In a short time, a struggle for survival has ended.
In this lower form of life, there is no aftermath to brutality.
It is simply over.
The world of insects is an alien world.
This life form offers man little to relate to.
There seems no link.
But there are similarities.
Man and the insect have shown efficiency, ingenuity, and even a similar destructive
instinct.
To some who have contemplated this frail connection, there comes an unsettling feeling, perhaps
best expressed by philosopher and naturalist Joseph Wood Crouch.
Because our society is becoming so tightly organized and the techniques of conditioning
human beings so refined, the insect is sometimes held to us as an awful warning against what
we might come to resemble.
For insect and for man in a changing world, flexibility is the key to survival.
In an attempt to isolate the single behavior pattern that might be applied to his own struggle,
man delves deep into the microscopic world of the insects, forcing them to yield the
carefully guarded secrets of their success.
As more information is gathered, man slowly finds answers to his own most baffling questions
and learns that in his search for survival, he must not only reach up into the heavens,
but stoop low to examine the small plot of earth beneath his feet.
For in a world so minute that a blade of grass towers like a skyscraper, and a whole society
can live and die in the impression left by a single footprint, man may find answers so
enormous that his own fleeting existence can be made more permanent.
It is for this reason that he will continue on his journey through the hidden world.
Of all the diverse wonders in the world of insects, the butterfly evokes our greatest
delight.
The sight of myriads of monarchs wintering in the trees of California has brought joy
to millions.
And now, the puzzling mystery of where the monarch butterflies of the East Coast migrate
in winter has finally been solved.
Scientists discovered tens of millions of them transforming the landscape in the mountains
of Mexico.
In 1986, the area was designated a butterfly sanctuary, which attracts thousands of visitors
yearly.
Next time on the best of the National Geographic specials, we'll explore another corner of
the endlessly rewarding and surprising world around us.
I'm Mike Farrell for the National Geographic Society.
Thank you.