"Welcome to the Natural History Museum." "There's one dream that many people working here share, and that's to discover and name a new species." "It's a part of the museum's great task to fully understand the complex world we live in." "We're all over the museum and on expedition, seeking out life in an unexplored jungle..." "I tend to shy away from dangerous snakes." "Beneath the sea in Sweden..." "There it is." "We've found it" "And on the streets closer to home." "This time we're hearing stories of great explorers and joining the people that carry on the difficult and sometimes dangerous tradition today, right here in the Natural History Museum, the Museum of Life." "The truth is you never know when a species that rocks the scientific world is going to turn up." "In December 1938, a fishing boat landed at a port on the east coast of South Africa." "The captain was puzzled by an unusual-looking fish." "It had a sail-like dorsal fin, a bony skull and fleshy bases to the limbs, as if it was using them to walk on." "An amateur fish enthusiast recognised it at once as a Coelacanth, a fish thought to be extinct for 70 million years." "Since then several have been caught, and this one is pride of place in the Central Hall." "Today the prehistoric Coelacanth can be found in deep water around East Africa and Indonesia." "It's a story of survival that astonished the scientific community..." "And one that shows you never know what's out there until you look, especially in the depths of the ocean, the world's last truly unexplored ecosystem." "Mark Carwardine caught a boat from the west coast of Sweden in search of a species new to science." "In 2003, the carcass of a stranded whale was sunk here by scientists looking at the importance of whale carcases to the ecology of the ocean floor." "When they returned two years later they found a creature, entirely new to science, that amazingly was feeding on the whale bones." "I'm joining the museum's Adrian Glover, the man who first broke news of the new species, as he heads back to sea for further investigations." "That was six years ago the whale was sunk, what do you expect to see?" "What's left of it today, do you recon?" "We're expecting to see bones sitting like a reef-like structure on the seabed, that's what we hope." "Hopefully it's not been completely buried or washed away." "Hopefully we'll find it, you never know." "Oh, we might not even find it?" "Oh, no, I didn't say that!" "Oh, no!" "I really hope we do find this whale skeleton because it's the only place" "Adrian has any hope of collecting the peculiar species he's recently discovered." "Once the boat's in the right spot it's up to the submersible - or ROV - to go on its search." "It's all done by remote control." "These are rare glimpses of the deep." "We've seen less of our own planet's sea bed than we have the surface of Mars." "Do you know, it feels like sitting on the Starship Enterprise looking out at an asteroid storm." "It's quite mesmerizing." "It is, isn't it?" "It's like a relaxation video, except I'm beginning to feel sick!" "Oh, we've found it, we've found it!" "There it is." "That's the skull." "Wow, fantastic." "That's extraordinary." "This was once a five tonne minke whale, and its carcass provides hundreds of times more food to this small patch of seabed than it would normally get in a year." "It's like an ocean buffet that could support over 400 different species, many of which are new to science." "It's quite a skill, isn't it, driving the ROV without kicking up all the silt?" "Yeah, it is." "I mean..." "I think your best training for this would be hours in front of PlayStation computer games, really." "Not wanting to disturb the carcass for ongoing study, we're in search of a bone that's been especially marked for retrieval." "Now what we're going to try and do is hook it using our custom-designed hook device." "This is the arm sticking out of the ROV?" "Yeah." "Hook it." "Gosh, that's easy..." "Oh, he almost got it..." "It's like one of those fairground things you have to put money in and try and grab a cuddly toy." "He's got it, he's got it." "Beauty!" "Gosh, he's very good, isn't he?" "That's fantastic." "Having flown to Sweden, driven all the way from Stockholm and sailed out to the whale bones, this is the moment of truth." "Oh, you can smell it from here!" "Seeing a species new to science is an exciting prospect, especially for a zoologist like me." "It's a little less exciting, though, to discover that it's a mucus-covered worm." "This is what gets you excited, these things here?" "Let's just get this straight, this is what your life work is all about?" "This was the most exciting discovery for me in the last..." "I don't know, my entire scientific career." "Maybe a closer look might help me see the merits of Adrian's worm." "One thing I am impressed with is its name." "It's been called the bone-eating snot-flower." "So bone-eating snot-flower, was that your idea for a name?" "That's right." "It was our idea, actually, and if you look a little bit in detail at these animals you can see first of all the flower bit, they look a little bit like a flower emerging from the bone." "Oh, I can see in this one, I see what you mean." "There's s a beautiful one there." "But that's only half of it - well, not even half of it - because it's got a root structure so that the plant sort of analogy goes further, if you like, so the root structure goes inside the bone," "and it's actually got bacteria inside those roots which are giving it its energy, so it's got no mouth or guts so how is it going to feed?" "But it's living on a... on a substance, living on whale bone, which is very, very energy rich, so it's living on its food source." "What a life." "No mouth, no gut, presumably no eyes either?" "No, that's right." "I mean, it's a really strange animal." "Adrian's mission is to uncover the secrets of these bone-eating worms, from how they reproduce to the way the bacteria inside them digest the oil-rich bones." "But they aren't the only mysterious characters that have been discovered living in this unique ecosystem." "Meet the carpet worm, the candyfloss worm and even the snowboarding worm, all specially adapted to live on whalebones." "But I was curious to know why we need to study these bizarre forms of life." "Does understanding the bone-eating snot flower have any wider relevance?" "To some people it might just seem this is a weird worm sitting on a whale bone." "That's how I saw it, first of all..." "That's right." "That's what you think." "But what it really tells us about is the process of evolution, and particularly evolution in the most extreme environment." "How did this bizarre animal evolve?" "What's its closest relatives?" "How did it evolve to actually live on what's quite a toxic and difficult place to live?" "And, really, the sort of bigger picture is how does a life evolve anyway, what is the process of evolution over time?" "One thing is certain - at the very least, the bone-eating worm shows us just how little we know about life in the ocean deep." "Right, a special day for this specimen." "Yep, we've had it since about 2005-ish." "Right, and now it's time to get it on display?" "Yes." "Gosh, it's like an alien." "Even stranger, possibly." "Let's move it into this trolley." "Straight in." "Lovely." "Every now and again one of the mysteries from the deep oceans is found by chance and is presented to the Natural History Museum." "So are you quite excited to see it?" "Yeah, really excited." "I mean, we... we kind of got it about three years ago and we haven't really seen it since the initial preservation stages." "So, yeah, looking forward to seeing it." "This creature was hauled aboard a ship run by the British Antarctic Survey." "Having been preserved and stabilised, it's time for Jon Ablett to have a close-up look." "Whoa, that's heavy!" "This is one of the strangest and least understood creatures in the collection." "Unwrap it..." "Oh, my lord!" "It's a monster!" "Yeah, this is what we call a colossal squid Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni and, yeah, we think these are the biggest invertebrate, the biggest squid species, there is in the world today." "Look at the suckers!" "Look at this, look, there's the hook!" "Yeah, that's the hook that he got caught on, still haven't had a chance to remove it yet." "Look, there's teeth in those suckers!" "These is what they'd use to hold onto the prey with, so when they've grabbed fish or squid they're eating they can really dig-in and the prey won't get away." "That would rip you up?" "And this long, great big long arm, it feels like one of those alien autopsies." "This is one of the tentacles, and the strange thing about this species is that they have these hook-shaped suckers that actually rotate." "So what's that used for, then?" "We think it's for grabbing the prey, and when it's got its prey it kind of would screw into the flesh, so whatever it's caught really isn't going to get away." "So once that tentacle has grabbed hold of you there's no escape?" "So we have the beak here..." "Look at that!" "Woah." "So that would fit together, so you can imagine that's the kind of mouth part." "So this is just a shredding machine?" "Yep." "Wow, look at that." "That is just fearsome, brilliant." "OK, let's do some measuring." "OK." "If we measure from the top of this tentacle here..." "So you want it nice and... you've got to be very scientific about it, no point actually stretching it to say we've got the biggest one?" "No, no, we have to be honest about these things." "199 centimetres." "That is huge." "I want to say it's colossal." "Well, it is, it's a Colossal Squid." "All we have to do now is place the rare squid into a vast tank of preserving fluid." "Welcome to your new home." "Having the opportunity to work on little-known species is one of the biggest advantages of working for the Natural History Museum." "I'm Dinarzarde Raheem." "I'm from Sri Lanka and I'm a land snail researcher." "I worked on a biodiversity survey in Sri Lanka and that's how I became interested in snails." "One of the reasons that motivated me was there was lots of prospects for finding new species, rediscovering species which hadn't been seen for a long time." "I really enjoy being outside in the field, scrounging about in the leaf litter." "The terrain is often very difficult, the conditions are often foul." "I'm not particularly sure-footed but that hasn't stopped me!" "If you're working in rainforest you've got to be prepared." "It's going to be raining most of the time and, actually, for snails, the best time to work is when it's wet." "Is that OK?" "That's not too bad." "I've discovered about 50 new species." "When I came here, I was just amazed, I don't think the total number of specimens in the snail collections have been counted, but it must be one of the largest in the world." "One hope under all of this is that, you know, you provide information, people become interested about what is there and what is in danger of being lost, and you hope that will make a difference." "A fascination for life in all its diverse forms is what drives many of today's museum scientists." "And it's also what drove Hans Sloane, the man whose collections began the Natural History Museum." "I met up with Mark Spencer, keeper of the Sloane Collection." "Wow, this is incredible." "How are you doing?" "Very well, thank you." "Hello." "Look, it's amazing." "How many volumes have you got?" "There are about 260 volumes belonging to..." "In 1687, Hans Sloane joined a ship heading to the West Indies." "He collected and studied everything he could find, including many species new to science." "On the death of Sir Hans Sloane in 1753, he bequeathed his collections, which were huge, to the nation, and they form the basis of this Museum," "The British Library, and The British Museum in Bloomsbury, so they're of international importance." "So why did he make these collections?" "Slone was really going out into the world partly to go and actually see his slave plantations which he'd just inherited in Jamaica, but also to really look at the world." "He was fascinated in nature and natural history, he'd already been collecting plant specimens in England when he was a younger man, so it really was in his blood." "But it was also done for hard reasons, he was out to make a living and to make his reputation." "We're really looking, one, at a fantastic collection, but really the heart of the museum." "Yes, absolutely, and it's a fabulous heart." "I mean, these objects are without comparison, they really, really give us a unique insight into 18th century science, and they're of huge monetary value, and they're massively precious." "So these are the foundation stones of the museum?" "Totally, totally." "But alongside a passion for collecting, Sir Hans Sloane knew that the right discovery could make him extremely wealthy." "Hello, everyone." "Sandy Knapp, botanical researcher, has been looking into the story of the plant that made Sloane a fortune." "They look a bit sort of like almonds or dried out runner beans, don't they?" "While he was in Jamaica, he discovered the locals were grinding the pods of nearby trees." "They were mixing the powder with water to make an unpromising brown drink." "It was known as chocolate." "Sir Hans Sloane drank chocolate without sugar the way they drink it in the Caribbean and Central America when he first went to Jamaica, and he did not like it." "Everybody who wants to volunteer, come on up." "What I want everybody to do, this the chaotic part..." "Sandy is trying to show people how unpromising the discovery was..." "One... two... three..." "Before Sloane added the milk and sugar into the recipe that we still enjoy today." "She's getting people to try the drink as it tasted in the 1680s when Slone found it." "What do you think it's going to taste like?" "Really... nice." "Really nice?" "There we go, you try a little bit of that." "Let's start it out here, now just take a little sip." "Bless him, he went like this, "Urgh!"" "These guys over here have got some too." "Hot chocolate without sugar." "Hot chocolate without sugar?" "Let's taste a little bit." "Eww!" "Yeah, that tastes to me like hot dirty water." "THEY LAUGH" "Thank you so much for your valiant efforts." "Brilliant." "In a museum of natural history, crammed full of mammals, insects and dinosaurs, Sandy believes it's easy for plant life to be overlooked." "But if you stand by the tail of the great dinosaur and look up, soaring high above is a bold and beautiful structure that redresses the balance." "Richard Owen knew that he was making a place for a museum of natural history in all of its guises, and plants are part of natural history which, I think, kind of makes the building, because it's the one place in this building" "where plants are the element of decoration as opposed to just being the background for animals." "We don't really know very much about the ceiling because most of the documentation about it has either been lost or never existed." "We don't know who decided what plants to put here, we don't know why the plants were chosen to put on the ceiling, so it's a great mystery." "Particularly puzzling are these unlabelled panels, known as the archaic panels." "I would come into the museum early in the morning and I would look up at the ceiling with binoculars." "I think people who came in thought I was a little bit crazy." "Some of the archaic panels are really easy to identify, they're common garden plants - a lily, for example - but some are more difficult, and there are some that really stumped me, I just couldn't figure out what they were." "And the other thing we never knew was where these images had come from." "And I was leafing through a book called Plantae Asiaticae Rariores, which was published in the 1830s by Nathaniel Wallich, and I came across one and I thought," ""That's it, that's the plant I can't figure out what it was,"" "and I realised that many of the images on the ceiling had actually been copied from this particular book." "But even this ancient book doesn't hold all of the answers." "One panel in particular proved stubbornly cryptic." "I couldn't find it in Wallich and I looked in other books, and then one day when I was visiting Kew Gardens I saw this plant, and I thought, "That's it!"" "And it's a Chilean plant in the family the invasive garden oxalis is from, so you never can anticipate when you're going to find something out." "Just recently I found one of the last ones." "There's still a couple that we are not quite sure what they are, but we'll figure them out eventually." "Probably my favourite of the archaic panels is one that's a copy of a plate from Wallich, the pepper where we get black pepper from, and the plate has little hanging elongate clusters of grapes, and that's what pepper fruits look like," "but the artist who did the panel on the ceiling added a curlicuey bit at the top and put some flowers on, but the flowers are completely wrong, and I like the thought of someone turning a botanic illustration," "which is beautiful in and of itself into a design that's also beautiful, but getting it botanically wrong." "I think that's nice." "The plants in the ceiling range from the common to the exotic, a seemingly random assortment which perhaps reflects the nature of the museum's own herbarium collection." "But for Sandy, the choice was much more deliberate." "For her, this beautiful ceiling is here for more than mere decoration." "I think they're plants to sort of show what made the British Empire great." "It was built at the absolute height of its powers as a kind of colonial and top cheese nation." "Things like cotton, tobacco, tea, all those plants which were grown in the colonies and then sold on and really did make the empire." "I love the ceiling, but you get a sort of zero one reaction." "People either say, "Oh, yeah, it's amazing, it's absolutely incredible,"" "or people say, "What ceiling?" And so you either know it's there and think it's marvellous, or you haven't, you know, craned your neck back like that and looked." "It's one of those things that I felt was one of the hidden secrets of the museum." "Odd to think that a hidden secret is something that's over the entire top of the museum, but it is hidden in a way, as who looks up?" "Throughout the ages there's always been a demand for specimens that push forward our understanding of the world, and while the adventure to get them could be highly dangerous, there's been no shortage of people prepared to risk all for the right specimen." "Almost 100 years ago, three men pushed the boundaries of human endurance in one of the harshest climates on earth." "But what motivated them wasn't personal glory, fame or money, it was these..." "The eggs of the recently discovered Emperor Penguin colony." "The world was desperate to discover the secrets of these intriguing creatures, and they believed the answers lay inside their eggs." "So in 1911 three Brits - Edward Wilson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard and Henry Bowers - set out on a journey that later became known as "the worst journey in the world."" "In 2006 I was part of a team that attempted a polar adventure using only the clothing and equipment that would have been available to the Edwardian explorers." "I just sort of feel everything falling to pieces, really." "I've now got blisters all over my feet which are painful aside from the frost nip, which I'm just being a baby about because it's not serious and it's not like they need to be amputated, they just... they just hurt a lot." "I discovered how unbelievably hard it is to survive at the poles, yet while my expedition took place in the summer, Cherry-Garrard, Wilson and Bowers were determined to return with the eggs of the Emperor Penguins, which meant they" "had to go out in the laying season - the middle of winter, a time when the Antarctic is in permanent darkness." "Douglas Russell is curator of the egg collection, and he's been looking into the extraordinary story of Wilson, Bowers and Cherry-Garrard." "These are the three eggs that were collected." "The three explorers set out with a 140 mile journey ahead of them to find the penguin eggs, pulling their sleds through frozen darkness every step of the way." "One of the difficulties was that they couldn't pull the two nine foot sledges with all the weight that they had of provisions, because the temperature is so low that the ice crystals don't melt underneath the runners, so it's not very easy." "You might think that it's actually dead easy to pull a sledge with some heavy weight on it." "It's not, as I'm sure you know." "We found this, it was like dragging a sledge across sand, and the colder it gets, the harder it is to do." "They just had to keep going." "The temperature fell to minus 60, it was so cold that their teeth cracked but the men kept going, sometimes covering little more than a mile a day." "Three gruelling weeks later they arrived at the breeding colony of the Emperor Penguins." "They've just risked their lives for 19 days in order to get to the colony, so the acquisition of those specimens must have been immense, the feeling of relief." "Were these the only three they were able to collect?" "They originally collected five, but they put them into their fur mitts to protect them, and Cherry-Garrard unfortunately fell and broke his two eggs, so ultimately the only three they managed to get back intact where these three." "Do you think these must have been one of the hardest specimens to collect in the whole museum?" "Yes, they're certainly some of the most iconic specimens in the whole of the collections." "What they clearly illustrate is the lengths people have gone to to go and try and push the boundaries of science forward." "Every item in the collection tells the story of someone who spotted it and collected it." "Many represent stories of physical hardship and dedication to bring the item home for the scientific establishment." "But if that wasn't enough, some explorers even had to overcome obstacles presented by the establishment they were trying to be part of." "In the late 1800s science was the preserve of men, but Dorothea Bate was an uneducated young girl from" "Carmarthenshire who fell in love with palaeontology at the age of 19 when she had a job cleaning fossils right here in the heart of the Natural History Museum." "I've arranged to meet palaeontologist" "Victoria Herridge, who's been researching Dorothea's story." "Dorothea Bate was determined to make a name for herself." "She set out to make new discoveries on the unexplored island of Cyprus." "So was that the big aim, to discover a new species?" "Oh, yes, certainly." "It was one of the many aims, but particularly in the early 20th century discovering a new species was a way to make your name on the scientific map, if you like." "If you discover a new species and describe a new species, more importantly, your name forever becomes attached to that species name, and so it's like you've immortalised yourself in the scientific community." "And for Dorothea as well that would be a really fantastic way of legitimising her role as a professional scientist, rather than just an amateur who was allowed to come and play with the collections." "She discovered something a little bit like this here." "Right." "Now this, as you might be able to see, cos it looks a little bit like a human jaw, is the jaw of an elephant, an extinct species of elephant, and as you can see it's huge." "It's massive." "It's absolutely massive." "So the things she discovered are like this, are they?" "Yes, sort of, they're like this with a very, very subtle twist." "They're smaller, because these... what she discovered on Cyprus was something quite amazing, she discovered these dwarf elephants." "What you'll see in here... are some of the teeth of a dwarf elephant that Dorothea Bate found in the north of Cyprus." "So these are all the finds that she dug up herself?" "Mmm. yes, she excavated these." "Now, these are all teeth." "What...as a comparison here." "Yeah, exactly." "Previously I showed you the tooth and jaw." "Elephant's teeth are weird, it's quite hard to get your head around them." "Here is a lower tooth of that same species I talked about earlier, the strictus elephant." "See how big it is, absolutely huge." "This is its lower adult molar." "Right, and this one here..." "Now that is the same tooth in the elephant on Cyprus." "That is unreal!" "Look at the difference in size." "Unbelievable." "You can see it's very, very similar, just a lot smaller." "So you'd think, "That's from a baby elephant."" "Yep, but we know it's an adult because we can tell elephants' teeth by the shape of them, and their very last tooth have got a very distinctive shape, and because of that... because of that we know it's adult tooth, because of that we know that" "this was the tooth it was when it was fully grown." "It's quite incredible." "So how big would that have been?" "I mean..." "Yeah, reconstructions for this is just like swans on Sicily." "This elephant was probably about a metre tall as an adult." "A metre tall?" "You could have it in the house." "Remember I said..." "Can you imagine?" "Apartment-size elephant, brilliant." "Incredible, isn't it?" "She got her name in the history books?" "Yeah, she did." "She effectively... when she found this she was absolutely vindicated." "Historically, specimen hunters were frequently obsessives - there were so many obstacles that they needed to be - but in a profession which attracts obsessives, one man was more obsessive than most." "The museum houses the most important natural history library in the world." "It has over a million books, but there is one that stands out." "It was the ambitious creation of John James Audubon, the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and servant girl." "The magnificence of this work by Audubon is, in fact... is the scale." "In 1820, with no formal training, Audubon embarked on a 20 year mission." "He wanted to observe and paint every species of bird in North America, each one of them life-sized." "Audubon truly was quite revolutionary in the way he displayed his birds." "Here we have a wonderful example of this Osprey pursuing its prey, catching its prey." "While many artists were painting static posed pictures of birds from specimens in the studio, Audubon was observing the birds in their natural habitat and recording the animals' behaviour in every detail." "Audubon's passion and brilliant observational skills led him to notice worrying changes in the natural world around him." "He was very concerned about the loss of several species and warned about it in his own writings." "The Carolina Parrot for instance is a species that is now extinct." "This wonderful display here shows that they obviously travelled in great numbers." "Unfortunately the last surviving member of this species died in 1914." "John James Audubon realised his lifelong ambition." "He produced 1065 of the most beautiful and lifelike depictions of birds ever created." "The value to science is that never before had they seen such magnificent displays of birds - life-size, pursuing their prey, feeding their young, males and females together with the habitat they lived in and the plants that they fed upon." "That was something quite new for scientists to see." "Less than 200 sets of Audubon's books were produced and only 119 are known to have survived." "One recently sold at auction in America for $8.8 million." "Audubon's The Birds of America has now become an icon of American culture." "Today the search for species in exotic locations goes on, and while funding and proper organisation means you don't have to be completely obsessive to be a species hunter, there's no denying it still helps." "The Government of Panama is putting together a plan to protect a remote forest in the west of the country from proposed exploitation." "Before it can act, the government needs to know what rare and endangered species the forest supports." "To chart an unmapped and barely explored region like this the government has turned to the world leaders - the British Natural History Museum." "The museum has launched an expedition led by botanist" "Alex Monro, a man who knows how challenging expeditions can be." "It's physically very tough, it's naturally a quite hostile environment for us." "There isn't much to eat, there's lots of things that can do you damage, and you really feel that you're kind of away from everything." "On expedition with Alex is reptile expert Mark Wilkinson." "He is fully aware of the dangers of the jungle." "These are deadly, it's a great big adder and a lot more toxic, and these are quite aggressive as well, I think." "I tend to shy away from dangerous snakes." "The aim of the first day is to collect 60 specimens." "Previous surveys have already identified that this forest is full of species found nowhere else on earth." "And all those species have their own unique history, their own unique way of reproducing, of dispersing, of just kind of surviving and keeping the populations going generation after generation for thousands of millions of years." "I just find that just completely amazing." "For a man who spends most of his time in the museum, Alex is happiest in the jungle." "It's quite spiritual." "You have all these really tall columns in the forest and kind of interesting vistas." "I just find it a really stimulating and peaceful kind of uplifting experience." "It's not just rare plants that the team are interested in documenting." "Lorenzo has just found this amazing frog, called a glass frog." "They're called glass frogs because you can basically see their internal organs through the skin, it's so transparent, and he found it whilst collecting plants." "This is really rare, we won't find more than one of these per trip." "While the lower areas have been visited previously, the team are keen to get above 1000 feet to the part of the forest that is completely unexplored and uncharted." "And documenting the diversity of an area like this is the first step towards managing and conserving that area." "We've just finished our collecting and it's been a really good day, actually, we've collected just under 70 numbers, which is really good." "And we're all very hungry because all we had for lunch was Coco Pops without any milk, and they're really nice but they don't fill you up." "But hungry or not, there's no keeping Mark from his work." "Well, here is one of the largest stick insects" "I've ever seen." "We've seen a few here, but nothing quite as spectacular as this one." "And the mimicry of it is incredible." "If you look close up, I mean the segmentation, pseudo-segmentation, of the abdomen makes it look like..." "Again, makes it look like a stick." "There's spines on here that might have some defensive function as well, but mostly what they look like is the spiny plants we see around here." "Perfectly harmless." "Oh, that was horrible." "We got caught in the rain so we decided just to move all our stuff and come down and press, but the track has just turned into a mudslide and it's really, really horrible, they're all coming down." "It's nice to wash in cold water at the end of the day when you're really hot, but as you can probably hear there's tonnes of horseflies whizzing around, so you have to be really quick before they bite you, so it's not that relaxing." "There's still large parts of the world which are relatively unexplored, and small parts but significant parts which are completely unexplored, so there's no question that there's still a great need for this work to be done, and in particular because we're destroying so much of our natural world that" "what's left we need to manage much better in order to make sure that it survives for future generations." "In their time in the unmapped zone the team collect over 200 species, many of which are new to science." "In the months that follow each one will be dried and identified or even named for the first time." "That information will be used to build up a map showing the spread of species across the forest, ensuring it's properly conserved and managed for the future." "Another museum expedition has just returned from Peru." "There's two that we've found so far that we think have very, very high likelihood of being completely new species." "Right." "'Max Barclay has been looking at the insect life on the forest floor 'and is now combing through his discoveries.'" "This beetle lives on underground truffles." "The expensive things that you get in a restaurant?" "Exactly." "I can't remember what they cost but it's an awful lot of money." "There's one species in France that actually competes with the locals for the very valuable white and black truffles." "We don't know exactly what kind of truffles this feeds on, but it's a subterranean fungus growing in the rainforest." "You've discovered, hopefully, a new species of beetle." "Is there anything else you discovered?" "We've discovered very interesting things." "The guys we were working with from America were ecologists and they were looking at dung beetle ecology." "These are dung beetles." "We all know what dung beetles eat - poo, dung, faecal matter." "They do a good job as well, don't they?" "Yes." "They're very important in ecosystems because they clean up all the waste, and many of them are very specific about where they live, in a particular altitude, lowland tropical forests or on Altiplano..." "What was interesting about this ecology group is that they were collecting the dung beetles and comparing it with data collected in the same place 10 years ago." "When they first arrived, we'd been there before, and they asked what dung beetles we'd seen." "We said, "This and this."" "They said, "You can't have seen that." "We know this place, we've studied here, it doesn't occur here." ""It's a lowland species and we're at 1600 metres."" "So you found a dung beetle in a piece of dung where it shouldn't really have been?" "Exactly." "That's incredible." "So that shows that climate change is affecting insects' ecology?" "Yes, that's right." "It seems that insects are moving up mountains." "Insects live at particular zones of altitude and temperature, so if they all move up one, what happens to the ones that are already living in the top zone?" "They don't have anywhere to go, so it could be that if the climate were to get warmer, we would start losing species that live on the tops of mountains." "That's something we conservationists need to be aware of." "So it's not always about finding a new species unknown to science, it's about finding a species that shouldn't be there, cos that's a different story?" "That's right, a lot of these are very well-known, but we thought we knew where they lived." "And now they're moving and living in different places and that's interesting, ecologically, why they're doing that." "Incredible." "Today, time and time again, we're hearing stories of species on the move." "Climate change and the great flow of human traffic around the globe means that species once isolated, are now springing up in the most unexpected places." "And this mixing up of the world's species is starting to have significant consequences." "More than 40% of Britain's wild plants are exotic species, introduced by us humans over the last thousand years." "That's sumac, not native." "Not native." "That's not native, that's not native." "What's that?" "That's Sycamore, that's not native." "I've come to London's urban jungle with museum botanist Mark Spencer." "We're on the hunt for a new generation of exotic plants that are about to change the face of the British landscape." "This here is the Loquat tree which is not a native to this country." "It's a plant from East Asia" " China, Japan." "It's been grown in that part of the world for centuries." "This plant itself has really been grown as an ornamental in this country for about 200 years... and never produced fruit because for many years our climate just wasn't warm enough." "So what's different, what's going on now, then?" "It's just beginning to be able to, really, in the last 10 years or so produce a lot of fruit." "So for example in 2003, the really hot summer we had, I saw trees in people's gardens in London with hundreds and hundreds of fruit." "This is the first loquat plant in the UK known to escape cultivation and to be found growing wild." "Take a snip off." "I'm terribly cruel sometimes." "If you just take hold of that for me." "Sure, yeah, no worries." "Sort of bundle the leaves together into a cylinder." "Now take the top half and fold it over on itself, like you're folding an envelope over." "Really, it doesn't matter if I bend the leaves?" "No, all we're doing is just temporarily getting it in the press, a bit like that there." "'Mark needs to monitor the spread of these exotic species to see how they'll affect our native plants.'" "At the moment I wouldn't say this is a threat to our wildlife, it's just a fascinating indicator that our environment is changing, and changing very, very rapidly." "Gardening and food imports have brought hundreds of exotic plants into Britain, and with climate change it's increasingly common to find lemons, limes and even avocado fruiting wild each summer." "That may sound idyllic, but there is a darker side to some of these recent arrivals." "Now this here is the Tree of Heaven." "OK." "Otherwise known to many as the Tree of Hell." "Ooh, why's that?" "Well, we now believe it to be the Tree of Hell because it is really beginning to become a bit of a nuisance." "It is now starting to produce active and viable seedlings - many, many, many thousands of them - and these seedlings are spreading from our streets and gardens onto our railways and into the wider landscape in the urban environment." "In its native China, the Tree of Heaven isn't a problem, but in a different habitat like Britain, the insects and diseases that normally keep its growth in check aren't here." "How old is this one, then?" "Well, that is..." "The leaves you can see there is a year's growth, well less than a year's growth - several months." "These things can grow three, four metres in a year, so this is not a particularly big one." "In just less than a year, this is how high it can grow - or higher?" "That's incredible." "And there's baby down there, so that's just really in its first season." "What kind of damage can it cause to our native plants?" "It just forms a thicket and actually just covers them." "It also has a capacity to do something called allelopathy, which means that it produces chemicals from its leaves, and when rain falls onto it, the chemicals wash out of the leaves and soak into the ground." "These chemicals actively inhibit the growth of other plants, so it's got a double whammy in that it's shading out other plants and then it's effectively poisoning its competitors as well - a very effective strategy if you're a Tree of Heaven," "but bad news for our native plants." "OK." "It's a bit of a horror." "I'll never look at one of these again in the same way!" "The Tree of Heaven has the potential to seriously damage the biodiversity of Britain, and we only have to look at Japanese knotweed to see the consequences." "Brought over in the 1700s, Japanese knotweed is the UK's best-known invasive plant, it wreaks havoc with our wildlife, and our infrastructure." "It seems that the Tree of Heaven is set to do the same." "Like Japanese knotweed, it's spreading out from London as its seeds are blown along our railway lines." "So what does this mean for the future of the landscape of Great Britain?" "Very, very significant changes, I expect." "These non-native organisms moving into our landscape mean massive change." "We'll see a landscape that's going to have fewer species in it, many of them will be incredibly successful but it will be at the cost of many other things." "That loss of diversity will have a real impact on us and our wellbeing, because species-richness is massively important for all of us and for our agriculture." "Studying the eco-system close to home may be less glamorous than heading for an unexplored jungle, but it's no less important - or magical." "I'm Juliet Brodie, and I work on seaweeds." "I think the reason I'm working on seaweeds goes back to when I was a little tiny child aged about two, and my parents decided to enter me into a fancy dress competition." "They dressed me up as a sort of little sea creature, and I was just draped in kelp, and I stood in this corral and I bawled my eyes out, so I've had a sort of love-hate relationship with seaweeds ever since." "When I was a bit older I took up diving and found that under water there was the most amazing world, and just how beautiful seaweeds where." "The history of collecting seaweeds goes back a very, very long way, and in fact some of the oldest specimens in the museum are seaweeds going back to about 400 years." "In Victorian times, there was a big craze for collecting seaweeds." "They would go and collect some of the very, very beautiful seaweeds and make them into these absolutely exquisite little books." "So we know what they collected, and we also know whether those thing are still there today." "We can also get the DNA out of them, so they're not only beautiful and historically interesting, if you like, for the whole history of the subject, but they are of a worth scientifically as well." "I think if we begin to see the loss of some of our very key seaweeds, then we really are in trouble in the world." "They may be acting as nurseries for fisheries, for example." "They're very important in terms of taking up carbon dioxide in the environment." "Also, it seems that some of the brown algae for example, which have some unique compounds that you don't find in flowering plants, do seem to have some anti-cancer properties." "Now, of course it's very difficult to work out exactly how this functions, but people are beginning to research into this much more." "When you really start to look at them, they are beautiful as well as important, and without them the world really wouldn't function in the way that it does." "Britain is changing." "New species bring new opportunities and new threats." "So the museum is joining a pioneering new scheme, to try and work out what's going on." "Juliet Brodie recently joined a team of scientists hoping to persuade local residents to survey the place they know best." "Wembury Bay on the south coast of Devon - the preferred habitat of surfer dudes and budding young architects." "But today they are about to be outnumbered by an altogether different breed of visitor - by professional biologists and enthusiastic nature-spotters." "I'm joining a big experiment, the latest trend in field work." "So we'll be looking in the hedges, the meadows, on the beach there and right out at sea." "In fact, we'll be counting every living thing that makes it's home here in Wembury." "Spiders, snails, slugs and things." "Varieties of crabs, lots of seaweed." "Our nematode worms." "You name it." "ALL:" "Five, four, three, two, one." "KLAXON BLARES Oh, that's good!" "The Wembury BioBlitz is officially launched!" "Off we go." "Disperse!" "Yes, I did say BioBlitz." "It's an intensive 24-hour inventory of all the species in one place, like a health check for biodiversity in this unique nature reserve, but it can't be done without an army of volunteers and the help of local experts." "So I'm off to meet marine biologist Richard Ticehurst from Plymouth University, to help check out the shallow waters." "If I can stay on my feet." "Kate, this is a turbot, a shrimp." "Oh, really?" "A very small turbot." "I think of them as a bit bigger!" "This one is the size of a postage stamp, but they do get to 20kg." "Now, you can see, if I..." "Yeah." "You can see how well camouflaged that fish is." "It's just disappeared." "There we go, we've got a bass." "Ooh." "Ooh." "We've got a bass!" "There we go!" "Quick!" "We've got it on film." "You are beautiful." "That's what they look like when they're alive." "I wasn't expecting to get anything bigger than my ruler!" "The last time anyone looked this closely at these shores was back in 1957." "It's this historical survey that makes our BioBlitz so valuable." "The idea is to compare what we find today to that record 50 years ago." "It could reveal if there are any new species invading these habitats, and which rare species are still present." "Volunteers from the Devon Wildlife Trust are primed, ready to spot any passing basking sharks or whales." "We haven't been very successful just yet." "Well, the sun's gone in and we have had a bit of drizzle but we've only got a two-hour window to look at the rock pools here at the very edge of the shore, because very quickly, the tide will come in and cover this again," "so the volunteers are hard at work." "Is that...?" "Ooh!" "Ooh!" "Ooh, my word - what's that?" "It had huge, great big pincers!" "I don't know that I want to meet that one again." "Look, here it is." "Here it is." "Got it!" "What is that?" "A squat lobster." "It's a lobster?" "It is a lobster." "It's a true lobster." "Found a bigger version of the one I've just found." "OK, but I got there first!" "Back at Blitz HQ, verifying each species is going on around the clock." "John?" "Hi." "Hi." "We're six hours in." "How much have we found?" "We've got about 600 species so far." "600!" "Yeah, it's pretty good going." "We've a lot of records still coming in." "You can see all the activity." "So we're entering but also ID-ing stuff." "Yeah, there's a lot of identification, checking of notes to make sure it's a good ID." "It'll go on, we'll keep ID-ing through the night and the morning." "OK, so on with the work." "Yeah, definitely lots more to do." "Nightfall brings no rest." "We don't want to miss the chance to find the animals that only come out after dark." "If we just find a nice sinkhole that we can dig into without hitting bedrock..." "Oh, look at all these beasties!" "Dead seaweed is home to as many as nine different species of a tiny crustacean, the sandhopper." "Just a couple of biscuits." "Useful tip - cat biscuits attracts sandhoppers." "Put that over the top, and then we need to make a mark to show that it's here." "Yeah." "We'll leave these overnight, because it's part of the BioBlitz." "We'll come back in the morning first thing." "And see how full they are." "From the lure of cat biscuits on the beach to egg cartons on the cliff." "Oh, that's nice." "Orange Swift." "That's a Flame Shoulder." "It's a good night for the moth people." "Another day and more species to count...or not!" "Nothing as yet, nothing as yet." "Even before the 24 hours is up, Juliet Brodie is revealing something strange amongst the seaweeds." "Well, I'm shocked by the number of non-natives that are here after the last ten years." "I want to show you this one in particular, which is wireweed." "This is one that's come from Japan and it's almost certainly come with the import of agriculture products, things that we eat." "Things like..." "What, like oysters?" "Shellfish, oysters that sort of thing, yes." "Juliet thinks that this invasive seaweed could be having an effect on the native species." "We think this is declining." "We don't know whether that's to do with the non-native species, or whether this is something else to do with climate change, or changes in grazing habits of species." "We just don't really know." "Its big questions like these that the museum hopes the BioBlitz can help answer." "So, 24 hours is up - how's it gone?" "Excellent - exhausting but exciting." "We've got about 800 species identified now, quite a bit of lab work to come over the next couple of weeks, so the numbers should go up quite a bit." "Pleased with that?" "Yeah, really pleased." "What does it tell us about the biodiversity here at Wembury?" "It has shown it's very healthy in many places, but also there's some invasive species that have spread a lot further than we thought they had." "OK, be honest." "How are you feeling?" "Jaded is probably the word I'd use." "Exhausted but it's been really good fun." "The museum's BioBlitz counted a total of 825 species at Wembury, and none of the animals were harmed during the making of this BioBlitz." "The ecosystems of the world are complex." "What we do know is that in faraway jungles and much closer to home, things are changing in ways we do not yet fully appreciate." "But every day we're getting closer to an understanding of what we've got, and what we have to do to conserve it, in part through the work being carried out here at the Natural History Museum - the museum of life." "Next time, we enter the world of all that creeps and crawls." "It's protected." "Oh!" "I develop a taste for things with six legs..." "Honestly, that's delicious." "LAUGHTER" "And we find out how maggots are helping the police." "We are entering the world of the planet's quintillion insects." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd" "E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk"