Animal Planet explores the boundaries between fact and fiction

Media News

New Delhi, June 22, 2011

Babies that eat their parents...Flesh-eating plants...Animals that build skyscrapers...The natural world has weird and wonderful stories beyond your wildest dreams. But can you really trust your eyes? Can you tell fact from fiction? A lively new series, FOOLED BY NATURE, brings you the most extraordinary stories from the wild, including one created just to test you. In fact, it's a pack of lies! Can you spot it? It won't be easy. Here in the wild, truth is often stranger than fiction.

The 26-part series FOOLED BY NATURE will premiere on Animal Planet every Friday at 8 pm from July 01.

Commenting on the series, Rahul Johri, senior vice president and general manager – South Asia, Discovery Networks Asia-Pacific said, “Our natural world is full of weird and wonderful creatures. Animal Planet continues to bring such incredible stories from the wild that entertain and engage viewers. In its new series Fooled by Nature, Animal Planet unearths strange facts and myths about animal behaviour.”

The amaurobios, a garden spider commonly found in Europe and North America, is a devoted mother – so devoted in fact, that she is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Once her hundreds of spiderlings hatch, they feed on a special foodsack of eggs their mother lays for them. But once the eggs are gone, she urges her young to eat her alive to ensure their survival. Her grisly sacrifice safeguards the survival of as many of her offspring as possible.

But the Darwinian ruthlessness doesn’t stop there. In Kenya, the naked mole rat lives in colonies of up to 300 members, all controlled by a single queen mole rat. This queen guarantees her position as head of the colony by suppressing the reproductive cycle of all other females through a pheromone secreted in her urine. While the ordinary females toil for the duration of their short lives, the queen maintains a monopoly on breeding.

There is also the story of the penguin father that starves himself for four months just to keep his baby chick warm, the alligator babies whose gender is determined by the surrounding temperature, and the bird that incubates its eggs in a volcano.

In each episode, the series presents five unique stories. But only four of these stories are true. Can you separate the fact from fiction? Is the suicidal spider the red herring? Or is it the authoritarian mole rat? FOOLED BY NATURE explores the weird, the wonderful, the dazzling and the disgusting in the natural world – with a twist.

Interesting facts from the series:

• Koala bears eat the poisonous leaves of the eucalyptus trees. Fortunately, at birth the cubs are trained to digest the bacteria, by eating their mother's dung.

• The motion of a zebra herd and their stripes creates an optical illusion for predators.

• Humpback whales are known as gentle giants famous for their beautiful songs. But did you know they use deafening sounds to catch their prey? At 180 decibels, it’s as loud as a rocket launch.

• When vast numbers of bats are leaving a cave, each individual still uses echolocation to navigate and to avoid midair collisions.

• Did you know that temperature controls a baby alligator’s gender? A critical two week period in an alligator egg’s development determines what gender the hatchling will be. And since there are cooler nests in the wild, there are always plenty of female alligators to breed the next generation.

• 115 days after his last meal, the male emperor penguin can use his own body tissue to provide a survival ration for his chick. His penguin milk is produced by the cells lining the inside of his throat and is high in fat and protein, just like mammal milk.

Some of the episodes are:

Hungry Hunters: Meet some of nature's Hungry Hunters: animals that use the weirdest weapons and strangest strategies to catch and kill their prey.

Bizarre Breaders: Nature's Bizarre Breeders have the strangest ways of bringing up babies. Emperor penguin fathers that produce "milk"; alligator mothers who control their babies' gender by temperature; birds that use volcanoes to warm their eggs; and a spider mom that will die for her babies. All these animals are parents prepared to make extraordinary sacrifices for their babies.

Peculiar Poisons: The world is full of Peculiar Poisons, but Animal Planet shows you some of the more unexpected animals which produce terrible toxins. Meet a lizard with venom packed with medical marvels, some kangaroos which fight armed with toxic saliva, and a marauding toad which has taken over a country.

Awesome Appearances: Many creatures in the natural world have Awesome Appearances. Chameleons can't hide their feelings: they show them off with crazy colors. Cuttlefish signal to each other with mesmerizing strobe-like stripes; Peacocks see their flashy feathers with vision that's truly psychedelic; Zebra create optical illusions by being black and white. With dazzling displays, these animals are all dressed to impress.

Amazing Abodes: The natural world is full of Amazing Abodes. A family of beavers builds its own lake to live in, with a waterfront lodge and, believe it or not, a swim-through freezer. Cave dwelling Swiftlets build nests far above the floor, but rather than use twigs, they use their own spit. And Lungfish in Africa see out the dry season by burying themselves underground, and can survive for an incredible four years.

Fantastic Feeders: Animals who have found surprising ways of eating the most unexpected things. Viewers meet a cave mining elephant; a fish whose "waste" is a tourist attraction; a marsupial with an unusual diet, and a dog that eats insects.

For further information, please contact:

Discovery Communications India

Ruchika Tandon

Mobile: +919810202457

Email: ruchika_tandon@discovery.com