Majestic. Regal. Iconic. They’re all sort of wildlife documentary buzzwords, right? Ways to describe the elegance of nature, but what about the – how do we put this delicately? – what about the right weirdos? From beetles that fight their way out of frogs’ butts, to urine-quaffing giraffes, there’s another side to nature that less often gets the limelight. That is, until now.
Enter: UNDERDOGS, a new series narrated by *checks notes* Ryan Reynolds. Yep, that Ryan Reynolds, here to celebrate the unsung heroes of the natural world with a refreshing touch of candor because, let’s be honest, the natural world can be absolutely bonkers.
Take, for example, the velvet worm (technically not a worm but an entirely separate group called Onychophora). Pretty cute as invertebrate predators go, it’s got two antennae that make it look a bit like Zuul, but when it’s time to fight, it takes inspiration from Spiderman.
“The velvet worm is my favorite freak,” said Ryan Reynolds to IFLScience. “It shoots this gooey, gross, juicy thing that freezes its enemies. I kinda like that. If you were to be mugged on the streets of New York City that way, well that – that would stay with you. Oof.”
That’s right, when a velvet worm senses a meal is in reach, or a foe is close by, they rear up and brandish two appendages like a cowboy in a Western, firing reels of deadly silly string. It’s a kind of slime that has fascinated scientists for years because it behaves unlike any other goo we see in nature.
It may come out all gooey, gross, and juicy, but within seconds it transforms into a glassy fiber that’s as stiff as synthetic nylon. What’s weirdest of all is that if you then soak the solidified slime in water, it dissolves back into a viscous solution from which the fibers can be re-drawn. Now that, that is something we humans could do a lot with. A superpower we can only dream of born from a humble blind worm, and there are plenty more underdogs where that came from.
With wildlife filmmaking firsts including African wild dogs learning it’s apparently impossible to kill a honey badger, to the beetle that deters ants by effectively getting its babies to wave their diapers in the air, there are some truly memorable moments in what has to be the funniest wildlife documentary out there. So much so, it’s also the first to get an advisory rating. A power move we at IFLScience can really get behind.
What the pearlfish calls home would make for quite the episode of Through The Keyhole.
Image credit: National Geographic
The unlikely stars of this peek at nature’s B-side are broken down into five episodes: SuperZeroes, Terrible Parents, Sexy Beasts, The Unusual Suspects, and Total Grossout, with stand-out highlights including:
- Pearlfish, to use Ryan Reynolds’ words, “reverse parking” into the colons of sea cucumbers
- An aye-aye that must be digging for something rarer than gold when it noodles an eye-wateringly long finger up its nose
- Geese for whom parenting constitutes launching your babies off a cliff
- Monkeys that have learnt to beg, barter, and steal tourists’ phones
- Slug sex. That’s all I’m saying on that one
If you fancy cheering on the little guys for a change, this one’s definitely for you. UNDERDOGS, narrated by Ryan Reynolds, premieres June 15 at 9/8c on National Geographic and streams the next day on Disney+ and Hulu. The premiere will also be simulcast on ABC.