♪ Narrator: A scientist once said, "If there is a creator, he must have an inordinate fondness for beetles."

The reason is all around us.

[Buzz] One out of every 4 creatures on the planet is a beetle, and no other animal comes in such an infinite array of shapes, colors, and sizes.

Woman: Beetles in and of themselves could rule the world, and they basically do.

You have beetles in the sky.

You have beetles in canopies and underground.

I mean, beetles do absolutely everything.

♪ Narrator: The secret to their success came around 295 million years ago when their outer wings began to harden, making them insects with armor.

Man: Beetles have these covers over their wings called elytra, which protects their wings from damage.

And in this way, they're little walking tanks.

That makes them extremely resistant to many challenges in the environment.

Different man: If you can compact your flying wings underneath a protective shell, you can burrow, you can crawl under logs, you can store air under the elytra and go underwater, you can access all these other different habitats.

Narrator: The beetle battle for survival has led to extreme bodies, fierce fighting tactics, and even human traditions.

[Cheering] And they may hold secrets to the evolution of all life on Earth.

But like all insects, these ancient survivors now face new and unprecedented threats.

And without beetles, we would be in deep.

♪ ♪ Of all the animals on the planet, none have been as successful as beetles.

Forming the order coleoptera, there are over 400,000 known species.

♪ And aside from the oceans and the polar ice, they're found in every habitat on earth.

♪ Woman: Beetles do a lot of different jobs for us.

They're important herbivores, they're scavengers, they can decompose wood.

They can decompose bodies of other animals.

There's a lot of jobs that beetles do that we kind of take for granted.

Narrator: Beetles have evolved to be essential to their environments.

Colorful, and even beautiful, they live to do some dirty jobs.

Man: Beetles are oftentimes called recyclers because they help remove waste.

There are a lot of different kinds of beetles that do this.

One of them is a dung beetle.

Different man: Dung beetles are one of the most important groups of insects here in Africa.

This is the center of dung beetle diversity.

And dung beetles are diverse because we have a lot of dung from all the different animals roaming the savanna.

[Birds squawking] ♪ ♪ Narrator: In the rolling hills of Hluhluwe Imfolozi Game Reserve, Africa's most beloved mammals feed on the grassy slopes.

And all that eating leads to one thing.

Poop.

In a single day, one elephant alone will drop 300 pounds of it.

[Files buzzing] [Man speaking local language] ♪ Narrator: Dr. Gimo Daniel is on a hunt for some of nature's most unappreciated workers.

A biologist from neighboring Mozambique, he has spent 6 years researching the tiny custodians of South Africa's wild landscapes.

With insect populations declining around the globe, Gimo wants to discover how many species of dung beetle are cleaning up after the park's big game.

[Gimo Speaking English] And I use this bucket to put the balls that they're making.

Narrator: To draw in as many beetles as possible, Gimo and his assistant Vinicius work with a special bait, one only a beetle could love.

[Speaking English]] [Speaking local language] [Speaking English] ♪ Narrator: While a ranger keeps watch for curious lions or buffalo, Gimo and Vinicius dig a series of ground traps.

[Speaking English] ♪ Narrator: They'll wait a full day before coming back to see what species they've caught.

[Gimo speaking English] ♪ Narrator: There are at least 5,000 species of dung beetles in the world, but they all fall into 3 main groups: Dwellers, who live in the dung; tunnelers, who bury straight down beneath it; and rollers, who carve out a ball and quickly haul it away to their nest.

♪ And they're all competing for a resource that most other animals would rather avoid.

♪ From the moment a fresh pile hits the ground, beetles catch the scent and race to claim the hot commodity.

Man: A lot of herbivores partially digest the plant matter that they're eating, and they introduce an enriched soup of bacteria into this plant matter.

And that's a pretty good nutrient-rich resource.

And beetles take advantage of that.

♪ Man: One reason why these dung beetles are adapted to finding this dung so rapidly is that there might be intense competition for a limited amount of dung.

And beetles have evolved different ways of fighting and competing for this limited resource.

Narrator: Dung beetles are considered the strongest insects in the world, building balls up to 30 times their own size.

But some clever beetles save their energy.

They wait for others to do the hard work and try to hijack someone else's ball for themselves.

♪ Other species will present their prize to a possible mate.

♪ Woman: Once a female spots this nice ball of dung that this male has, she'll hitch a ride.

And now she's conserving her energy to save for laying her eggs, the male will push the ball backwards without looking where he's going.

♪ Narrator: With his partner on board, the male pushes the ball as quickly as he can, and he does it upside down.

Sylvana: They use their back legs and push off with their front legs, so they're walking backwards, kind of like a handstand.

And when they're pushing that ball of dung, they can't really see where they're going.

So in order to reorient themselves, they'll climb on top and be able to see where the sun is and be able to orient themselves based on the position of the sun.

♪ Narrator: When the new couple has reached the nesting site, the beetles bury their stash.

The female will lay a single egg inside the ball, which will feed the larva for a month until it transforms into an adult to start the cycle again.

♪ One dung beetle can bury 250 times its body weight in a single day, and in the process they churn and restore the soil.

Gavin: When you're burying dung, you're injecting nutrients into the soil and you're aerating the soil.

So it goes beyond just dealing with waste that no one else wants to deal with.

It's providing nutrients to plants and fungus and bacteria, all of which are important for maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

Narrator: Each species burrows at their own preferred depth from 3 inches to 3 feet below the surface.

The diversity of beetles ensures every layer of the soil is refreshed and fertilized.

♪ Sylvana: Dung beetles are very important for these ecosystems because they're continuing this nutrient cycling, which will help the savanna and help the grasslands grow better grass for the mammals that are eating the grass.

And so it's the circle of life, just with poop.

♪ Narrator: It's been 24 hours, and Gimo and Vinicius head back to the traps to see what the pig dung has brought in.

Wow, that's nice.

[Speaking English] ♪ Narrator: Across South Africa alone, there are at least 800 species of dung beetle.

This tells Gimo there's more to be found in the park than what they're seeing in the traps.

And some species might not be fond of pig poop, which means you'll have to think like a beetle and sniff out some fresh dung.

[Speaking local language] ♪ [Gimo speaking English] Ooh!

Look at this one.

♪ Narrator: Most dung beetles are not picky eaters, but some have become so specialized that they're now highly vulnerable, like one species, anonychonitis, that depend solely on the waste of a single animal-- rhinoceros.

[Gimo speaking English] We found a lot of diversity here.

It's a fresh dung, and the dung beetles are still using others for feeding.

You think it [indistinct] larvae?

No, I don't think so.

So we have 3 different species with 4 different colors.

And to be honest, we don't have much knowledge about what the color means, but probably is something about sexual selection between the species so the male can find the female color and pheromones, as well.

It's a beautiful one.

That one.

Yeah.

Narrator: Gimo will take his beetle specimens to the lab to be identified.

They'll serve as a baseline for understanding how many species it takes to maintain an ecosystem that's home to such a diversity of wildlife.

[Gimo speaking English] ♪ Narrator: The diversity of dung beetles is due in part to their adaptability.

But like most insects, they're now in trouble.

♪ In some parts of the world, their numbers have dropped by over 80%.

A major cause is pesticides that drift from nearby farms and find their way into the dung that supports them.

[Gimo speaking local language] Narrator: Insect declines now threaten the planet's natural cleanup crew and not just waste removal.

Other beetles have even more unpleasant duties, like the undertaker of the insect world, the burying beetle.

Man: Burying beetles are really important for the environment because they help remove dead animals.

They will bring the carcass to a particular location.

They'll dig a hole, and they'll bury the animal into the ground.

Swinson: If an animal dies, it'll attract flies.

And the flies will lay their eggs on it, and then the fly larva are maggots, and then they would consume most of the resources available.

But burying beetles take advantage of this resource by burying it as quickly as possible, getting it away from any competitors, and then they lay their own eggs and their larva, then consume that.

Kawahara: Oftentimes, the beetles will remove the fur and they will produce a chemical that they put onto the decaying animal and slow the process of the decay.

And that allows the larva to survive on the meat of the animal for a very long time.

Jessica: American burying beetles, they're actually really beautiful.

So they're black with kind of these orange jaggedy stripes that go across them.

So you look at them and you wouldn't know that their destiny is actually to live inside of the rotting flesh of another animal.

♪ Narrator: It may seem curious that in these dark and dirty environments are some of the most colorful bodies in the insect world.

But a beetle's bright hues serve a range of functions we barely understand from signaling to survival.

Sylvana: Some beetles are different colors to warn predators that they taste nasty, like ladybugs that have that bright red with contrasting black dots to let predators know that they're toxic.

Other beetles are different colors, to say, "I'm the healthier, stronger male."

Some beetles are really colorful to blend in with their environment and have really good camouflage.

♪ Narrator: A beetle's coloration can also be deceptive to us.

♪ Beloved beetles, like ladybugs, appear delicate and dainty, but their painted shells and polka dots disguise what makes them critical to the ecosystem.

Sylvana: Ladybugs, I mean, their name is very cutesy and sweet, but they're in fact, vicious predators.

And we need them in our ecosystem because they help control aphid populations.

Aphids are small insects that typically suck the nutrients out of plants, and they can be very detrimental to plants and cause them to be weakened.

And so ladybugs are really important predators for controlling aphid populations.

♪ Narrator: Whether feeding on dung or garden pests, beetles have developed seemingly limitless creative strategies for survival, their behaviors and bodies shaped by millions of years of environmental pressures.

One of the biggest is the drive to reproduce ♪ Along the mudflats of rural Nebraska, one of the rarest insects in the world is on the prowl.

The Salt Creek tiger beetle is tiny but terrifying.

The fastest bug on Earth, it can run the human equivalent of 300 miles per hour.

Its prehistoric appearance dates back 60 million years to when the American Midwest was awash with a salty inland sea.

It now survives in a few remaining tidal banks, its entire world less than 15 acres of habitat.

The tiger beetle's most powerful weapon is its sickle-like mandibles made for catching and dismembering prey.

But these massive jaws also have another purpose.

♪ Tiger beetles are always in the mood to mate.

When a male finds a receptive partner, he uses his weaponized mandibles to clamp onto the female.

A perfect fit right over her wing case.

♪ The coupling can last for several hours.

And even after, the male will remain latched onto his partner, warding off any challengers who might want to fertilize her clutch.

Eventually, she'll lay up to 200 eggs.

♪ Most won't survive to adulthood, but it's an invaluable contribution.

Because of pesticides and habitat loss, there are only a few hundred individuals left on the planet.

♪ The eternal battle for mates has led to an insect arms race.

Ummat: Many animal species invest in structures that are used specifically in competition for mating opportunities.

These are weapons used in combat by males in many species like the large tusks of elephants, the large antlers of elk.

Insects have so much diversity that they account for the largest diversity of weapons that we find in the animal kingdom.

And so they offer an incredible opportunity to understand how these structures evolve, how they're used, and how they develop.

♪ Narrator: To find the extremes of insect weapons, Dr. Ummat Somjee is heading to a habitat from the deep past... Maungatautari Sanctuary Mountain... ♪ a forest enclosed by a protective fence.

♪ The barrier bars entry to mammals, which didn't exist in New Zealand until humans introduced them.

Invasive animals like rats and mice have nearly wiped out the island's defenseless native creatures.

♪ Ummat: Maungatautari is really special because they've built a fence around the entire perimeter of the park, which prevents mammals from entering the park.

When you enter Maungatautari, the temperature drops.

It feels really different with the tree ferns and the soundscapes.

There are giant parrots calling, sounding almost prehistoric.

This is what New Zealand used to be like.

It protects flightless birds.

It protects parrots and many of the native fauna, and this is also a sanctuary for the New Zealand giraffe weevil.

♪ Narrator: Named after long-necked African giraffes, the New Zealand giraffe weevil is one of 95,000 species of weevils, part of a superfamily of long-snouted beetles.

Found only in New Zealand.

They make their homes on the decaying wood of fallen trees And the males' drive to compete for mates has led to the evolution of an extreme weapon.

Its head.

♪ Ummat: I study sexually selected traits.

So these are traits that are often shaped by competition for mating opportunities.

And the New Zealand giraffe weevil is a great example of one of these weevils that grew to extreme proportions.

Because males had these large heads that they used to fight, their heads also grew disproportionately large.

And so it's an exaggeration of an exaggeration.

It looks ridiculous.

It accounts for almost half their body length in the largest males.

♪ Narrator: Smaller males have small heads.

But in bigger males, the snout, or rostrum, grows disproportionately larger, modified into an elongated lance for fending off competition.

Ummat has come to learn how and why these differences evolved.

Ummat: Why is it that larger individuals invest disproportionately more in those structures compared to small ones?

We find that large individual elephants invest disproportionately more in tusks compared to small ones.

This is a pattern that we see across nature, and these weevils present some of the most extreme examples of this exaggeration and provide some of the best opportunities to try to uncover the reasons why we see these patterns across the Tree of Life.

Narrator: Their exaggerated heads have led to the most extreme size difference between adults in the animal kingdom.

If you took a small male and put it next to a large male, the large male is 30 times larger.

This is a really small one.

He's about a centimeter and a half long, and this is a medium sized one.

He's about 4 centimeters long, and they grow twice the size of that.

So sometimes we get males that are 8 or even 9 centimeters long.

So if the smallest weevil was the size of a person, the largest weevil would be the combined mass of two giraffes.

That's an enormous range of sizes, especially in the same species for individuals that are competing for the exact same mating opportunities on the same log.

[Insects chirping] ♪ Narrator: When two rival males meet, they align themselves and measure their opponent.

If one is clearly outsized, he'll walk away.

But if it's an even match, it's time for a joust.

♪ Ummat: They line up, and they start jousting with their elongated heads.

♪ And in those cases, fights can go on for a few minutes.

♪ Narrator: A nearby female watches closely as the two suitors go to war.

♪ Ummat: It looks very energetically costly.

Males are grabbing each other with their mandibles.

They're trying to maintain the grip on the log, and they're trying to pull at each other, and they're both trying to oust each other from the log.

♪ Narrator: In the heat of battle, both fighters lose their footing.

Not even a fall stops the fight.

♪ Ummat: These males are jousting for the opportunity to fertilize that egg.

♪ Narrator: One weevil throws in the towel, and the winner makes his way back to claim his prize... ♪ an opportunity to mate with the female.

♪ While his long head is for fighting, hers is for drilling.

And she's already boring the hole for her egg.

♪ Ummat: A female will take anywhere between an hour to 4 hours to drill a hole where she'll lay a single egg.

♪ Narrator: Another challenger arrives, drawn by the drilling female.

The other male fends him off, ensuring he's the last to mate with her before she lays her egg.

♪ Ummat: Her rostrum is in pretty deep, so she must be coming to the end of her drilling.

She's removing little pieces of sawdust with her antenna as she drills deeper.

So I think she's getting close to laying.

♪ So when she's ready to lay, she'll turn around and then she'll probe with her ovipositor until she finds the hole that she took so long to drill, and then she'll lay her egg into that hole, and that might take a few minutes for her to do.

And then she'll very carefully use her abdomen, the tip of her abdomen, to grab little pieces of bark and lichen, and whatever's on the surface of the log, and fill in the hole that she drilled on top of the egg.

♪ Narrator: As she conceals the site, what Ummat wants to know is who fathered the egg?

Is it always the larger male who wins the fights?

Or do smaller males find opportunities to sneak in and mate?

Is bigger always better?

♪ Ummat: A big question is if this large head is such an advantage, why don't all males have such a large head?

In simple terms, we want to know whether the males with these elongated heads have an advantage over these males that are much smaller.

And one way we're testing this is by watching and observing the different males that a female mates with and observing their behaviors and then trying to figure out the paternity of the eggs that that female lays.

[birds chirping] Narrator: Keeping an eye on who's mating with whom requires a detailed system And a lot of time in the forest.

Ummat: To keep track of individual weevils, we'll catch a weevil and put a little paint on its back.

And then we'll use a Sharpie to write a little number on its back.

So we have individual identification numbers for each individual weevil.

And we have these great little binoculars that have a short focal distance.

And when we go back to a log, we can look through the binoculars and see which individuals are on the log and keep track of them that way.

[insects chirping] There's a female that's drilling right now.

She's drilling so that she can lay an egg, and there's a male that's mating--ooh!

And there's another male that's approaching him right now.

♪ For the last week or so, the largest male on this particular log has been the 55th individual that measured, male 55.

♪ Every time he gets in contact with another male, he's very aggressive.

He eeks that male off, and he's often mating with females that lay eggs in that trunk.

♪ So I'm really excited to see if Male 55 is actually going to be the father of many of the eggs that we collect.

♪ [birds chirping] Narrator: To dig into these evolutionary questions, Ummat has teamed up with Dr. Chrissie Painting from the University of Waikato.

Chrissie has spent more than a decade pioneering research into their life cycles, behavior patterns, and secret hiding places.

Chrissie: They're all hiding.

I've worked on the giraffe weevils for about 15 years almost now, and so this project is the culmination of many years of work on the species where we've answered lots of basic kind of behavioral and morphology questions about the species, and now we're able to take it that step further with that knowledge that we've built over time.

Narrator: When they spot a drilling female, they take a DNA sample from any males that mate with her and mark the egg site.

Chrissie: We've been sitting here sometimes for a lot of hours watching a female drill her hole.

And we're recording all the males that approach and mate with her during that time.

And then when she finally turns around and lays the egg, we very carefully pinpoint that exact spot, and then we will pop that little bottle cap over the top.

♪ Ummat: Now, these eggs are about 8 days old, so we'll just pull out a chunk of wood where we saw the female lay an eggs, and then we're going to slowly shave off tiny sections of that wood until we see the egg exposed.

But it's so delicate at that point, even if we touch it a little bit, we might lose that DNA data.

And so we're going to try to expose it and then drop it into a vial to save the genetic information.

I'm nervous just talking about it.

[Laughter] ♪ Have you got it?

Yeah.

Oh, sweet.

Yeah.

♪ Chrissie, voice-over: Once we actually extract the DNA and genotype the egg, we'll have the mother's DNA, and then we'll also be able to profile who the father was.

And hopefully, it's one of the males that we've observed.

♪ Ummat: I would predict that the larger males might be more likely to father the eggs.

But we see the small males present in the population, and they might be mating with females after these large males are mating.

Narrator: Months later, the test results come as a surprise.

The dominant males, who won the battles and the last to mate with the females, fertilize the eggs only 30% of the time.

The rest were fertilized by smaller or unknown males.

It turns out being small may have its own advantages.

Ummat: One reason that not all individuals have greatly elongated heads may be that these small individuals get advantages by sneaking copulations with females, and they may be less easy to detect by these large males if they're smaller and more agile.

♪ Narrator: Beetles have been battling for mates for 295 million years, far longer than elephants and rhinos have had to refine their tusks and horns.

♪ The staggering diversity of beetle bodies makes them an invaluable window into how and why these traits evolve.

But insect combat plays out on a tiny scale, and trying to witness their weapons in action is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

But in a few places, beetles have battled their way right into the spotlight [Indistinct chatter] In northern Thailand, the home of Muay Thai kickboxing, a fight is about to begin.

[Indistinct chatter] Spectators place their bets as two local champions square off in the ring.

[Shouting] [Speaking local language] Ummat: I heard about this beetle fighting tradition where people would collect beetles from the forest and get them to compete and have this whole culture around it.

[Shouting] And I've known about this for a really long time and have always wanted to see it happen.

[Cheering] ♪ [Man chanting in local language] Narrator: In the city of Chiang Rai on Thailand's northern border, September brings an unusual culture to life.

♪ A whole community focused on beetle battles.

And for a scientist who studies fighting insects, it's a research goldmine.

Ummat: There's more than a thousand species of rhinoceros beetles with different horn shapes and sizes.

And for almost all of them, we don't know anything about how they fight, how those different weapon shapes evolve.

If I were to go into the forest and look for beetles fighting, it would take me a really long time and I would not be able to watch many beetles fighting in the wild.

There's not a lot of places where you hear these stories of people taking so much time and energy, collecting insects from the wild, and then watching their behavior and engaging with them.

So I was so curious to come and see what was happening and how people engaged with these beetles.

[Speaking local language] [Speaking local language] Ummat: I met Un, who raises beetles.

He's such an interesting character because everybody seems to know him, and his beetles seem to win pretty often.

[Un speaking local language] ♪ Ummat: Is there any way you can tell that this one might be a good fighter, or do you find out later?

[Speaking local language] ♪ Ummat: This is the first time I've handled these beetles, and it's really interesting.

I can feel the tarsal claws on my hands, and it's really interesting to feel it holding tight when you stroke the horns.

So this is really exciting to finally hold one.

♪ Narrator: Once abundant in these forests, Siamese rhinoceros beetles, like insects everywhere, are becoming harder to find.

Un keeps some females to breed more beetles and then releases them to help replenish the wild population.

[Un speaking local language] ♪ [Indistinct chatter] Ummat: There's a guy named Nui here who hosts beetle fights at his house.

And he gets a lot of different people who are really excited, enthusiastic about beetle fights in his backyard.

And I've been invited to his house.

So I'm really excited to see how this works [Indistinct chatter] [Speaking local language] [Cheering] Narrator: Like the New Zealand giraffe weevil, rhinoceros beetles in the wild size up their opponents before fighting.

Here, they're divided into strict weight classes.

Locals size them up by eye, but for Ummat, it takes a bit more precision.

Ummat: I'm measuring the size of the beetle.

We're taking the whole beetle length, including the horn, the head horn, and then we're also taking the width of the beetle, which might give us an indication of the body size itself.

[Indistinct chatter] In boxing matches, we often see strict size classes where individuals fight based on their size class, and we see a really similar pattern happening in nature.

Beetles that are more evenly matched in size are more likely to escalate the competition.

And so they're kind of re-creating what actually happens in nature about this equality in opponent size.

[Indistinct chatter] Narrator: The fight brings enthusiasts from throughout the neighborhood, but is what's good for the culture also good for the beetles?

[Cheering] Ummat: It's important to consider a cruelty element to this beetle fighting.

One of the things that I know as a biologist studying beetles is that these beetles have these horns to fight.

That's what they do in nature.

These beetles have this hard exoskeleton, and much of these fights are a form of signaling.

There very rarely is an injury during a fight and at the of a wrestling competition, the one that retreats, the one that taps out is the loser in that situation.

[Cheering] They're kept very well because they want their beetles to be champion beetles.

So it's really motivating to see all the care and enthusiasm people take and pride they take into how well they take care of their beetles.

♪ [Shouting] Narrator: The fighting arena is a hollow rotating log with a female beetle hidden inside.

The scent of her pheromones triggers the males' competitive warrior instinct.

Ummat: I've been studying insects for a long time, and it's actually very challenging to get insects to compete or to watch them compete.

[Shouting] I've often put two beetles on a log, and they've done nothing for hours [Shouting] And they're able to entice the beetles to fight in these artificial environments, which I was surprised by.

They were able to get beetles to fight almost every time.

[Shouting] Narrator: Ornate sticks help direct the competitors' movements during a match.

In the wild, beetles use vibration to signal to one another.

[Shouting] The wooden stylus may be literally tapping into a form of beetle communication.

Ummat: When people are tapping on the log, beetles are probably using these vibrational cues in nature to tell if there are other beetles around, or perhaps they're telling if there are females that are feeding on the log and creating vibrations.

So we're not quite sure how it works, but it certainly works, and the people here have figured that out.

[Cheering] When the beetles approach each other, they start by smaller pushes and shoves.

[Shouting] You can see their tarsal claws really gripping the edges of the log.

It was really interesting to watch this grappling behavior, just like two wrestlers trying to get the other one into a vulnerable position.

[Cheering] And when one beetle was able to lock onto the opponent in the correct way and lift it up off of the log... [Shouting] It was so clear how that weapon was really well designed for that explicit purpose.

[Shouting] They fight in different ways.

These very big beetles weren't moving as fast as the smaller ones that were more nimble, turning faster, dodging more, were able to do more of this dramatic behavior.

[Shouting] These big ones did these much slower movements, they would grapple for a longer time.

[Cheering] [Shouting] Narrator: The beetle that gets the most lifts or dislodges their opponent is declared the winner.

And the loser is released to the wild.

[Cheering] Finally, the crowd urges Ummat to step into the ring and put what he's learned to the test.

OK, go.

[Shouting] Ummat: I felt so nervous when I had to try to get a beetle to fight and participate in this.

[Shouting] And my stick rubbing skills weren't very good.

I was doing it for the first time, and I really didn't recognize how difficult it was.

[Cheering] Thank you.

I lost, I lost.

I lost very badly, I lost.

But I thought I was winning at first.

[Shouting] Oh, you put a bet on it.

[Laughter] [Speaking local language] ♪ Ummat: This has been an incredible opportunity for me to compare fighting behavior in so many beetles in one place.

If I was coming here as a naturalist, going into the forest and trying to observe this behavior, I doubt I would have been able to see it.

[Shouting] In this culture, an insect that is sometimes seen as a pest is actually prized.

People look at it and engage with it and pay attention to it.

The fact that a community of people in this remote region are paying attention to these insects is extremely valuable.

It creates enrichment in the environment, and it draws people in to paying more attention to insects.

[Shouting] ♪ Narrator: In a way, it's strange beetles don't get more attention.

There are more of them than anything else on Earth.

♪ Sylvana: Beetles, without them, we would be waist high in feces and dead animals and plants, and the planet would smell so bad.

And so once we get empathetic toward our insects that do so much for us without thanks from humans, we can funnel that into getting people to care about the bugs that are in their backyard.

And to change people's perspective from scary, creepy crawlers to their neighbors that are contributing to the health of their neighborhood.

♪ Narrator: From the pollinators that feed the world to the unnoticed creatures that replenish the soil, control pests and disease, and bring beauty and mystery to the planet, the insect apocalypse underscores how we need bugs more than they need us.

[Buzzing] Sylvana: All of a sudden, that curiosity and excitement turns into understanding and respect and empathy for insects that we need in order to survive.

♪ ♪ "Bugs That Rule the World" is available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video ♪