Inside the Secret Kingdom of Insects

Added: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]They are everywhere.

[00:00:01]>> [music] >> Under your feet, above your head, inside the walls of your home, and deep in the roots of every forest on Earth.

[00:00:08]They were here long before the dinosaurs walked this planet, and they will almost certainly be here long after we are gone.

[00:00:15]We walk past them every single day without a second thought, [music] but if you stop and look closely, you will find some of the most incredible stories in the entire natural world.

[00:00:24]>> [music] >> This is the world of insects, and it is far stranger, far more brutal, and far more beautiful than most of us ever take the time to notice.

[00:00:32]>> [music] >> If the natural world amazes you, you are in the right place. Hit subscribe and join the Untamed Horizon community.

[00:00:39]There is always something wild waiting for you here.

[00:00:41]>> [music] >> Let us start with an insect that most people see every day, but rarely think about. The ant.

[00:00:47]There are over 20,000 known species of ants on this planet. [music] Together, they make up roughly 20% of all animal life on land by weight.

[00:00:55]>> [music] >> That means if you put every ant on Earth on one side of a scale, and every human on the other, >> [music] >> the ants would win. A single ant is tiny, but a colony of ants is something else entirely. Leafcutter ants, [music] found across Central and South America, work in huge teams to cut pieces of leaves and carry them back to their underground nests.

[00:01:14]>> [music] >> But they are not eating the leaves. They are using them to grow a special kind of fungus, which is what the whole colony actually feeds [music] on.

[00:01:21]These ants have been farming for millions of years longer than humans figured out how to do it. Army ants are different. They do not build a permanent nest at all. They move across [music] the forest floor in massive swarms, sometimes millions strong, eating everything in their path.

[00:01:36]>> [music] >> Insects, lizards, small frogs, even snakes.

[00:01:40]Nothing that cannot get out of the way fast enough is safe.

[00:01:43]>> [music] >> And fire ants? If you have ever accidentally stepped on one of their mounds, you already know exactly how they got their name.

[00:01:50]Ants communicate almost entirely through chemicals called pheromones. When an ant finds food, it leaves a chemical trail back to the colony. When it is in danger, it releases a different chemical that tells the [music] others to fight.

[00:02:03]An entire society built on invisible signals. If ants are the builders of the insect world, >> [music] >> bees are the workers that keep everything alive.

[00:02:12]There are over 20,000 species of bees in the [music] world. Most people think of the honeybee, but the family is enormous. There are bees that live alone, >> [music] >> bees that nest underground, and bees so small you could easily miss them on a flower petal.

[00:02:25]The honeybee colony is one of the most well-organized groups in all of nature.

[00:02:29]A single hive can hold up to 80,000 bees.

[00:02:32]>> [music] >> There is one queen whose only job is to lay eggs.

[00:02:36]There are male bees called drones whose only purpose is to mate with the queen.

[00:02:40]And then there are the female worker bees who do absolutely everything else.

[00:02:45]Workers build the comb, guard the entrance, >> [music] >> feed the young, collect nectar, and make honey. They also do something remarkable when they find a good source of flowers.

[00:02:54]They fly back to the hive and perform what scientists call the waggle dance, a figure-of-eight movement that tells the other workers exactly where the flowers are, how far away they are, and how good they are.

[00:03:05]They are giving directions through dance. Bees pollinate about 1/3 of all the food that humans eat. Without [music] them, most of our fruits, vegetables, and nuts simply would not exist.

[00:03:15]>> [music] >> A world without bees is not a world most of us would want to live in.

[00:03:19]And yet, bee populations around the world are in serious trouble.

[00:03:23]Habitat [music] loss, pesticides, and disease have wiped out huge numbers of colonies over the last few decades. The smallest creatures sometimes carry the biggest responsibilities. Few things in nature are as immediately beautiful [music] as a butterfly in flight.

[00:03:37]But the life of a butterfly is far more dramatic than its appearance suggests.

[00:03:42]A butterfly begins its life as an egg, >> [music] >> then hatches into a caterpillar that does almost nothing but eat.

[00:03:48]It grows rapidly, shedding its skin several times as it gets bigger.

[00:03:52]Then forms a chrysalis and goes through one of the most astonishing changes in the entire animal kingdom.

[00:03:58]Inside that chrysalis, the caterpillar's body breaks down almost completely.

[00:04:03]It dissolves into a kind of living soup, and from that soup, an entirely new creature is rebuilt. Wings, new legs, new eyes, a new mouth.

[00:04:12]The butterfly that emerges is almost nothing like the caterpillar that went in.

[00:04:17]The monarch butterfly, famous for its bright orange and black wings, makes one of the longest migrations of any insect on Earth.

[00:04:24]Every year, millions of monarchs travel up to 3,000 miles from Canada and the United States all the way to a small patch of forest in Mexico.

[00:04:33]They have never made the journey before.

[00:04:35]They do not follow adults who know the way.

[00:04:38]They simply know, in some way scientists are still trying to fully understand.

[00:04:42]Then there is the dragonfly.

[00:04:44]>> [music] >> It might look delicate, but it is one of the most effective hunters on the planet.

[00:04:49]Dragonflies catch over 90% of everything they chase, >> [music] >> which makes them more successful hunters than lions, wolves, or sharks.

[00:04:57]They have been flying on this Earth for over 300 million years.

[00:05:00]>> [music] >> The ones alive today are smaller versions of ancient dragonflies that once had wingspans of nearly 2 and 1/2 feet.

[00:05:07]Even now, they can fly backwards, [music] hover in place, and change direction instantly.

[00:05:13]No fighter jet [music] built by humans comes close to their level of control in the air.

[00:05:17]If you wanted to pick one group of insects that best shows just how varied life on Earth can be, beetles would win without much competition.

[00:05:25]There are more known species of beetles than any other group of animals on Earth.

[00:05:29]About 400,000 species have been named so far, and scientists believe there could be many more we have not discovered yet.

[00:05:37]One in every four animal species known to science is a beetle.

[00:05:41]The dung beetle does exactly what its name says. [music] It eats dung.

[00:05:45]It also rolls it into balls and buries it as food for its young.

[00:05:49]This might not sound impressive, but dung beetles are genuinely important.

[00:05:53]They help break down waste, return nutrients to the soil, [music] and keep ecosystems clean.

[00:05:59]Some of them can roll a ball of dung more than 10 times their own body weight.

[00:06:04]The stag beetle, with its huge jaw-like horns, looks like something out of a science fiction film.

[00:06:10]Males use those horns to fight each other for females, [music] wrestling and flipping rivals off branches.

[00:06:16]Beetles live in deserts, rainforests, [music] rivers, snowfields, and underground.

[00:06:21]If there is a habitat on Earth, there is almost certainly a beetle that has figured out how to live in it.

[00:06:26]>> [music] >> The praying mantis is one of the most well-known predators in the insect world, and for good reason.

[00:06:32]It sits perfectly still, blending into leaves or bark, waiting for something to come close enough.

[00:06:38]When prey gets within range, the mantis strikes faster than the human eye can follow.

[00:06:44]Its front legs snap shut in a fraction of a second.

[00:06:47]It is one of the fastest movements in the animal kingdom.

[00:06:50]Mantises will eat almost anything they can catch, including other mantises.

[00:06:55]The female is famous for sometimes eating the male after mating, though this does not happen every time.

[00:07:01]The male, despite this risk, will still approach the female.

[00:07:05]Some things in nature are hard to explain.

[00:07:08]Grasshoppers are quieter in their approach to life, but no less remarkable.

[00:07:12]>> [music] >> A single grasshopper can jump 20 times the length of its own body.

[00:07:17]For a human, [music] that would mean jumping the length of a basketball court in a single leap.

[00:07:22]When grasshoppers gather in large enough numbers under the right conditions, [music] they go through a physical change.

[00:07:28]Their body color shifts, their behavior becomes more social, >> [music] >> and they begin moving together in one direction.

[00:07:35]At this point, they are no longer called grasshoppers. They become locusts.

[00:07:40]A locust swarm can hold billions of insects and cover hundreds of square miles.

[00:07:44]They eat nearly every plant in their [music] path.

[00:07:47]Throughout human history, locust swarms have destroyed entire harvests and left communities with nothing.

[00:07:54]A creature the size of your finger, multiplied by the billions, has brought civilizations to their knees.

[00:08:00]>> [music] >> We share this planet with more insects than we could ever count.

[00:08:03]Scientists estimate there are somewhere around 10 quintillion individual insects alive on Earth right now.

[00:08:10]That is a 10 followed by 18 zeros.

[00:08:12]>> [music] >> They build, they farm, they hunt, they pollinate, they clean, they transform.

[00:08:18]They hold ecosystems together in ways that most of us never see and rarely think about.

[00:08:24]The next time you see an ant carrying something twice its size, or a bee moving from flower to flower, or a butterfly resting on a leaf in the sun, take just a moment.

[00:08:34]Because you are looking at one of the oldest, most successful, and most important groups of living things that has ever existed on this Earth.

[00:08:42]And they have been doing it long before any of us showed up. If this opened your eyes to something new, hit the [music] like button and subscribe to Untamed Horizon.

[00:08:51]Drop a comment and tell us which insect surprised you the most.

[00:08:54]We have many more stories from the wild coming your way.

[00:08:57]Stay curious.