The Most Extreme - Survivors

Are you a survivor? Could you hang tough with animals living in the worst conditions on the planet? We are counting down the top 10 most extreme survivors in the animal kingdom and seeing how we stack up against their extraordinary endurance. Discover that when the going gets tough, the tough get pushed to The Most Extreme. Earth is a planet of extremes, extreme places╔ and extreme animals. But some animals are more extreme than others. Join us as we count down to find the most unusual and the most extraordinary, The Most Extreme. Our countdown begins in a land of extremes, extreme heat and extreme dryness. You have to be tough to survive in a desert. That's why camels are coming in at number 10 in our countdown of extreme survivors. For thousands of years, people have been crossing the arid wastelands of Arabia on these animals known as Ships of the Desert. Other people have been less complimentary and called them horses designed by committee, but if so the committee knew what it was doing. The camel might be ugly, but it survives in conditions that no horse ever could as camel breeder Gil Riegler explains. Camels just have a amazing adaptation to the desert, it's arid, it's hot, there is not much food, but look how big these animals grow and how strong they are. They can carry 600 pounds of weight for 10 hours a day without that much water or food. Everything about them is adaptation to their environment. If you look at the nostrils, the nostrils are little slits and have special muscles that will help them close them during the sandstorm. Little hairs inside them will siphon out the sand so they can actually breathe. When you look at the eyes, the long eye lashes will keep the sand away from the eyes and they also have a second eyelid that goes across it, so they can walk in the desert with their eyelid covering their eye. The camel's most famous feature also comes in handy in the desert, but contrary to popular opinion, its hump doesn't store water. It's actually full of fat which it can use as a fuel supply in times of adversity. So with all these built-in survival features, just how tough is a camel. Imagine if you were dropped into a desert, there is no water, no shade and the temperature is 50 degrees, you start sweating at an alarming rate. Sweating drains your body fluids. Lose more than 12% of your body weight and you're in big trouble. With nothing to drink, in less than 36 hours you'd be dead. But imagine if we had the super survival skills of the camel. We'd be able to endure the extreme heat much longer than an ordinary human. That's because not only is the camel better at conserving water, but it can lose more than 25% of its body weight and still survive. It can go without a drink for an incredible eight days, but when it finally gets to water, it's really thirsty. A camel can drink 80 liters in 10 minutes. But it's a different kind of drinking that may take the camel out of the desert and into our homes. Camel milk is very nutritious. When you think about the desert, there really isn't anything there especially when you think about fruits or vegetables that can supply vitamin C for the young baby camels. Camel milk could contain triple the amount of vitamin C that cow milk will have in it. It also has insulin and we're very interested in doing the research to find out how this insulin works with diabetics. Of course the tricky part is getting the milk out of the camel. Gil not only breeds camels, but milks them. He set up the first camel dairy in the United States, but it's not a new idea. In deserts around the world, many people rely on this nutritious milk for survival and Gil's discovered that camel milk has 40% less cholesterol than cow's milk and will keep for four months in the fridge. It's a long way from the deserts of Arabia to the fridges of America, but who knows may be one day we'll be calling the camel the cow of the desert. If only our next contender in the countdown was as kissable as a camel. Welcome to Drybones, Texas. It's time for our showdown with pest controller Michael Bohdan. The rat may be number nine in our countdown, but it's also public enemy number one. Rats have been around for millions of years and they have always associated themselves with man and as a result they'd been able to adapt their life and they're very prolific. It doesn't take very long for a rodent to the born and then let's say 30-45 days later, it starts having young of its own. At this rate, a single pair of rats could have 15,000 offspring in a year if they all survived and surviving is what rats do best. Rats are number nine in our extreme countdown because they are so tough, they have to be because we try really hard to get rid of them and the diseases they carry, but rats just keep coming back for more. Take a look at most cities and you'll find for every person there is at least one rat making itself at home. So how do these wildly rodents always stay one jump ahead of us. Well for a start, rats are incredible athletes. Their superhuman powers mean they can come into our lives through even the most unsavory entrances. They may be your worst nightmare, but have you ever dreamt of what it would be like to have the superpowers of a rat. If you were a rat, you'd be able to squeeze into some very small spaces. Thanks to the flexible bones in your skull, you'd be able to squeeze through any hole that's just slightly bigger than the width of your head and you'd never get stuck in a pipe because the jaws of the rat are 120 times stronger than ours. That means you could easily gnaw a hole in a lead pipe, or a garbage can, or even cinder blocks. And if there isn't a handy toilet to escape down, don't panic because rats are so much smaller and lighter than humans, they have no trouble falling great distances. With the superpowers of a rat, you could survive a fall from a five story building. That's why we've had to try every trick in the book to get rid of these super survivors. Poisons are our favorite weapon, but rats have even found ways to survive this chemical warfare. It seems rats take tiny bites of any new food they find including poisons which may help them build up an immunity. Coupled with the rats fast reproductive rate, this has seen the emergence of super rats. Animals that scientists have described as little bags of poison with four legs and a tail, but one man shared the rat's incredible tolerance for poison. He was the scandalous mad monk Rasputin. In 1916, in Tsarist, Russia, Rasputin had become so unpopular that a band of conspirators decided to poison him with food laced with cyanide, but he didn't die. The poison may not have worked because Rasputin chronic gastritis meant the cyanide wasn't rendered volatile. So like a rat, Rasputin cheated death until the conspirators decided to shoot him several times and he still didn't die. It wasn't until they beat him about the head and threw him in the river that Rasputin finally succumbed. But not to the poison or the bullets, but by drowning. Even though rats are harder to kill than Rasputin, they are still only number nine in our most extreme countdown. We've survived the first two contenders, but coming up are animals so tough, they don't need health insurance because they can walk away from any disaster even the end of the world. That's coming up next on The Most Extreme. The sea can be extremely dangerous especially if you are a gannet. The Australasian gannet is a hunter of fish. So it has a problem. How do you catch a fish when you're soaring 30 meters above the sea? The solution is simple, if a little extreme. The gannet is number eight in the countdown because no ordinary animal could survive hitting the sea at 140 kilometers per hour. Hitting anything at that speed is usually fatal. You'd have to be a dummy to try diving into the sea at these speeds, but gannets are extreme survivors, thanks to their clever design. To make sure they don't swallow water, gannets have no nostril holes and can keep that beak tightly shut upon impact and its body has built-in air bags just under the skin. Just before it dives, the gannet inflates these air pockets to absorb the shock of impact. We've installed a similar system in our cars. Unlike gannets, the human body is not built for these extreme impacts, so why would anyone make a career of diving into the water at 100 kilometers an hour. One of these human gannets is Dustin Webster. Why would I jump off of something? Well, unlike some animal it's not for survival that's for sure. Main reason I like to jump off is for adrenaline. First look over the edge. It's a long way down, you can't imagine how far down it is. The height I was going from today is actually 63 feet, that's about 19 meters pretty high when you consider that human body is not made for that kind of impact. The only thing I can tell you is when you hit, you better not relax until you take your first breath of air, because if you relax that water is going to tear you apart, it's going to shape you into a pretzel. It may be fun, but cliff diving is also extremely dangerous even when going feet first, that's why it's best left to those animals with built-in safety equipment. And an appetite for extreme speed. If you think that daredevil divers, incredible climbers, and deep drinking survivors are tough, just wait till you meet an animal that loves the high life so much, it'll take your breath away. That's coming up next on The Most Extreme. Our next tough customer lives high in the Andy's of South America. It's a cousin of the camel that doesn't survive the extreme heat but height. Meet the guanaco. It can be found more than five kilometers above sea level. Up here the air is dangerously thin. It contains only a third of the oxygen it would at sea level. That's why the guanaco is number seven in our countdown. It's perfectly adapted for living in conditions that would leave us gasping for breath. Imagine if you were dropped on to a mountain 3,000 meters above sea level. In the rarified atmosphere, you'd soon be feeling sick and tired because the organs of your body need oxygen to work properly and oxygen is carried by red blood cells. In a teaspoon of blood there are about 19 billion of them which sounds like a lot, but in thin air it's not enough. That's why climbing mountains can be a dangerous business. Above 5,000 meters, you're breathing four times faster than normal and still not getting enough oxygen. In a death zone above 7,500 meters your digestive system gives up and in a desperate search for oxygen starts to eat itself. It's not a nice way to go. But imagine if we were like the guanaco. A human with guanaco blood would have four times as many red blood cells and each blood cell would live twice as long. With so many more cells to collect oxygen from the thin air, the guanaco is much better suited to the high life than we are. The guanaco was once described as a careless mixture of parts intended for other beasts and turned down as below standard. But like all our other contenders in our countdown when it comes to extreme survival, this careless mixture can teach us a thing or two. If rats are our worst nightmare, then cockroaches must be what rats have bad dreams about. These belligerent bugs are number six in our countdown because they'll survive just about anything we throw at them. And no wonder, thanks to supersensitive antennae and an extra brain in their rear, cockroaches can dodge just about anything, but then they've had plenty of practice. Some 400 million years in fact, cockroaches were bugging dinosaurs long before they set foot in your kitchen. But from the suburban kitchens of Natick, Massachusetts comes the ultimate cockroach survival story. 30 years ago, scientists at the local army base were carrying out experiments on giant Madagascan hissing cockroaches. They exposed the bugs to doses of radiation. Cockroaches can survive 200 times more radiation than we can, but at the end of experiment the scientists were left with the colony of radioactive roaches. So they decided, they better poison the bugs and then seal them in plastic bags to be taken to the local landfill. But these were bugs that just didn't know when to quit, they shrugged off the poison, chewed out of the bags and were soon running amok in the burbs. One resident even had radioactive roaches for breakfast. That's why the army decreed the only reliable way to kill these bugs was to hit them with a hammer, but even then you'd have to aim carefully. Cockroaches can live for a month with no head and only then die of thirst. Cockroaches may be too tough for their own good because they are so hard to get out of our lives. Most people think cockroaches are revolting. Now these are giant hissing cockroaches. I told you, you guys would like this. Even wildlife educators like Paul Hahn have trouble getting people to appreciate the truly incredible survival skills of the cockroach. If you think the cockroach was disgusting, just wait till we sink even lower in the search for our next contender in the countdown. We are dredging the bottom of the sea to find an animal so tough, it bathes in acid everyday and dines on nothing but poisons. That's coming up next on The Most Extreme. You can't find number five in the countdown with a snorkel, you need Alvin. Alvin is a deep sea exploration vehicle. The deep sea is just like deep space, dark, dangerous and unknown. So Alvin has to be built to withstand the most extreme conditions nature can throw at it. Imagine traveling two and a half kilometers straight down Sun light disappears after only a few hundred meters. You'd think nothing could survive down here and then out of barren wastes rises a miniature volcano. It's a chimney called a black smoker. It spews boiling hot toxic chemicals into the sea. It would take something really tough to survive here. Something as tough as the tubeworm. Tubeworms are very strange animals. They are full of billions of bacteria. They convert the black smoker's toxic chemicals into food for the worm. That's why the tube worm has no mouth, no stomach and no rear end, yet it survives horrific conditions that would kill any other animal. Imagine if you were as tough as a tubeworm. You'd spend your life sitting in a bath of vinegar just like the acid waters of the black smoker and you'd be breathing hydrogen sulphide, a gas as deadly as cyanide. Your feet would be in water just above freezing, but your head would be cooking in wafts of boiling water coming from the vent. But the most deadly of all is the extreme pressure of all that water above you. It's like trying to breathe with a blue whale on your chest pushing down at more than 200 kilos per square centimeter. We may not be able to survive three kilometers under the surface, but Tanya Streeter from the Cayman Islands gives it her best shot. Tanya is a free diver. That means she takes one big breath and finds out how low she can go. Can you imagine holding your breath for two and a half minutes and once you passed 60 meters, your lungs will be squeezed to the size of egg cups as the pressure collapses your chest cavity. On her deepest dives, she'll have to swim the height of the Statue of Liberty to get to the surface and all this on a single breathe. Tanya Streeter takes snorkeling to the extreme, but even Tanya would have to dive 20 times deeper to visit the realm of the tubeworm. When nature calls, our next contender has learned to hold out even longer than Tanya. Welcome to the Arctic, in this frozen world animals have to find ways to survive extreme cold. Coming in at number four are the biggest survivors on our extreme countdown, polar bears. Your average polar bear will have a 12 centimeter layer of fat and two coats of fur to keep it warm. In fact an adult bear will suffer more from overheating in the summer than being cold in the winter. But baby bears are not so well insulated, that's why pregnant females have to find another way to escape the worst of the Arctic weather. Female polar bears go underground. Alaskan wildlife biologist Steve Amstrup is looking for a polar bear den. Deep inside this snow cave, a female polar bear will tuck herself away from the worst of the Arctic winter. Boy, this is a narrow little spot here. She'll spend four months in this den saving energy by falling into a deep, deep sleep. Her heart rate will drop to eight beats a minute and her metabolism will slow to half its normal rate and she'll give birth to her cubs in her sleep, but the reason the polar bear is number four in the countdown is that during the entire four months she's asleep. She won't answer the call of nature not once, not only is that extreme will power, it's extremely interesting to scientists. That's because scientists believe that the polar bear's ability to grin and bear it may help sick humans as well. It's just a matter of hunting down the secrets of the bear's metabolism. Scientists are taking a closer look at tranquilized bears because they are the ultimate recyclers. Instead of going to the toilet, hibernating bears turn wastes into protein. Somehow bears are able to split up the waste molecules and use the components to build helpful chemicals that can be used by their body. Scientists are hoping that by analyzing the bear's chemical recycling process, we could develop drugs for people with kidney failure. Patients could recycle their wastes rather than rely on dialysis machines to filter their blood for them. But the polar bear's extreme constipation hasn't set a good example to everyone. In 1994, a New Zealand man set a dubious endurance record of his own. After arousing the suspicions of officials when entering the country, the man was arrested and held in custody. Police suspected he was carrying drugs inside his body. He was booked into a hotel room and the two constables waited patiently for the details to emerge and waited and waited. Three weeks passed, and still the call of nature was ignored. Finally, on the 23rd day the smuggler could hold on no longer and the police had their incriminating evidence. Then they passed a motion of their own to have the smuggler locked up for obstructing the course of justice. Perhaps it's lucky we haven't yet found a way to recycle wastes like the polar bear. If we had, the smuggler might still be in that hotel room today. It seems incredible that anything could be tougher than polar bears, tubeworms and cockroaches. But number three in our countdown is an animal that makes the coldest place on earth seem like a tropical paradise. That's coming up next on the Most Extreme. In Antarctica, cold is taken to the most extreme. In some places the average temperature is minus 57 degrees and it can get down to a world record minus 89 degree Celsius. Few humans would think of spending their winter in Antarctica after all in these temperatures exposed skin freezes in less than a minute. Yet number three in our countdown walks here in bare feet. These are emperor penguins. At the beginning of the winter, when the sea freezes over and the going gets tough, most animals head north for warmer places, but not the emperors. These incredible survivors choose to breed in the coldest place on earth. They waddle and slide up to 80 kilometers to reach their breeding ground where they huddle together to keep out the worst of the wind. The females each lay a single egg and then they leave the males to it. The colony of solo dads is plunged into the perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter. But the males have a problem. There is nothing to build nests out of in this frozen wilderness. So the males make a nest of their feet. They'd balance the precious egg on the tops of their toes and cover it with a warm pouch of skin and then they settle down for the winter. They barely move for 65 days. They keep that egg on their toes despite freezing temperatures, cruel winds and blinding storms and throughout it all, they don't eat a mouthful of food. When the sun finally returns, it's a huge relief for everyone who spent the winter on the ice. The arrival of spring signals the annual Scott Base polar plunge. The rules are simple, no clothes allowed and you must go completely under. It's got to be a quick dip because cold water robs body heat 32 times faster than cold air. In freezing waters, it only takes minutes to stop your heart, but there are cases of extreme survival. In March 1975, an 18-year-old Michigan man was out for a walk when he fell through the ice. He was submerged in freezing waters for 38 minutes. When rescuers pulled his body from the water, there were no signs of life. He was en route for the morgue when suddenly he came back to life. Thanks to the mammalian diving reflex. This shuts down all the body systems except those necessary to keep the heart and brain alive. In extremely cold water it can keep humans and other more expert divers alive for a long time. Submerged emperor penguins are also thought to be able to reduce blood flow to all but the most vital organs. That's why they can spend almost 20 minutes under water on a single breath. Once back on the ice, the female emperors head back to their hungry males. It's a good thing the female spent the winter feeding because now the eggs have hatched and there is an extra mouth to feed. To survive in this frozen world, you have to be tough, but the emperor chicks still need to keep on their toes. If they fell on to the ice, they could freeze to death in only two minutes. But that's no problem for the next contender in our most extreme countdown. In the mountains of New Zealand, number two in our countdown has a truly extreme solution to surviving the cold winter. This is a huge flightless cricket called a weta. It's one tough insect with an armor-plated body and massive jaws, but unlike polar bears or penguins it's cold-blooded. So when the temperature drops, the weta chills out. The weta freezes solid. Its heart stops beating and all brain functions ceases as the water in its body turns to ice, sometimes for several months. It takes a very special kind of animal to survive these freezing conditions. Even experts can only survive for a few minutes. Unlike the weta, if ice crystals start forming in our cells we are in big trouble. Ice crystals are big, sharp and destructive. When mountaineers get ice crystals forming in their body, it's called frostbite. Ice destroys every cell it touches because it ruptures delicate cell membranes. Even when the frost bitten areas warm up and the ice melts, all cells are dead and destroyed and that can lead to gangrene and amputation. But not for the weta, for when the thaw begins, the weta comes back from the dead. There is no frostbite, there is no cell damage. The weta's just been in suspended animation. And scientists still have no idea how it survives, but even the weta's incredible endurance is still no match for the ultimate survivor on the planet. We've seen the nine contenders. They're the best of the best. Only one animal is tougher. It's number one and it's coming up next on the Most Extreme. Our number one most extreme survivor is so tough, you can find it just about anywhere on the planet from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the Himalayas. It can survive in hot springs and freezing Arctic wastelands, dry deserts and humid rain forests and it can even survive in your backyard. Entomologist Ruud Kleinpaste is hunting for the world's toughest animal. You can find the most extreme survivor anywhere there is moss or lichen. The only problem is that the world's toughest animal is very, very small. Coming in at number one in the countdown is the water bear. It's a real shame that the water bears are so small. They are invisible to the naked eye, but if you could see them they look cute just like little teddy bears. Normally this tiny animal waddles around on its four pairs of plum little legs sucking the juices out of mosses and lichens. But when the going gets tough, how can the cute and squishy water bear be tougher than a grizzly bear. The water bear is the most extreme survivor on the planet because when conditions get tough, this animal effectively curls up and dies. It looses 99% of the water in its body and enters the state of suspended animation. Let's say a water bear starts getting too cold, it'll shrink down, retract all its legs and shut down all systems until conditions improve. Once they're in this state, they're practically indestructible. Imagine if you were as tough as a water bear, if things started getting too cold, all you have to do is curl up and lose virtually all the water in your body. You'd enter a state of suspended animation. Freezing solid would be no problem to a human water bear. Water bears can survive temperatures as low as minus 200 degree Celsius. Extreme heat would be no trouble either. Water bears have survived a scorching 150 degrees. Imagine if a human was exposed to radioactive material. You could be 200 kilometers downwind from a nuclear blast and still get a lethal dose of fallout. That's about 500 roentgens, the units used to measure radiation. The indestructible water bear has been shown to survive a thousand times that amount and life in the desert would be no trouble for a water bear. With nothing to drink, most humans would last less than two days, but even camels are no match for one incredible water bear. A long time ago, a water bear was trapped in a museum specimen of dried moss. It came back to life when scientists added water to the moss 120 years later. The water bears toughness is literally out of this world because it could even survive the vacuum of space. It seems you can never judge an animal by its soft and squishy looks. After all when it comes to survival, the water bear really is The Most Extreme.