Educational Videos

Monarchs are locked in a battle with Ophryocystis elektroscirrha (OE), a parasite that can trap a butterfly in its own chrysalis and deform its beautiful wings. Turns out there is a wrong way, and a right way, for you to help these butterflies in your backyard.

Just like us, honeybees get sick. But they have a clever way of protecting against parasites... Prof Jaap de Roode from Emory University explains how beekeepers could have unintentionally put honeybees at risk by selecting against this self-medicating behaviour.

Is your cat amazing ... or is there a parasite in your brain that exercises mind control? Get the facts on toxoplasmosis.

​The biggest challenge in a parasite’s life is to move from one host to another. Intriguingly, many parasites have evolved the ability to manipulate the behavior of their hosts to improve their own survival -- sometimes even by direct brain control. Jaap de Roode details a few parasites that can really mess with the mind.

Just like us, the monarch butterfly sometimes gets sick thanks to a nasty parasite. But biologist Jaap de Roode noticed something interesting about the butterflies he was studying — infected female butterflies would choose to lay their eggs on a specific kind of plant that helped their offspring avoid getting sick. How do they know to choose this plant? Think of it as “the other butterfly effect” — which could teach us to find new medicines for the treatment of human disease.

Explore how animals found ways over time and many generations to use natural medicine as provided in leaves, berries and other plants or even insects. This documentary also shows how those wild animals are practising health care. How have their techniques been passed on to early humans? Questioning traditional boundaries between human and wild animals, we will travel from the Central African Republic to Tanzania, from the US to France with some of the leading experts in animal behaviour as today’s science revisits the birth of animal intelligence and culture.