Screensnaps #10

A predatory Fried Egg Jellyfish wandering into a group of 100,000 Aurelia jellyfish in order to spear several of them with its tentaclces. (From last week's Life: Creatures of the Deep.)

Screensnaps #9

Another panther chameleon.

Screensnaps #8

This little amphibian — a pebble toad - looks like something that might be jettisoned skywards out of Fuego's fervid crater!

Not all our cats enjoy watching TV, we have discovered. Bali does though; and so does his mother Wizzy, but we've never seen any real evidence that she is really seeing what we see.

But with Bali it's different. His eyes followed this toad's tumble down the side of a mountain and when he spotted the cause of this emergency maneuver — an enormous toad-eating tarantula — he turned to look at me to make a slightly distressed burble and then quickly re-focused on the progress of this eight-legged beasty.

We plan to watch the next episode of David Attenbrough's Life (mammals) with Bali in order to discover what else fascinates him.

His usual position is at the end of the bed right in front of the big screen. During the episode about reptiles a wave hit the camera and Bali looked down below the bed, as if expecting the floor to have been flooded by this sudden deluge!

Screensnaps #7

Panther chameleon.

Screensnaps #6

The new 10-part David Attenborough Life series is proving to be a spectacular demonstration of the virtues of 1080p resolution. This screensnap shows a pair of Brazilian caimanes conserving energy whilst hunting after a long period of being packed together in shrinking pools during the dry season. They line up in rows and basically wait for the fish to swim into their open jaws.

Screensnaps #5

And this was one of the Prince's bodyguards...

Update: V wants one. (She says it reminds her of Clint's line in Gran Torino: "Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn'ta fucked with")

Kate Humble said she felt like she was in a Bond movie as the cortege of expensive 4x4s departed The Kingdom Tower.

Screensnaps #4

Kate Humble lived up to her surname as she was entertained (and thoroughly PR'd) by some of the richest men in Riyadh as she made her way along The Frankincense Trail.

One of them, HH Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud hangs out in this building in the foreground — the Kingdom Tower — HQ of a massive business empire. Humble was taken to his private resort (in the back of his SUV) as the Prince completed on the refinancing of Citigroup up front.

She met his 27-year old fourth wife Amira, who explained why she is comfortable with her husband being surrounded by so many beautiful (and ethical) women.

Saudi Arabia rakes in a profit of $1bn a day from the petrochemicals industry.

Peter Berg rather skipped on the outrageously glamourous side to Saudi life in The Kingdom.

Screensnaps #3

One of the most stunning locations visited in Land of the Lost Volcano was this cave system on the island of New Britain, supposedly never before explored by crazy foreigners.

Leading the way was the team's resident adventurer Steve Backshall, a man with the body of an ex-Para who sounds like Lee Evans on amphetamines: "This is FAN-taaaastic!"

Screensnaps #2

Another recent offering from the Beeb was The Frankincense Trail presented by Kate Humble. When it was good it was fabulous, but when it wasn't so good, our toes began to curl a bit.

The trouble was that Humble's natural personality is the nice-but-dim charming English chump that Louis Theroux likes to affect to good effect.... just without any of the ironic knowingness. In many of the circumstances this trip deposited her in, this persona was just what was needed, but occasionally, when allowed to wander off the prepared script, her otherwise disarming gaucheness became a bit of deterrent to insight.

Episode one covered Humble's trek from the gnarly-tree source of frankincense in Oman through the desperately unstable nation of Yemen. It's perhaps rather a shame that country is so dangerous, as it features the extraordinary mud-brick cityscapes of Sana'a and Shibam. In the latter some of these structures rise to 16 stories.

Screensnaps #1

Thanks to the advent of 1080p I have invented a sad new hobby for myself: television photography. Once I realised that I could capture and manipulate some eye-catching stills from my HD programmes there was no stopping me..and so a new regular series is born.

This little fellow turned up in the BBC's exciting new adventure-science series The Land of the Lost Volcano, set in Papua New Guinea.

The format is not dissimilar to last year's Oceans in which a group of telegenic specialists led by a more seasoned chief scientist are sent off to the frontier of human knowledge, living together in a manner oddly reminiscent of reality TV...though thankfully the team-members assembled here are less obviously twattish than their marine equivalents.

Most of them are there to collect images and specimens and to generally push the cause of conservation, but this particular group also has a designated 'adventurer' whose mad larks are interspersed through the more earnest (and equable) footage of stick insects, perhaps so the director can justify the constant palpitations of his soundtrack.

Anyway, back to the ant. Jungle ants tend to be agriculturalists, growing fungae for food deep within their colonial homes. In this instance however the fungus has turned the tables on the farmer-critters. It grows from inside the body of the insect, somehow taking over its motor controls so that the possessed ant has no choice but to climb up certain types of forest flora and deposit itself on the underside of a leaf. There it will die as the fungus expands and grows the stalk you can see in the snap above. This will eventually disperse spores which will appropriate yet more ants for this fungal reproduction system.

Update: Thanks to Scott for sending me this video which explains the process in greater detail.