[slow calm music] Here we are.

Throughout the world, there are over 2400 species of praying mantises.

Most are found in the tropics, and over a tenth of them, here in Brazil.

In the heart of the Amazon, Gavin is looking for the very roots of their evolution.

From over 140 million years ago.

What makes the Amazon so unique compared to other areas is there's dramatically different lineages of praying mantises that live there.

There are very highly adapted modern forms, but there are then these really interesting, unique, ancient forms.

And these are the lineages that have been around since the origins of praying mantises themselves.

[slow calm music] [rattling] Uh, maybe I better go down there, huh?

Yeah, can you catch it at that level?

Okay.

Now I need that splitter.

[slow upbeat music] We're at an emergent canopy tower, north of Manaus in the Amazon We're in a pretty ideal location where the tower goes well above the canopy height.

So what we're going to do tonight is set up a mercury vapor lamp or metal halide lamp.

It's basically a lamp that's tuned specifically to attract insects.

It throws off a lot of ultraviolet light and it's really, really bright.

The 138 foot tower provides a rare opportunity to mount lights at different levels from the forest floor to the canopy, drawing in a virtual layer cake of mantis diversity.

For praying mantises, I'm trying to find the rarest things.

You have enough to plug in?

Awesome.

[generator rumbling] Running lights is the most efficient and effective way of doing it.

I mean this is here, this is the 50/50 shot.

Are the bugs better over there?

Or are they better over there?

Right.

This is the difference between a successful night.

Right.

And a not so successful night.

Harold's been working here on a project to really document the overall diversity of the nocturnal insects that are flying at night.

Might actually, so we don't trip, if we can run it and tie it on up there?

Oh, yes, good idea, good call.

There's no lights out here.

And there's no lights this bright at this elevation.

So this is a totally unique signal for insects to be able to see.

I mean, if you look west, it's the same forest all the way to the border of Ecuador.

That goes for hundreds of miles.

It's just so exciting.

Like every night as it starts to get dark, you just feel the anticipation building like what is it going to be like tonight?

You know?

This is one of the most interesting times of day, this crepuscular time of day, primates are going to bed.

And then the insects are all starting to wake up.

So it's like a shift change in the rainforest.

[slow calm music] If there is a place in the world that you're going to find some of the coolest stuff, it's going to be sitting on this tower tonight running a light.

We're waiting for the star of the show.

This is the opening act.

As soon as the sun falls, the first bugs begin to arrive.

[slow uplifting music] You never know what you're going to find.

It's always a surprise when you walk up to it.

You just have to hope that you're in the right place at the right time.

Where are you?

My God.

Here he is.

This is a mantoida.

It's the second earliest branch in praying mantises.

So it's really, really ancient.

Goes back a long, long ways.

So you can find fossils of these things that look pretty much the same as these.

[slow upbeat music] There's just layer upon layer upon layer of different groups of insects.

That are living, forest floor all the way up to the canopy.

[slow upbeat music] That's a new one.

This one was hanging out down to the bottom of the sheet, feeding, eating all the other insects that are here.

If you're a predator and you eat insects, this is kind of a great place to hang out.

Gavin collects the tiny predators to be photographed and documented, to get a baseline of the region's mantis diversity.

As insects disappear in other parts of the world, there's little known about how praying mantises are faring in the deep forest.

I think it's extremely important to understand the biodiversity and the environments around us all the way down to one of the biodiversity hotspots on planet Earth, in the Amazon.

If we don't understand what's there, we don't know how it's changing.

We don't know if there's a problem.

Other predators are also drawn to the lights.

Look at those jaws there.

This is another longhorn beetle, those jaws are brutal.

I think this is a genus photina.

[slow upbeat music] This mantis is called Angela.

That's the genus.

And it's a unique lineage of mantises that mimic sticks.

Angelinae.

A really unique kind of mantis.

The lights have brought in a mantis that would be difficult to spot in the daytime.

They act as much like a branch as they possibly can, or a little twig.

Blending in is the name of the game.

[slow upbeat music] If it sees a bird or something come along that it thinks it's in danger for, it'll even act closer like a branch by sticking its legs out in front of its body to break up the profile.

So a bird can't quite determine if that is an insect or a twig.

It's literally pretending that it's something else.

[slow upbeat music] In addition to their hunting skills, praying mantises are also masters of disguise.

Camouflage is one of the core strategies of survival for praying mantises.

If they don't do it well and they don't really own it, they are detected fairly easily by birds or other predators.

Beyond sticks, mantises have evolved bodies that look like bark and even dry, dead leaves.

[slow upbeat music] The dead leaf mantis not only has evolved to look almost identical to a dead leaf, but it also behaves like a leaf swaying in the wind.

When you see highly specialized species like dead leaf mimicking praying mantises, the next question you ask is how can something like that come to be?

So millions and millions of years ago, this thing's ancestor might have had a fraction of a fraction of an advantage over the other individuals within that same population.

But if you compound that over millions of years, that fractional advantage can lead to adaptation and selection and refinement of a convincing camouflage form to the point where the outcome can be so unbelievably convincing that you don't think it's possible.

This long evolution has led to perhaps the mantis masterpiece, the ingenious disguise of the orchid mantis.

[slow upbeat music] What makes them one of the most amazing species on earth is that the female masquerades as a flower.

They're derived from these flower associated ancestors, but they themselves no longer sit on the flower to catch pollinating insects.

They have become the flower to attract pollinators just to their body.

Bees and flies are lured by the predator's shape and vivid color.

But the costume has a dual purpose.

[slow calm music] It's masquerading as a flower to both attract its own prey.

But it's masquerading as a flower to hide from its own predators.

Sometimes it's hard to wrap your head around how closely insects resemble the environment that they live in and that local adaptation has put pressures on these insects to look like inanimate objects or to look like other insects that are also in their environment.

I mean, you won't see something on that level in a lot of other organisms.

Insects do it the best.

[slow calm music]