This time, Steken en Prikken travels to Suriname. The land of sunshine, Paramaribo, roti, yardlong beans, and a vast jungle.
Besides monkeys, birds, and snakes, hundreds of fascinating little creatures creep and crawl around here. Can their bites and stings ruin your vacation, or is the fear worse than the danger?
Our task was to create a short explainer animation for each episode, presenting the animal in a lighthearted, funny, and clear way.
Jellyfish have been around for more than 500 million years! That’s even before the dinosaurs existed!
They are made up of about 95% water. The remaining few percent consist of proteins, salt, some nerve cells, and muscles. That means they have no bones, no blood, no brain, and not even a heart!
The bombardier beetle lives all over the world, except in Antarctica!
It can “bombard” because it has two chemicals in its body that create a small explosion when mixed: hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide!
The dwarf caiman can be found all across Suriname! The largest caiman in South America is the black caiman.
A caiman’s sex isn’t determined at fertilization but by the temperature at which its egg hatches.
The giant fishing spider lives both in water and on land!
When night falls, it goes hunting and can catch fish even bigger than itself! But fish isn’t the only thing on its menu, it also eats tree frogs!
Piranhas live in the rivers and creeks of Suriname! They love company, which is why you often see them swimming in schools.
From fish to injured capybaras, they use their razor-sharp teeth to tear their prey to shreds.
The tiger moth caterpillar has one goal: to become a moth. To achieve this, it eats its own body weight in leaves every day!
But once the tiger moth caterpillar transforms into a moth, it can only reproduce, and its adventure often ends just two weeks later.
You can find the conehead grasshopper in tropical forests on large green leaves!
They are mainly active at night, when you can hear them “singing” to attract a mate.
These sneaky creatures can be found in shallow waters, waiting for an unsuspecting prey to swim by.
Once the prey is within reach, it grabs it with its pincers, inserts its piercing snout, and injects it with a substance that turns the prey’s insides into a delicious smoothie.
The spider wasp belongs to the wasp family! But it’s three times bigger and doesn’t live in a social colony. It lives alone in holes in the ground!
After mating, its baby larva is born in its food, a paralyzed spider. But once the spider wasp emerges as an adult, it’s done with spider meat and becomes a vegetarian for the rest of its life!
Bullet ants live in a colony! Almost all the worker ants you see outside the colony are females!
The males only have one job: ensuring the queen can lay new eggs!