Nick Baker's Weird Creatures

Nick heads to cowboy country, southeast Arizona, in search of the horned lizard - a reptile with an amazing trick up its spiny sleeve. He discovers a whole range of life with spectacular defence mechanisms, but armed with a high-speed camera his target weird creature promises to deliver a literally eye-popping spectacle.

A blood-sucking vampire lives in the waters of the Amazon, one with a macabre reputation. The candiru is a tiny catfish that has been known to swim up the human urethra. Nick takes a riverboat lab down the rivers of southeastern Peru - his mission to lure and capture some candiru, and try to separate myth from science.

The world's smallest armadillo is highly elusive, and very peculiar. About 10cm long with looks like a door wedge, it lives in the sandy dunes of Western Argentina, and is very rarely seen even by those who live there. Nick travels the same Mendoza desert roads as Charles Darwin two centuries before, meeting guanacos and gauchos along the way, and trying all his trapping tricks to find a PFA.

Nick takes on his biggest frogging challenge yet - a giant frog that lives underwater in one of the highest lakes in the world. Struggling with the lack of oxygen and faced with the risks of diving at altitude, this is Nick's most dangerous Weird Creatures mission.

Gharial are about the most peculiar, and endangered, species of crocodile on earth. Huge in size, but no threat to people, their need for clean, flowing rivers is at odds with much of northern India's rapid growth. Nick sets out to discover why gharial are so different from other crocs, and what humans are doing on both sides of the battle to save the Gharial from extinction.

A monster lurks just off the holiday beaches of Britain's west coast. The basking shark is the second biggest fish in the sea, and the UK is one of the best places to see them. Amazingly, for a creature the size of a London bus, we know very little about their biology and behaviour. Nick goes in search of the sharks, and the scientists working to unravel their mysteries.

In the boreal forest of Manitoba, Canada, Nick goes trapping for the fastest nose in natural history - the Star-nosed Mole. Its 22-tentacled nose enables it to find food at lightning speed - one reason that this mole has the energy to survive the freezing winters, even swimming beneath the ice, of the forests and marshes it inhabits.