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HOW OFTEN HAVE WE BEEN FOOLED BY NATURE ? FIND OUT AS ANIMAL PLANET EXPLORES THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN FACT AND FICTION IN THE BIZARRE WORLD OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS

Babies that eat their parents! Animals that build skyscrapers! Flesh-eating plants! Nature has an uncanny knack of coming up with solutions to the problems of survival that far exceed the human imagination. Actually, how much of this is really true? Animal Planet's new series FOOLED BY NATURE brings you some of the most extraordinary stories from the wild, and out of five fascinating specimens showcased in each episode, one is absolutely fake! It won't be easy to spot the truth because in the wild, truth is often stranger than fiction.

The amaurobios, a garden spider commonly found in Europe and North America, is a devoted mother - so devoted in fact, that she is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. Once her hundreds of spiderlings hatch, they feed on a special foodsack of eggs their mother lays for them. But once the eggs are gone, she urges her young to eat her alive to ensure their survival. Her grisly sacrifice safeguards the survival of as many of her offspring as possible.

But the Darwinian ruthlessness doesn't stop there. In Kenya, the naked mole rat lives in colonies of up to 300 members, all controlled by a single queen mole rat. This queen guarantees her position as head of the colony by suppressing the reproductive cycle of all other females through a pheromone secreted in her urine. While the ordinary females toil for the duration of their short lives, the queen maintains a monopoly on breeding.

There is also the story of the penguin father that starves himself for four months just to keep his baby chick warm, the alligator babies whose gender is determined by the surrounding temperature, and the bird that incubates its eggs in a volcano.

But only four of these stories are true. Can you separate the fact from fiction? Is the suicidal spider the red herring? Or is it the authoritarian mole rat? FOOLED BY NATURE explores the weird, the wonderful, the dazzling and the disgusting in the natural world - with a twist.

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