Not a whole lot of people know this about me, but despite the overall lack of television I watch these days aside from one or two select shows, and baseball, if there’s one thing that I always have a tendency to stop on, it’s nature shows. And when I saw the initial previews for Life, I was excited for a high-quality nature show, and set my DVR to record all the episodes.
Now despite the fact that I’m less than pleased with the narration of Oprah Winfrey, the program as a whole is still no less amazing. It’s just so beautifully done. I highly recommend to anyone who just likes watch animals doing their thing.
But out of all the episodes so far, the one creature that has gotten my attention to the point where it warranted a post about, is simply awesome. That’s pretty much all I can about, it’s a bug, and it rules – The Darwin’s Stag Beetle.
In short, it’s a beetle with gigantic pinchers, and I’ve already forgotten which part of the world it’s indigenous to, although I want to say it’s probably somewhere in South America or Africa. That narrows it down.
But what makes it so cool is what it does. As in every subject on Life, creatures other than humans operate their days on two goals: eating and procreation. And since it’s Oprah Winfrey doing the narration for the show, that means all she can talk about is sex.
The Darwin’s Stag Beetle is an aggressive species that has to truly fight for its goal to procreate. Basically, it waits on a tree, for a female of its species to show up, so they can get it on, and continue the existence of their species. But once one male stakes a tree, he has to defend it from all comers, to ensure that he is the only one when the female of the species inevitable arrives.
So in this episode of Life, is nothing but this montage of this one super beetle fighting other beetles off to defends its ground. And these are not typical bug fights where it just looks like two bugs trying to climb on top of each other. No, the Darwin’s Stag Beetle actually wrestles its opposition. And within this montage, the Darwin’s Stag Beetle successfully fights off its opposition with a series of bodyslams, suplexes, and hip tosses to other stag beetles, before inevitably picking up opponents and unceremoniously throwing them off of his tree. Seriously, about 4-5 opponents are shown arriving, 4-5 opponents shown getting slammed around, and 4-5 opponents getting eliminated from the Royal Rumble.
And then the female finally arrives. After a witty double entendre from Oprah about how the female has a headache and doesn’t want to fuck, the male ultimately succeeds his conquest and fertilizes the female’s eggs.
And this is when it gets good.
After performing his manly duties, fighting off other suitors and conquering the female, the Darwin’s Stag Beetle then picks up the female and throws her off the tree.
And that, is what I call, “owned.”
