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If you think some people have a lot of lip, well they're no match for the
great gapes of the natural world.
We're counting down the top 10 most extreme mouths in the animal kingdom
and comparing our little cake holes to their gigantic jaws.
It's a hard act to swallow when big mouths are taken to the most extreme.
Earth is a planet of extremes, extreme places and extreme animals.
But some animals are more extreme than others.
Join us as we countdown to find the most unusual, the most extraordinary,
The Most Extreme.
Our search for the world's most extreme mouth begins with an animal
that really does have jumbo sized jaws.
Meet Geeta, the Asian elephant.
She lives at the Los Angeles zoo and weighs about three tons.
She is number 10 in the countdown because an elephant has a very big
mouth and the largest molars on the planet.
Carrying out a dental check up is easy when the mouth is more than half a
meter wide and when there are only four teeth to look at.
Each tooth weighs more than two kilograms and is the size of a brick.
Geeta will grind her way through six sets of these massive molars in her
lifetime.
That's because the plant she eats are often full of silica, one of the
minerals that makes up sand.
Chewing on plants every day can grind down the enamel of the teeth.
So when Geeta turned 40, she was on to her last set of molars.
In the wild, old elephants that wear out all their teeth may starve to
death.
But for now, Geeta's teeth are in good shape, so it's high fives all around.
Geeta needs her big teeth and big mouth because she really has a mammoth
appetite.
Everyday an adult elephant needs to eat about 5% of its body weight in
food.
That's a lot of bales of hay, more than 50 tons every year.
Imagine if we had an elephant's appetite.
For the average man eating 5% of his body weight would mean chewing through
more than four kilograms of bread every single day.
That would add up to more than 3000 loaves of bread a year and we'd be
cramming all that food into a mouth that's only about five centimeters
wide.
If you compare the size of our mouth to the size of our body, the ratio of
2% means that we have a relatively tiny mouth compared to body length.
Now compare our little jaws with the huge mouth of the elephant.
But then, everything on an elephant's body is enormous.
So relatively speaking, its mouth to body length ratio is only half that of
the human.
And that's why the elephant is only number 10 in the countdown.
It does have gigantic jaws, yet in proportion to the rest of its body,
the elephant has little to mouth off about.
While other animals in the countdown have jaws that are proportionately
much bigger, few can match the elephant's desire for food.
An elephant can spend up to 18 hours a day feeding.
But not even this insatiable appetite can compare to the lengths our next
contender will go to as it tries to fill its big mouth.
Mom, I'm back.
This is Umar Alvi from London.
He may look like any other teenager, but inside his mouth is a big
surprise.
Umar is the proud owner of one of the longest tongues in the world.
Stretching an amazing 65 millimeters from lip to tip, it measures more than
twice the length of the average human tongue.
Having such an awesome appendage inside your mouth has all kinds of
uses, from eating ice cream to wiping your nose.
But no human can match the licking power of the animal at number nine in
the countdown.
One of the strangest looking animals in the world is the giant anteater.
It has a small opening little more than a few millimeters wide at the end
of its long tubular snout.
This may not sound much of a mouth, but the giant anteater is number nine
in the countdown because what it lacks in width, it makes up for in
extraordinary length.
Its mouth may only be the width of a pencil, but it can stretch back more
than half a meter along that enormous snout.
On the grassy plains of Brazil, the anteater's big mouth is designed for
one thing, to seek and destroy ants and termites.
There's no room and no need for teeth in the mouth of the anteater.
All it has to do is roll out a tongue that can extend more than half a meter
down a termite tunnel.
It's covered in sticky mucous and can be flicked in and out 150 times a
minute.
But this isn't the only creature in South America that has a useful
tongue.
One man is harnessing the super charged tongue of the cow, not to
catch termites, but to offer hope to the hairless.
At the institute for capillary health and beauty, Anissa Ducay says that
because men simply towel dry their hair, the follicles fill with water
and the hair then rots and falls off.
But he claims he knows the cure.
Meet Samona, the cow.
Ducay says that her tongue combined with his secret tonic can make hair
grow again.
Of course, Samona won't lick juts anyone's head, only those that have
been first smeared with molasses and oats.
Ducay claims these human cow licks experience such spectacular re-growth
that he has no need to advertise.
Word of mouth alone has hundreds of men lining up to be licked by this
bovine big mouth.
The only things taking a licking from a giant anteater are termites.
Because it has no teeth, it has powerful stomach muscles to grind up
the insects.
But then all kinds of big mouths are able to swallow their food in a single
gulp.
So far we've seen anteaters with super snouts and elephants with massive
molars.
But still to come is a big mouth that really gets into the swim of things.
And what special technique would you need to swallow something bigger than
your head?
Find out next on The Most Extreme.
The next contender in our countdown of The Most Extreme Big Mouths is the
snake.
While snakes like this python choke the life out of their lunch, others
can kill with a single venomous bite.
But all snakes have the same problem.
They have no teeth suitable for cutting or chewing food.
So they have to swallow their prey whole even if it's something bigger
than their head and this is why snakes are number eight in the countdown.
The width of their jaws may only be a fraction of the length of the long
body, but they can enlarge the size of their mouth using a trick that's
beyond even the best human contortionist.
Contrary to popular opinion, snakes and contortionists do not have to
dislocate their joints to achieve these bizarre positions.
Instead, they rely on extreme flexibility, although snakes have an
extra anatomical modification that gives them truly jaw dropping powers.
Not even the most flexible contortionist would be able to swallow
something the size of their head simply because of the way our jaw is
connected to our skull.
Most humans can only open their jaw to about 45 degrees.
If we wanted to eat like a snake, first we need to add an extra bone to
our jaw to act as a double jointed hinge.
This extra bone would mean that we would be able to drop our jaw much
lower.
And that would give us the ability to open our mouth to a massive 150
degrees just like the snake.
But snakes have another trick.
They can split apart their lower jaw which allows the mouth to stretch much
wider.
With jaws like a snake, then we too could easily swallow food that's as
big as our head.
And entering the record books wouldn't have been such a stretch for 13 year
old Sarah Davis of Missouri.
She is about to find a use for her big mouth that even a snake would find
challenging.
Sarah can do unusual things with drinking straws, lots of drinking
straws.
Strangely enough snakes use a similar trick when swallowing a huge mouthful
of food.
A human would quickly suffocate if we tried eating like a snake because we
can't have a mouth and throat full of food and breathe at the same time.
Snakes solve the problem by having a reinforced windpipe that can be pushed
forward to the front of the lower jaw.
It's like a built in feeding snorkel.
But the python is not the only breathtaking big mouth in the
countdown.
Our last two contenders have really put their money where their mouth is.
But still to come, we go lunching with a bird that always leaves you with the
bill.
And later, we'll get cheeky with an extraordinary human big mouth.
That's coming up on The Most Extreme.
Our next contender has a beak that really can hold more than its belly
can.
Soaring in to number seven in the countdown is the pelican.
It has one of the biggest mouths of any bird in the world and it uses it
to go fishing.
Diving from more than twice the height of an Olympic high diver, it can
strike the water at nearly 65 kilometers an hour.
It hits the sea with such a force that it can stun fish almost two meters
below the surface and then it opens that massive mouth to scoop up a meal
thanks to an expandable pouch that can hold three times more fluid that its
stomach.
A single mouthful contains 11 liters of water.
It then filters out the fish assuming it can reach them.
And after a hard day's fishing, a pelican's big mouth also comes in
handy for a yawn of epic proportions.
Having such a huge mouth also comes in handy when feeding chicks.
The babies have to reach right down their parents' throat to reach the
fish stored in the gullet.
This is definitely one of the world's most extreme kisses.
But strangely enough, humans may have started smooching the same way.
There is a theory that our kissing behavior began way back with or
prehistoric ancestors.
In the days before supermarkets, mothers had to prepare baby's first
meal of solids.
Mom would first chew up the food and then use her tongue to push the mush
into the baby's mouth.
This meeting of lips became a gesture of affection and we've been hooked on
kissing ever since.
Our hunger for kisses means that the average person will spend a total of
two weeks of their lives kissing and the good news is that a really
passionate kiss burns two calories a minute.
Pelicans may not push their mouths together for as long as some humans,
but their kissing can be just as enthusiastic.
And pelicans have found another use for their enormous beak.
When they're in the mood for love, they apply the bird equivalent of
lipstick.
Courting pelicans are essentially voiceless, which is why they advertise
their availability with a bright red pouch.
The pelican's brilliant beak makes it the biggest showoff in the countdown
unlike our next contender whose big mouth is all the better to eat you
with.
The countdown's next massive mouth is attached to a truly terrifying
predator.
Stalking you silently through the water, it can attack without a
warning.
Crocodiles have chomped their way into number six in the countdown because
almost one sixth of their body is mouth.
That's a mouth to body length ratio of about 15%.
Every scale on a crocodile's body including those on the jaws has a
small dot called a mechanoreceptor that picks up the tiniest vibrations
in the water.
And inside that big mouth are more dots, this time chemoreceptors that
taste chemical changes in the water.
That's how a crocodile can literally taste and feel your presence from
almost a kilometer away.
Once a croc finds you, you're in big trouble.
A study of the biomechanics of bite strength in 2002 found that a
saltwater crocodile nearly five meters long slams its jaws shut with more
than 1700 kilograms of force, the strongest bite yet measured.
And in Australia, that pressure is being used to push competitive
swimmers.
Darwin swimming coach Mark Davis has a novel approach to training.
A lot of good swimmers are fast when they start to imagine they're being
chased by a shark or something and then go fast.
In our case, we're going to use a crocodile.
Don't worry, this isn't as dangerous as it looks.
Mark has checked out the crocs top speed and given the swimmers enough of
a head start to make sure that the croc won't catch up.
So how did the swimmers feel about their new training partner?
Absolutely terrified.
Going inside it's like that was going to like-- it comes up with its big
mouth just kind of-- you know that.
Swimming with the croc is one way to beat the clock.
If you've been left open mouth by gigantic jaws and pouting pelicans,
then get ready to discover why you don't want to monkey around with this
big mouth.
And later why is it that when this giant yawns thousands die, find out
next on The Most Extreme.
According to the movies, the oceans are full of dangers and the biggest,
baddest big mouth of them all belongs to the shark.
Our next contender has a mouth so monstrous that even Hollywood couldn't
have dreamt it up.
Imagine diving into the water with a shark the size of a whale.
Meet the whale shark, the biggest fish in the sea.
An average sized whale shark can have a 1.2 meter mouth on a seven and a
half meter body.
That's a mouth to body ratio of 16%.
But there's nothing to fear from this gigantic gape.
It may have 3000 sharply hooked teeth, but all of them are only a few
millimeters long.
This shark isn't interested in sinking its teeth into anything because it's
really just a big sucker.
The whale shark prefers plankton to people.
Like a gigantic vacuum cleaner, it sucks up sea water and filters
plankton from nearly a million liters of water every hour.
That's more than enough to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.
Anything this big that eats that much is sure to attract a crowd.
The whale shark is like a huge floating reef providing shelter for
many species of fish and the odd leftover from that massive maw.
But whale sharks aren't the only ones spending a lot of time with their
mouths open wide.
The average jaw stretching, mouth dropping, face flexing yawn lasts
about six seconds.
Most of us yawn about 10 times every day which soon adds up.
It's been estimated that in your lifetime, you'll spend just under
three weeks yawing and we all know how contagious yawns can be.
Studies have shown that 55% of people will yawn within five minutes of
seeing someone else yawning.
Whale sharks have sensors running up and down their sides to detect
pressure changes in the water.
But for such a sensitive creature, whale sharks are really thick skinned.
Their 15 centimeter hide is the thickest skin of any living animal.
But if you think this shark's permanent yawn is impressive, just
wait till you see the great gape of our next contender.
The next time you visit a dentist, just imagine how much easier things
would be if you had a flip top head like the animal coming in at number
four in the countdown.
The hippopotamus would be a dentist's dream patient.
Its gape stretches more than a meter and extends past 150 degrees.
But checking these guys for plaque does pose a problem.
The hippopotamus uses its supersized mouth as a weapon.
Males fight for dominance using their heads like sledge hammers delivering
powerful blows that can drive the razor sharp incisors and long canine
teeth deep into rival males.
Hippos have been estimated to kill 200 people a year with those terrible
jaws.
No wonder, keepers at the Los Angeles zoo keep their hands well out of reach
when feeding their big mouthed charges.
Why take chances with an animal that's been seen biting an adult male
crocodile clean in half.
But crocs and keepers are definitely not on the menu, for these big
vegetarians prefer eating grapes.
It takes a lot of bunches to fill the mouth of a hippo and a human.
Robbie Snooks has an unusual talent.
For the last two years, he's been performing at venues across America
using nothing more than a bunch of grapes and his very big mouth.
Hello, watch this.
Robbie has become famous for the astonishing number of grapes he can
stuff into his mouth.
I guess I've always been gifted with this huge mouth.
I always knew that I had a -- like, you know, my cheeks are elastic and I
don't have a gag reflex, so meaning I can pretty much shove them as far as I
can back and I won't have that throw up feel
47.
Those three things are just natural to me, so I can just -- given the grapes,
I can go.
You want to try?
How do you fit them all?
If you want to really threaten Robbie's record, be prepared to have
more than 70 grapes in your mouth and they can't break.
Each grape must remain intact to be counted.
Robbie discovered this unusual talent when looking for a way to ease the
tension when studying for exams.
He thought he'd scare his roommates by seeing how many grapes he could put in
his mouth and while it's scary to watch a human hippopotamus in action,
not even Robbie can compete with the massive mouth of the real animal.
A hippopotamus consumes almost 50 kilograms of food a day which would be
an awful lot of grapes.
But then eating is easy when your mouth is so big you can swallow a
whole bunch of grapes in a single gulp.
If the last two massive mouths have left you gasping, then take a deep
breath because we're about to travel into the belly of a beast.
And later, we'll discover a small fish with a big mouth and a bad attitude.
That's coming up on The Most Extreme.
Our countdown of nature's biggest mouths continues with the largest
animal ever to star on the big screen.
A whale can stave in the ribs of the biggest ships, swallow whole crews,
pick its teeth with the oars.
Mind lad, if God ever wanted to be a fish, he'd be a whale, believe that,
he'd be a whale.
Actually whales are mammals, not fish.
So while Hollywood may have been a little biologically challenged, at
least they knew that whales do have the biggest mouths in the world.
But the whale is only number three in the countdown because just like an
elephant in proportion to the rest of their massive body, their mouth may
only be about 20% of their total length.
But that's still an awful lot of mouth.
The tongue alone from some of the bigger whales can weigh more than a
ton.
A single gulp of seawater from this right whale is enough to fill more
than 50 bathtubs.
So is a whale's mouth big enough to swallow a human?
The bible tells the story of a man who had a close encounter with a
leviathan.
During a terrible storm in the Mediterranean, sailors discovered that
the cause of their problems was a reluctant prophet called Jonah.
Much to their surprise, he suggested that the only way they'd be saved was
if they threw him overboard.
Things were looking a little grim for Jonah especially when an enormous sea
creature came along and swallowed him in a single gulp.
According to legend, Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale.
But careful translation of the ancient text reveals that Jonah was actually
swallowed by a great fish.
This makes sense because while a whale may have a mouth more than big enough
to hold a soggy prophet, it would have had a great deal of trouble swallowing
him.
Jonah could never have made it into a right whale's stomach because although
it's one of the biggest animals on the planet, these whales have throats so
small they'd have trouble swallowing anything bigger than a grape fruit.
And that's why they feed on some of the smallest animals in the sea.
Krill are tiny shrimp like creatures, but there are an awful lot of them.
Just one swarm can cover an area equivalent to that of half a football
field.
These are enormous shrimp cocktails for the right whale.
It uses a mustache of long whiskers to filter out krill and its huge tongue
squeezes out the water.
But other whales prefer eating fish and have found a unique way of getting
the biggest mouthful possible.
Humpback whales go fishing using a net made out of thin air.
Far beneath a school of fish, the humpback whale exhales a big burst of
bubbles, and as the ring of bubbles rises, fish freak out and form a
tightly packed school.
Trapped by a wall of air, the fish have nowhere to go.
Then the humpback whale surges up through the middle of the bubble ring
with its mouth wide open.
Sometimes more than 20 whales may join in a communal lunch through the bubble
net which turns the surface into a cauldron of bubbles and blubber.
And as if the humpback's mouth wasn't big enough already, it has another
trick.
Fleets in the lining of its throat expand during feeding, which means the
mouth can contain up to four times its usual capacity.
While humpback whales breathe out to catch fish, our next contender uses
its mouth to suck in water super fast.
Diving into number two in the countdown is a most unusual fish.
It's often difficult to see because it's beautifully camouflaged and stays
very, very still.
It has a big mouth and an even bigger appetite for other fish.
The trouble is most fish are constantly moving and our next
contender is a real lay about.
Fish have to be enticed into the massive jaws of the animal hiding at
number two in the countdown, the Angler Fish.
A spine from a modified dorsal fin serves as fishing pole and a flap of
skin does a remarkable impersonation of a wriggling worm.
Few escape from those massive jaws.
The Angler Fish is the countdown's second ranked animal because some
species have a mouth to body length ratio of over 30%.
An Angler Fish can expand the volume of its mouth by 12 times in less than
6000th of a second.
It literally sucks fish into its mouth, a move that makes it one of the
fastest feeding vertebrates known to science.
But one man also has a fast mouth.
Meet John Machida.
Welcome to Gorilla Grill, how may I help you?
I don't know, what do you think is good here today?
I don't know, we've got the menu right there, go ahead and choose something
off of it.
Well, let me take a look at them, you know, a hamburger sounds pretty good.
But I don't know maybe a cheeseburger because sometimes cheese is good.
I'd like to have cheese on the burger, but sometimes I don't.
But the grilled chicken sandwich is pretty good because that's really not
too fatty, like sometimes cheeseburgers are more fatty.
Now the vegetarian garden burger, I'm afraid of that I don't get anything
that is vegetarian because I'm not a vegetarian.
I'm a meat eater so I really don't want to worry about that.
Then there's all-beef hot dog, but that usually gives me indigestion, but
you might have really good ones here. So I might want to try one of those
and then the French fries because I don't know if I want a large one or a
small one because that depends on what else I'm going to get.
How about the nachos?
No, they sell too much cheese on the nachos.
The chicken nuggets is the whole kids meal, but I'm not wild and I'm not a
kid, so I probably wouldn't get that.
So that might be just it, I might have the right value to it, so I might want
to get that and then there's the soft drink.
I really love to drink soft drinks or sports drink or one sports bottle or
bottled water, ice, juices, coffee-- I don't know if I want water, but want
something to drink.
I don't know, what do you think?
John is one of the fastest talkers in the world verbalizing over 600 words a
minute.
That's over 10 words a second.
Most people can't even think that fast.
Thanks.
No, thank you.
He developed the skill through many hours of practice and now makes a
living by being the fastest mouth in the west.
And we've got the cheese and all that kind of stuff and these things, I mean
-- I don't know.
But the rhino sat on this or the elephant sat on it, whatever, but I
don't know.
It looks pretty good.
I don't know what I'm going to start with.
In a lot of the commercials that I do and a lot of the personal appearances,
I purposely build slow spots in because if I don't stop, people don't
breathe when they listen to me.
They hold their breath because they keep waiting for me to take a breath
because they think that's the obvious time for them to do it.
But if I don't take a breath, then they really likes to sit there and
they start to turn blue and they are like sitting there and they're like,
oh, this fellow when he's ever going to breathe.
So if I just take a pause, then everyone can breathe and then I can
start talking fast again and then I don't have to worry about it.
I don't have to worry about anybody passing out in the audience.
The Angler Fish doesn't have to worry about holding its breath.
The only things turning blue are on the menu.
But go over the edge of the reef and you'd have to hold your breath for an
awfully long time to find another species of Angler Fish.
No light penetrates four kilometers below the surface.
So the deep sea angler fish has to use a very different lure.
This angler fish is a reddish black color because at these depths, the
only light comes from bioluminescent creatures and most of that light is
blue.
The dark skin of the angler fish absorbs this light which means that
its body remains invisible.
Then it tempts fish to its enormous toothy grin using a lure that glows in
the dark.
Millions of light producing bacteria live inside the lure.
It's thought that some species can control the light emissions to mimic
the glow and flashes of other creatures like small shrimps.
Its elastic stomach means that it can swallow fish more than twice its own
length.
These fearsome hunters would be the terror of the deep if only they grew a
little bigger than a tennis ball.
That leaves the way clear for our final contender which has such a big
mouth that it literally bites off more than it can chew.
We've seen the nine contenders.
Their mouths are the biggest of the big.
Only one animal is a more extreme biting machine.
It's number one and it's coming up next on The Most Extreme.
In the rainforests of South America, nothing is safe from the most extreme
mouth in the countdown.
It's been recorded biting anything that enters its territory, be it as
small as a mouse or as big as a fully grown horse.
Its bad temper, slimy appearance and monstrous appetite have earned it the
nick name, Jabba, the Hutt.
Swallowing a mouse whole is easy if you're an Argentinian wide mouthed
frog.
That's why it has another nickname, the mouth on legs.
We would look very different if we had jaws proportional to those of an
Argentinian wide mouthed frog.
Instead of having a mouth that's only about 2% of our body length, we'd be
smiling out of jaws that were half the length of our body.
Imagine how quickly you could eat your dinner with a mouth that was nearly a
meter wide.
Being able to swallow a whole watermelon could open up a new career
in the world of competitive eating.
After all, it takes the fastest eaters in the world a quarter of an hour to
swallow about five kilograms of watermelon.
65 hardboiled eggs would be just an appetizer rather than a meal that
takes competitive eaters more than six minutes to eat and you could easily
stuff seven hamburgers into your cheeks.
Instead of having to chew through them one by one over 10 minutes like they
do on the fourth of July at Coney Island.
An Argentinian wide mouthed frog would feel right at home at Nathan's famous
world hot dog eating contest.
The rules are simple.
20 of the most impressive eaters on the planet have 12 minutes to swallow
as much food as possible.
Regurgitation results in disqualification.
Strangely enough in the world of competitive eating it seems as though
size isn't everything.
Some observers have a theory that skinny people's stomachs can expand
more easily because they're not corseted by the ring of fat that
burdens the heavier eaters.
So if you're thinking that you might have a talent for this sport, take a
minute to consider that to be competitive you're going to have to
eat more than two hotdogs a minute.
Competitive eating is definitely a sport for trained athletes because
swallowing that much food can be dangerous for your health and if
you're a wide mouthed frog, it can even be lethal.
The Argentinian wide mouthed frog is a truly dedicated glutton that has an
extra set of teeth on the roof of its mouth.
But like the small teeth around the outside of the jaw, the extra set of
tiny cone shaped teeth is not for chewing, but for holding.
That means once the frog takes a bite of something, it's hard to let go even
when it's one of the family.
The wide mouthed frog is so aggressive that it will literally bite anything
that comes near it.
Its big mouth means it can stuff huge amounts of food down its throat.
The only trouble is that sometimes the wide mouthed frog doesn't know when to
stop.
These ferocious frogs are so stubborn that they'll keep eating until they
rupture their stomach and they won't let go of a possible meal even it's
bigger than they are and even if it means choking to death.
In the ponds of Argentina, there really is nothing worse than having a
frog in your throat.
And that's why out of all the awesome orifices in the animal kingdom, the
wide mouthed frog really is The Most Extreme.