Some people enjoy strange relationships with animals that most of us might like to steer clear of, and in Animal Magic (xxx details this week) Rebecca Stott bravely sets off to investigate.

My friend John Maynard Smith would have loved this series. He was a brilliant biologist, and claimed in the last years of his life to be studying the behaviour of ants, bees, worms, and snails, in what he called ‘The Institute for the Study of Tiny Minds.’

Rebecca meets a man from Florida who is building a brain from the nerve cells of leeches, which are apparently often used in plastic surgery to promote blood flow, though an expert on medical history advises that if you use leeches to treat haemorrhoids you should tie a string to them first.

Leeches are old friends of mine; I filmed with a dozen of them in a reconstruction of the amazing Tempest Prognosticator made by Dr George Merryweather for the Great Exhibition of 1851. Each leech was in a jamjar, and the theory was that when a thunderstorm approached they would crawl upwards, apparently to avoid possible floods. At the top of its jamjar the leech would press on a small whalebone lever that would release a hammer to ring a bell, and if you heard several clangs you could be sure a thunderstorm was imminent. When I saw them they rang no bells, and there was no thunderstorm, but I am not sure that proved anything.

Rebecca goes on to investigate whether rat genes could be used to generate an aftershave that would make men irresistible, finds out how to paint ants for identification, and samples the allegedly aphrodisiac chocolate-coated leaf-cutter ants from Colombia.

There’s a unique mammalian Madagascan cockroach - it suckles it babies - not to be confused with the three-inch long Madagascan Hissing Cockroach, which is interviewed in the programme. As you may know, cockroaches survive in very thin air, and have been suggested as ideal colonists for a greenhouse on Mars, if any of the astronauts can work out how to build the thing from a flatpack.

Finally, a hot tip for Rebecca and anyone tempted to follow in her footsteps: if you get slug slime on your hands, don’t try to wash it off; this doesn’t work. Instead wipe it off dry, or try to roll it into little balls and throw them away.