Find out as our top 10 countdown of the most extreme jumpers on the planet - Part1

 But how do they measure up to the best jumpers in the animal world? Find out as our top 10 countdown of the most extreme jumpers on the planet takes us to surprising new heights.

 It's easy to keep one jump ahead of the field when leaping's taken to it's 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 count down to find the most unusual, the most extraordinary, The Most Extreme.

 Leaping straight into the countdown at number 10 are animals born to be jumpers. Rabbits and hares can't walk. They can't trot. They have to jump. All the time. They kick off the countdown because those big back legs are incredibly powerful.

 Watching a bunny hopping gently in a field, you'd never guess the extreme distance it can leap. You have see them sprinting to discover how far they can jump in a single bound. The rabbit's back legs are like coiled springs.

 They power the leaps that can carry the rabbit 10 times it's body length. That's a jump of nearly six meters.

 Compare that to the distance Olympic athletes can jump. If you could leap like a rabbit, you'd jump twice as far as any human in history, more than 18 meters. Our leg muscles are about the same strength as a rabbit's, so how can they jump so much further than us? Well, it all comes down to body weight. They heavier you are, the harder it is for those muscles to push you off the ground. That's why light-weight bunnies are such extreme jumpers. But which bunny is the best of the best?

Biologists Dave Riherd and Paul Hahn have hopped down to little Mexico in Los Angeles. For hiding somewhere in these market stalls is the most unusual animal in the countdown. Our number nine is truly extreme, because these guys first have to find a plant. Well, a bean, actually.

 But no ordinary bean. These are Mexican jumping beans. But surely jumping beans are just a joke, a novelty you only see in old comedies.

 But do Mexican jumping beans really jump?  For these beans, jumping is no joke. It's a matter of survival.

 But how do they do it? What makes a bean jump? To find out, you need to take a look inside, at the most unusual jumping device in the world. It's a caterpillar.

And it's this caterpillar that makes the bean jump because it hates getting hot. It'll throw itself around inside the shell to get the bean on the move. The Mexican jumping caterpillar is just trying to get its house back in the shade. For a bug in a bean, this is a pretty extreme jumping ability.

 But our countdown of the most extreme jumping animals on the planet is just warming up. Forget about bouncing bugs and hopping hares, coming up are creatures that'll get you screaming for more, while others will get you hopping mad or even, diving for cover. That's coming up next on The Most Extreme.

 How'd you like to live on the highest mountains in the world? It's a land of ice and precipice. And it's home, sweet home for the Tibetan Bharal, a mountain sheep that lives life on the edge. Bharal are number eight in our countdown because they're extraordinary rock-hoppers. They have to be. When you live above 4,000 meters in these mountains, one slip can be fatal.

 Male Bharal are extremely confident in their jumping ability. In fact, once their testosterone starts pumping, they show off by trying to knock each other off the cliff.

 Bharal may be happy bouncing off rocks, but most humans try to hang on for dear life. We use ropes, crampons, anything to get a grip on the cliff. But not the Bharal. All their climbing equipment is packed into their feet. Those hooves are rubbery to increase their gripping potential. And they're flexible.

 They can spread their toes out to grasp the ground, and to act as brakes when sliding down an icy slope.

 And since human mountaineers can't tiptoe down the rocks like Bharal, they've had to come up with a different way of getting down the mountain. It's a little extreme, but a lot faster.

From mad mountaineers, bouncing beans and racing rabbits, we've bounded through three animals in our countdown.

 But coming up, there's a whole army of extreme jumpers. These are the hoppers from hell and they're next on  Number seven in our extreme countdown may be small, but what it lacks in size, it makes up for in sheer numbers.

 These are locusts. It's a good, old-fashioned biblical plague of horrible hoppers. Locusts are a kind of grasshopper and they can really hop over a lot of grass. The locusts' huge hind legs can kick them over one meter, or 20 times their body length. Imagine if a basketball player could jump like a locust.

 How'd you like to be able to jump ninety meters for the ultimate slam dunk? Basketball players would kill to have legs like a locust.

 That's because, in addition to the massive muscles in its thighs, the locust has elastic bands in its knees.

 These bands are like stretchy springs that store energy. They work a bit like our tendons, which store enough energy to let us snap our fngers.

 At number six in the countdown is an animal the western world only discovered when European explorers first arrived in Australia.

 Accoring to legend, when they first set foot on this bizarre new land, they saw a strange animal hopping about.

 So they asked a local Aboriginal what it was called.

 The Aboriginal said, "Kangaroo." Unfortunately, in Aboriginal, kangaroo doesn't mean large, jumping animal, but translates as, I don't understand your question, so now Australia's home to more than 60 species of I don't understand your questions.

 But no matter what they're called, kangaroos are extreme athletes. It's not just the fact that they're incredible jumpers, they're also extremely fast. A sprinting kangaroo would clean up at the Olympics. It travels twice the speed of the world's fastest sprinters. That means that it would win the Olympic 100-meter sprint in a time of four seconds.

 And then over in the long jump pit, every nine meter bounce would win an Olympic gold medal. But the really amazing thing about these extreme athletes is that the faster a kangaroo travels, the less energy it uses.

 When we wanna run faster, we have to increase the number of strides we take each second. All this extra effort means we burn much more energy sprinting than walking. But kangaroos are different.

 To go faster, a kangaroo doesn't take more steps. It simply increases the length of its jump. And the further the kangaroo jumps, the more energy it's able to store in the massive tendons of its legs and tail.

 In fact, it's so good at storing jumping energy that it's actually easier for a kangaroo t o run than to walk.

 But some people have made use of a different method of storing energy for a high jump.