One episode of the TV series Trials of Life involved filming the remarkable behaviour of the tarantula wasp. Mother wasp finds a tarantula, stings it to paralyse it, and drags it back to her hole. Then she lays her eggs in it, so that the newborn larvae have their own reliable food supply. Or so all the textbooks say. The first attempt to film this sequence of events went beautifully - except that, right at the end, the wasp forgot to lay her eggs. The next attempt was going really well until a bird fiew by and ate the wasp. On the third attempt the wasp never managed to find the tarantula … and so it went, for a dozen or more attempts. None of the wasps filmed managed to complete the entire sequence in textbook fashion.

Despite this, the final film looked great: it edited several different wasps together to get exactly the textbook story.

However, one could be forgiven for concluding that real wasps don't read textbooks.