The big tip off for me when watching insect docs is the presence of ridiculous amounts of added foley. You'll see a caterpillar eating a leaf, and the audio track is replete with loud crunching sounds. Or an ant skitters across a branch, and you hear the loud pitter-pattering of his feet. And of course, lots of clicking chitinous noises, or gooey, sticky sound effects.
I once pointed out to somebody about how fake the audio was on insect docs, and they were like, "How do you know it's foley? Maybe it's real."
How do I know? Are you effing kidding me? I'm a filmmaker, and know how mics work. Can you imagine trying to actually get ant noises in the wild? Or how about the sound of aphids eating? It's hard enough getting clean recordings of human voices without picking up background audio.
