The world's biggest online zoo has opened its doors to show off hundreds of animals, all performing obediently over and over again.

Traditional zoo disappointments – coy lions staying in their dens or snakes hiding under leaves – have no part in the extraordinary display of passion, cunning, mimicry, reproduction and violence by everything from hedgehogs to spitting cobras.

Caught at night with infrared cameras, deep underwater with huge floodlights, and under microscopes which distinguish different sorts of microbe, the BBC's Wildlife Finder is the product of years of planning – and dreaming. Technology and funding have finally made possible the corporation's ambition to give its spectacular natural history photography and film a permanent global audience.

Starting with 370 animals, including four octopuses and a solitary starfish, the databank of clips and still pictures will be reinforced on a daily basis. BBC staff are combing through hundreds of wildlife programmes, from spectaculars such as Planet Earth to regional TV news items, to create an unprecedented collection. Early stars in terms of hits online include Darwin's frog, a tiny resident of forests in Chile, which gives birth through the mouth of the male. The process is repeated in slow motion – another feature of the archive's ability to spy on Earth's wild creatures to an unprecedented extent.

A New Guinea jumping spider has also leapt into the popularity charts, soaring from a leaf on to the cameraman's lens. He carries on filming, as a commentary tells us about the exceptional size of the spider's jaws. "Its jump is only used," the film explains, without the slightest wobble as spider legs skid on the glass, "as a means of getting on to its prey."

The website divides into the animal kingdom's main categories, such as mammals, fish and birds, and then descends in tiers through subspecies, down to moonrats and tree kangaroos. Long-standing favourites such as meerkats are in the launch selection but the spotlight also shines on the nocturnal and hardly-ever-seen Sundar Flying Lemur, or Malay Colugo. A rat-like rodent, this opens itself out into a sort of aerial handbag to glide silently through the forests of Borneo in the dark. Equally shy are the Dumbo octopi, the only wild species to be named after a Disney character.

Appearing in many of the clips alongside the animals is Sir David Attenborough. His favourites include film of the inside of a duckbilled platypus's burrow and an attack by predators on a shoal of sardines. Wildlife Finder had, said Sir David, realised his highest ambitions for popularising natural history.

"It has always been my hope that, through film-making, I can bring the wonder of the natural world into people's sitting rooms," he said. "Now the web has totally changed how we can link information, connect people and reach new audiences in a world which likes to have things on demand."

A quarter of the animals have more than one clip each, with 500 separate films in the launch package, and some show a very young Sir David.