For several years now I’ve been regular co-presenter on the Naked Scientists – a fun, live science show broadcast from Cambridge University. And if any of you have ever listened in, you’ll know that I tend to talk about the oceans, a lot. Well, now I’m getting the chance to talk about nothing else, in a new series of podcasts dedicated to ocean science and conservation.

And so, it is with my greatest pleasure, dear Blog readers, to introduce you to NAKED OCEANS.

As the tagline goes “From seagrass to sunfish, dugongs to diatoms, this is Naked Oceans.” Every month for the next year, we’re producing a half hour podcast all about the oceans.

But first, for any of you who are interested, here’s a little more about how we got here.

The journey began 18 months ago, when I first had the idea to produce a podcast about the seas. What could be more fun – and important – I mused to myself, than spreading the good word about the oceans? But would anyone listen?

I thought some more about it, scribbled down some ideas (e.g. “Ask famous marine scientists what their favourite fish is…”), and eventually shared my ponderings with the rest of the Naked Scientists production team.

Great Idea – they all told me. (Phew. First hurdle safely negotiated).

Next up was funding and I began the hunt for potential sponsors.

And a couple of things made the whole thing so much easier than I anticipated.

First, the fantastic podcasts the Naked Scientists already produce meant I could show people exactly the sort of thing I wanted to do. As well as the award-winning weekly shows that cover every corner of science, there are the specialist monthly pods: Ben Valsler looks into the skies for Naked Astronomy, and Diana O’Caroll digs deep for Naked Archaeology. Mine would be just as brilliant – I told people – only about the seas.

My second stroke of luck was finding the Save Our Seas Foundation.

I already knew about the ocean research they fund, including from watching a great documentary about Andrea Marshall’s manta research in Mozambique and beyond.

Calling in at their website, I discovered their funding remit also covers marine education projects. Ahah – that’s me!

After a whole lot of hard work, ironing out our plans, persuading some top scientists to support our project, and making the whole thing sound feasible – thanks in no small part to Naked Scientists pioneer Chris Smith – our application went in asking for start-up money for Naked Oceans. And I tried my best to forget about it while the grants committee made their selection.

A few weeks later we were short listed and my hopes rose a little higher. But not too high – one in three applications made it through to the first round, but there were still 50 of us to choose between.

And a few months later, in March this year, another email arrived from Save Our Seas and with a dash of English pessimism I assumed it was a “thank you but no thank you” rejection. But no. We got the grant. Naked Oceans was born.

Reading that email – and letting the news sink in a little as I sat quietly on my sofa in an empty house – was one of those pivotal moments when something important changes. Now I’m making podcasts about the oceans. Brilliant. Time to tell people.

And it was also time to start making Naked Oceans a reality. I had to learn how to make podcasts…

More on that next time. But for now – you can skip forwards in the story, tune in and have a listen to the first few episodes.

If you’re a tweeter and you’ve been following my tweets lately, you might have noticed a fair few stories from the cetacean world showing up. Reason being, there have been lots of whale and dolphin studies out in the last few weeks.

And here is a selection of the recent stories I think are most interesting, important, or both.

Photo by kaladrakas

For starters there was news that dolphins are picky eaters.

Previously, scientists thought that common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) pretty much eat whatever they find. But now it turns out they prefer eating certain fish with a high fat content, presumably because with their active lifestyle they need all the energy they can get.

To find out what they have been eating, Jerome Spitz from the University of La Rochelle rummaged around inside the stomachs of dolphins caught by tuna drift nets in the Bay of Biscay.

Common dolphin. Photo by Chris Gray

He discovered that dolphins ignore common fish with a low energy content, and make a b-line for less abundant lanternfish.

So it turns out for common dolphins only the best will do.

Leviathan lives – or at least it did 12 million years ago

New fossils have been found in Peru of a very scary sea monster that patrolled the seas until it went extinct several million years ago.

It looked rather like a sperm whale, only it was much more dangerous. Sperm whales don’t have upper-teeth, so they have to suck up their food. These ancient whales came fully equipped with two bristling rows of enormous fangs, the size of a machete (up to 36 cm or around 10 inches) – all the better for gobbling down large prey, probably other whales.

It roamed the oceans at the same time as Carcharocles megalodon, the 15m / 50foot and now extinct version of a great white shark – together they would have been a pair of serious ocean troublemakers.

The folks who discovered this new oceanic beast – which probably had the biggest, scariest mouth of any 4-legged creature we know of – have rather sweetly named it Leviathan melvillei, after their literary inspiration.

We also heard that sperm whales are carbon neutral

Talking of sperm whales… iron in modern sperm whale poo fertilizes the oceans, triggering a bloom of carbon-sucking phytoplankton, some of which end up as whale food. A neat cycle indeed.

Sperm whale tail. Photo by Adrian Midgley

The iron boost from each whale stimulates enough plantlife to counteract their own exhalations of carbon dioxide. The key is that the whales eat squid down in the dark depths and defecate nearer the sunny surface, bringing lots of iron with them. In the Southern Ocean alone, sperm whales bring up 50 tonnes of iron a year.

Sadly, whale hunting may have already reduced the ability of the oceans to lock away carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Bad news for finless porpoises

And finally, there was bad news for the finless porpoise (Neophocaena phocaenoides) – an odd looking fellow (unlike most other dolphins and porpoises, it doesn’t have a fin on its back).

The problem is, what we thought was one species could well be at least two. The small population of less than a thousand porpoises living in China’s Yangtze River could be headed the way of the Baiji river dolphin which three years ago was pronounced extinct in the wild.

Finless porpoise. Photo by ori2uru

Finless porpoises live across the Indo-Pacific, but it turns out the Yangtze porpoises have very different genetics to all the others, suggesting they are somewhat isolated and should be protected as a separate population. The Yellow Sea and South China Sea populations also appear to be distinct from each other.

The jury is still out over whether they are different enough to count as a separate species.

Sorry to end on a gloomy note, but it looks like – if we’re not careful – the Yangtze River could be the site of the next cetacean extinction that happens during on our watch.

Recently, I published a paper giving a round up of the latest seahorse studies and it reminded me of the revelations that have emerged from the seahorse world since I wrote Poseidon’s Steed, the story of seahorses from myth to reality.

So, here is are a few of the things we now know about seahorses, things that we didn’t know when my book went to press, and a few updates especially for readers who want to know what happened next…

Baby seahorse fossils discovered

When I wrote Poseidon’s Steed, no fossils of extinct seahorses had ever been found. And now they have, and they were just babies when they died.

Jure Žalohar stumbled on them in a stream in Slovenia while hunting for fossil insects. Among the fossils are juvenile seahorses just 5mm long – they look like eye lashes cast in stone.

The fossil find led to the naming of  two extinct species. One is Hippocampus sarmaticus, named after the era in Earth’s history when it lived. It looked a little like modern-day three spot seahorses, only with a very long tail.

And then there’s Hippocampus slovenicus, named after the country it was found in. This one looked more like the stumpy, knobbly Bargibant’s pygmy seahorse of today.

(These fossils did make it into my book, but back then the new species had yet to be identified).

Bargibants pygmy seahorse. Photo by Stephen Childs

Illegal seahorse trade rages on

A study by Vincent Nijman showed that between 1998-2007, around 16 million seahorses were exported from Southeast Asia (along with millions of other wild animals). Over 90% of them came from Thailand, and over half were destined for Hong Kong. Most of them were taken from the wild and were traded dried to make into traditional medicines.

But that is a huge underestimate of the total trade since these are only the seahorse transactions that were officially reported to the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Before 2004, reporting seahorse trade was purely voluntary but even now there seems to be a lot of unreported trade.

And don’t forget, this is just Southeast Asia – admittedly, this is a major source of seahorses, but not the only place they are traded from.

Photo by Fa11ing away

Nijman writes about an illegal consignment of 1-2 million seahorses picked up in Poland that came from Indonesia – a country that reports virtually no official seahorse trade.

So it seems we can’t fully comprehend the impacts of the seahorse trade.

Until we get a good idea of where seahorses are being caught and who is buying them, conservation efforts will continue to face major hurdles.

Seahorses are even older

In Poseidon’s Steed I wrote that seahorses first evolved around 16.5 million years ago – relatively recently in the grand scheme of life on earth.

But we now have new evidence to suggest they are older than that. We can now push back the beginnings of the seahorse lineage to at least 25 to 28 million years.

Yellow seahorse (Hippocampus kuda). Photo by Wildsingapore

Two researchers, Peter Teske and Luciano Beheregaray, peered into the past and used genetic sequences to figure out when seahorses last shared a common ancestor with their close relatives, the pygmy pipefish.

This ancient split pinpoints when seahorses first swam with their heads held high. Their radical heads-up trendsetting happened at around the same time in the Oligocene era when shallow marine habitats were opening up and seagrasses were spreading across the oceans.

So it makes perfect sense that seahorses invented a new swimming stroke, using their tails to hold on tight and their little fins to maneuver expertly through the complex, three dimensional world of seagrasses.

Seahorse males prefer larger ladies

Female seahorses can keep their stiletto heels on, because it turns out males choose to mate with the largest females they can find.

Choosy males picking out large partners is such a strong selective pressure for big-bellied seahorses that females have evolved to be 15-20% bigger than the opposite sex.

Deepwater Horizon spells bad news for Caribbean seahorses

It’s too soon to weigh up the ecological impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But the delicate seagrass and coral reef habitats that the Caribbean seahorses call home are undoubtedly in grave danger.

Seahorse farmers in Hawaii are already stocking up on dwarf seahorses, with the plan to release them in Florida to restock areas once the threat has passed.

Deepwater Horizon fire. US Coast Guard/Marine Photobank

Take another look in chapter 4 to see what I had to say about restocking the oceans with captive bred seahorses. That all still holds.

But perhaps, if there really is a seahorse disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, and once things have been cleaned up, then maybe we should step in to encourage seahorses back. But it is vital that we first wait and see whether the seahorses manage to survive on their own – and in the meantime take a long hard look at what we are doing to the world.

Seahorse cruisers

I already blogged about the Caribbean seahorse that was found half way across the Atlantic, in the Azores – backing up theories that seahorses cruise around the oceans, clinging onto life rafts of drifting vegatation.

Golden seahorse brooch is still missing

There is still no news of the whereabouts of the Lydian golden seahorse brooch.

Today is World Oceans Day. A day to celebrate the diversity, fragility, and beauty of the oceans. Horray for that.

So how about we make today the day we all do one thing for the oceans?

Here are my top suggestions:

Ask

If you eat fish, next time you’re at restaurant, supermarket or fish mongers, ask the person behind the counter or taking your order (drag out a manager or head chef if you need to) and ask them exactly where the fish you’re planning on buying was caught and using what fishing method.

Go armed with a pocket guide from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch project, or the Marine Conservation Society’s Good Fish Guide (write to them and they’ll send you one free), and do your best to avoid fish from overfished stocks and those caught with the most damaging fishing gear like bottom trawls.

As a consumer, it’s your right to ask, and the managers/chefs need to have an answer. If it’s obvious they have no idea where their fish came from, then let them know why you won’t be eating it – and perhaps why you won’t be coming back.

Porbeagle steaks on sale in Borough Market London. Photo by pfig

Don’t flush plastic

It would be nice to believe that all the waste we flush down the loo will be processed and cleaned up before the water reaches the ocean – not so. Q tips, dental floss, condoms… all sorts of things we think are okay to flush can end up in the oceans where they choke wildlife and leach gender-bending pollutants.

Sure, there are many other ways plastics reach the oceans, but don’t let your toilet be one of them.

Laysan albatross chick impacted by plastic debris. Claire Fackler, NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries/Marine Photobank.

Go for a walk/ride

The tragedy unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is a horrible but timely reminder that our reliance on oil is one of the biggest threats faced by the natural world, especially the oceans.

Plane releases dispersants over Deepwater Horizon oil spill. U.S. Coast Guard, Stephen Lehmann Marine Photobank

Not only can its extraction be devastating to ecology but of course the CO2 it releases when we pump it into our cars (and trucks, planes etc) causes climate change and with it the seas are getting warmer and more acidic, triggering all sorts of problems for wildlife.

We might all feel addicted to our automobiles but why not try and use your feet instead, at least for those short journeys. Pop to the shops on your bike or take a stroll into town. It’s pouring down here in Cambridge today, but I’ll get my umbrella out and remind myself of that lovely sound of rain over my head.

Get writing

The power of the pen (or keyboard) is greater than you might imagine. Take a few moments to write to your local politician, your local newspaper, or whoever you think might listen, and tell them your concerns for the ocean and ask them to help you do something about it.

Increasing the number and size of marine reserves is the simplest and most proven way of promoting healthy oceans. The more voices that call for more protection, the greater chance we have of making a difference.

And one last thing… how about we try making every day oceans day?

Seahorses are masters of disguise. They really are. They can grow a coat of weedy sprouts and change their skin colour to seemlessly match their surroundings. No wonder a cuttlefish recently mistook a seahorse for a blade of seagrass and covered it in eggs, as seen in this video on the BBC news website.

The egg-laden seahorse was caught on camera by underwater cameraman Manuel Enrique Garcia Blanco in Spain while working with PhD researcher Fiona Read.

But this isn’t the first time a seahorse has been used as an impromptu cuttlefish nursery.

A frogman with his bathers hung with hand-grenades? And a seller of toy balloons? From Gilbert and Allan, The Sea-horse and its relatives, 1958

While researching my book Poseidon’s Steed I tracked down a copy of the 1958 book The Sea-Horse and its relatives by Gilbert Whitley and Joyce Allan from the Australian Museum in Sydney (it wasn’t easy – the British Library and University College London copies have both gone missing. In the end I found a second hand copy on amazon – my copy once beloned to the Patchogue Medford library – complete with library ticket, last borrowed on 9th August 1982. It has that wonderful old book smell).

It’s a lovely book, filled with stories, science and illustrations including a “century” of species, many of which are now considered to by synonyms.

When I saw the BBC video clip I immediately remembered a drawing in Gilbert and Allan’s book. It shows two seahorses that have met a similar fate.

Gilbert and Allan tell a “Nursery Story for Adults” with a rather unhappy ending. In 1948, German naturalist, Heinrich Dathe, wrote about his discovery of a dead seahorse washed up on an Italian shore, its body covered in cuttlefish eggs. He assumed the poor seahorse – resembling a seller of toy balloons – must have passed away, encumbered by his unusual load.

But this wasn’t the first time Dr Dathe found evidence of a cuttlefish mistaking a seahorse for a piece of seagrass. While imprisoned in a concentration camp in  Rimini, Southern Italy, a friend presented him one day with a glass jar, filled with seawater and containing its own, miniature prisoner.

On closer inspection, it was a seahorse decorated in miniature bunches of grapes, slung about its midriff like a pair of bathing trunks festooned with hand-grenades. It was another seahorse covered in cuttlefish eggs.

So it seems that seahorses put on such flawless seagrass impersonations they run the risk of ending up with very dangerous underwear.

And fortunately, there was a much happier ending for the Spanish seahorse caught on camera with its young cuttlefish hitchhikers. This one survived its ordeal thanks to Garcia Blanco and Read who carefully removed the eggs from its tail and let the seahorse go on its way.

Now that’s got to be a nursery story worth passing on.

The votes are in and the future does not look bright for a collection of marine species that are getting a pummeling from international trade. Fans of bluefin tuna sashimi and anyone outraged at the idea of taking a global stance against shark fin soup can heave a sigh of relief. Don’t worry: it’s business as usual.

Hammerhead shark. Photo by petersbar

In the build up to the 15th biannual meeting of CITES held in Doha, hopes had been high among some conservationists (I was one of them) that protection might be granted to some of the most threatened marine species that cruise the oceans in ever decreasing numbers thanks to human appetite for sushi, soup, and shark steaks.

But alas no. Despite all the scientific evidence that points towards extinction-by-overfishing, nations at the CITES meeting voted overwhelmingly not to offer any of these species international protection.

The trade in fins and meat will carry on regardless of massive, worldwide declines. Same goes for the imperiled bluefin tuna.

Porbeagle steaks on sale in Borough Market London. Photo by pfig

At the end of 2009 I helped research and write scientific reviews for IUCN and TRAFFIC of proposals to restrict international trade in 4 shark species: Oceanic whitetips, hammerheads, porbeagles and spiny dogfish (4 other sharks were also to be protected under the hammerhead proposal since their fins and meat are difficult to tell apart).

So, I’ve been through the data and I know the stories of all these sharks. And, trust me, they need all the help they can get.

The aim of these reports was to provide an expert analysis of the proposals to regulate and control the trade these sharks. We summarized the data and tried to make it easy for nations at the CITES meeting to make balanced and informed decisions.

I’ve seen the porbeagle and spiny dogfish data before – these 2 were rejected at the 2007 CITES meeting too. It leaves me wondering if the same species will keep coming up at CITES, time after time, until their numbers are so low they can be safely labelled as being “commercially extinct” i.e. don’t bother going out to try and catch them.

Oceanic whitetip shark. Photo by Tom Weilenmann

This latest round of CITES negotiations on marine species has been the most public and – from where I’m sitting – the most frustrating and depressing.

When I set out to review the CITES shark proposals alongside a team of other wildlife trade experts, it wasn’t a forgone conclusion and certainly not simply a case of “save the sharks no matter what the science says”. We rigorously and objectively analyzed each species against the strict criteria set by CITES and – trust me – I could only wish the picture had been less clear cut and less desolate.

To be eligible for a trade ban under CITES, species of “commercially exploited aquatic species” (including sharks and tuna) need to have declined by somewhere between 80 and 95% from a historic baseline or by just 50% more recently.

If trade looks to be threatening the survival of a species in the wild but they don’t yet meet these thresholds, then less strict trade regulations can be imposed in the hope they will stave off the need for a trade ban.

And shockingly all these sharks – except possibly a few populations of spiny dogfish that remain in reasonable shape - and bluefin tuna fall well within the trade ban criteria.

I won’t repeat all the data here (if you want to know more, do check out the IUCN/TRAFFIC review documents) but here are a few of the more worrying statistics:

• Since the 1950s, oceanic whitetip sharks in the NW Atlantic and Central Pacific have declined by between 90-99%.
• Since the 19th century, hammerhead sharks and porbeagles in the Mediterranean have both plummeted by 99.9%.
• In the NE Atlantic, it took 82 years for porbeagle populations to collapse to 6% of their former abundance.
• Between 1905 and 2005, the population of spiny dogfish in the NE Atlantic population declined by 93.4 – 94.8%.

And I’ve not  just taken the juiciest pickings of the data to try and make a point. Similar stories of demise have been going on across the ranges of these sharks.

Nevertheless all this science, all the fisheries statistics, models and projections have been ignored.

Spiny dogfish. Photo by brotherM

The CITES criteria are not only based on population declines. The biology of the species is also taken into account: species that are more biologically vulnerable should, according to CITES, be protected more carefully.

And sharks are some of the most vulnerable fish in the oceans. They tend to grow slowly, mature late, produce a small number of young, and live a long time.

During my research I was astonished to learn that spiny dogfish probably have the longest gestation of any vertebrate in the world. Female spiny dogfish are pregnant longer than us human beings and longer than elephants or whales. They can gestate for up to 22 months, and even after all that waiting they may only give birth to a handful of pups. That doesn’t add up to a species that will cope well with commercial exploitation.

Hammerhead shark. Photo by Erik Charlton

One big question that many people are currently debating is whether CITES is the right tool for conserving marine species, including sharks.

Some say this is the job of regional fisheries organizations (like ICCAT). The most vocal on this are China and Japan who seem adamant that CITES should keep their sticky beaks out.

Others say CITES lacks legal bite and with so many opt-out clauses has little effect on the species in real danger.

Nevertheless, there are a handful of sharks that have managed to get onto the CITES appendices.

At a landmark vote back in 2002, basking sharks and whale sharks were the first elasmobranchs to earn themselves international regulation, followed by great white sharks in 2004, and a trade ban in sawfish – a close relative of sharks – in 2007.

But where next for ocean trade?

Right now, I really don’t know. My only hope is that all this attention and the mixed views being spread around the media will mean that the plight of the sharks and bluefin tuna – members of that unseen and largely uncared for marine world – will be higher on the interntional agenda and maybe those regional fisheries organizations will get their act together and do their job properly.

Of course as consumers we can all boycott bluefin and shark (ask where your fish and chips came from – it could be a spiny dogfish female who’s been pregnant for 2 years). But I fear that might not be enough. International, top-down action will probably be needed too.

And if we don’t do something there might not be any more bluefins and even fewer sharks to haggle over the next time CITES comes around.

This week, international negotiations are raging over a group of species that conservationists say are being pushed towards extinction. The cause of the problem: uncontrolled trade.

Votes are already coming in and the first big result is a NO VOTE on a potential ban trade in Bluefin Tuna. The trade will go on. Japan must be thrilled.

Inside a net with a shoal of doomed bluefin tuna. Photo by Marco Carè Marine Photobank

The plan – proposed by Monaco – had been to add the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna to appendix I of CITES – the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species of wild fauna and flora.

Every two years, CITES members meet to decide which species should be added, removed, or upgraded on their lists that offer endangered animals and plants protection from international trade. Appendix I means a global trade ban. Appendix II means global regulation, aimed  to keep the trade well within sustainable limits.

If the tuna vote had been Yes, it would have put a halt – for now – on legal trade in Bluefins from the Atlantic. Who knows what the consequences might have been: the black market might have carried on supplying anyone who wanted sushi. A new breed of sushi tourism might have opened up in Mediterranean countries that catch Bluefins (this was going to be a ban on international trade, not on catching them).

But Japan, Canada and a number of poorer nations voted against the proposal. And so the trade will continue, and we’ve missed a chance to help make sure there will still be Bluefins cruising the Atlantic in years to come.

Bluefin in a cage. Photo by Marco Carè Marine Photobank

And this is all despite overwhelming evidence that there are now few enough of these fish left in the oceans to meet CITES’ stringent rules for a global trade ban.

Many claim that the tuna is being watched over by ICCAT – the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, so CITES isn’t needed. But perhaps a more appropriate acronym could be the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas.

ICCAT set annual catch limits based on scientific data. These are not low enough and are often exceeded.

If you want a balanced and thorough overview of the Bluefin situation, I urge you to have a read of IUCN and TRAFFIC’s review of the CITES proposal to ban the trade. They have crunched a huge volume of data and offer a neat summary of the whole deal.

There’s a small chance the Bluefin No vote will be overturned at the end of the meeting. But it doesn’t seem likely.

We’ll have to wait and see if the Bluefins turn up again in the next round of CITES discussions in 2 years time.

Meanwhile, there are other threatened marine species under the CITES spotlight this week. A group of shark species have been proposed for trade regulation – not ban – under CITES. They include Oceanic Whitetips and Hammerhead sharks, both heavily exploited for their fins.

Oceanic Whitetip Shark. Photo by Michael Aston

I’ll be watching especially closely, since I was involved in writing reviews of the CITES shark trade proposals.

I can only hope these opportunities to help protect ocean biodiversity won’t also be thrown away.

A few weeks ago at the University Library, here in Cambridge, I made a rather wonderful discovery. I uncovered a forgotten hero of underwater filmmaking (and I found some seahorses).

Cambridge University Library. Photo by Nick in exsilio

I was doing some research for my next book proposal (and no, I’m not going to say what it’s about yet), and I did my usual trick of browsing a few books up and down from the one I came for. Unlike many other research libraries, the UL lets you walk among many of the shelves which means you often stumble on hidden treasures you weren’t expecting.

It’s interesting to see what books the library staff have chosen to catalogue together, using their baffling numbering system that seems determined to keep me wandering the shelves, cursing under my breath when the clockwork egg timer on the light runs out, plunging me into mid-isle darkness.

This time, on a shelf of natural history books I had passed by before, I noticed a title that set my eyes popping:

“Quest of the curly-tailed horses.”

How did I manage to miss this one when I was researching Poseidon’s Steed?

Big belly seahorse. Photo by Doug Deep

I was kicking myself. Surely, I’d been exhaustive in my search for seahorsey literature, and yet here was a neat volume, with a cute seahorse on the frontispiece. Of course the curly-tailed horses came right home with me that day. And over the following week I devoured the book in blissful evening installments while wallowing in the bath (one of my guilty pleasures).

And to my surprise, it wasn’t just the seahorses in this book that I adored, but my discovery of the man who wrote it. This book, it turned out, was the autobiography from the 1960s of an important, but virtually forgotten character in the world of underwater filmmaking and exploration: Noel Monkman. And what a life he led.

Monkman was born in New Zealand at the turn of the 20th century. The book begins in his troubled childhood spent in sullen boarding houses, being shifted from place to place by his father who attempted to keep him away from his mother after she made the unpardonable decision to continue with a music career instead of devoting herself to family life. Times were very different back then.

In delightful early chapters, Monkman describes his time spent on the New Zealand coast where he made friends with a local maori boy and together they discovered the extraordinary wildlife of the beach. They built a rock corral on the shore and filled it with their favourite creatures, including the curly-tailed horses.

Big belly seahorse. Photo by Richard Ling

They must have been Big-Belly Seahorses, Hippocampus abdominalis, since it’s the only species native to New Zealand. And at up to around 30cm or a foot from head to tail, these are the biggest seahorses in the world.

An amusing section in Chapter 6 describes his frustrations in trying to persuade the seahorses to eat. He offered them fish, bits of mussel, and all his own favourite foods: cake, biscuits, strawberry jam, plum pudding, apples, pears and plums. He even thought – being horses – he should try them on oats or bran. But no. The seahorses were having none of it.

Eventually, though, he cracks the puzzle of what seahorses eat, writing:

“As I lay beside the pool watching them, I noticed that occasionally one or other of them would turn slowly sideways as if watching something; then there would be a sudden flick of the head as if it had given a dainty little sneeze.”

Sneezing seahorses. What a lovely image!

Big belly seahorse. Photo by tassiesim

And how thrilled he was when he discovered the seahorses were feeding on minute animals.

“The worry about food for the curly-tailed horses had ushered us into a world of wonders.”

I’m not going to give too much more away because a big part of why I loved this read was knowing nothing at all about Noel Monkman before I started and uncovering so many gems along the way.

What I will say is that his childhood love of the seashore, and seahorses, stayed with him and through a series of jobs and adventures, work as a portrait photographer, building laborer and concert cellist, until Noel Monkman eventually found himself exploring the Great Barrier Reef in the 1930s accompanied by his wife, Kitty, making the first ever underwater films of the world’s biggest reef.

Their story echoes the famous explorations of another husband and wife team, Hans and Lottie Hass, and yet few people have heard of the Monkmans.

When I finished his book and began looking around online for more information about what happened to Noel Monkman, I was shocked to find so little.

So, I definitely recommend you track down a copy of Quest of the curly-tailed horses. Monkman led an extraordinary life with tireless dedication and ambition who we could all learn a thing or two from, and his book gives a vivid insight into what life was like back then. He truly is someone worth remembering.

A few more details:

• Noel Monkman died in 1969
• He wrote another book, Escape to Adventure, which is next on my reading list.
• This is the only other description of Monkman’s life and works I’ve found online so far. Don’t read it until after you’ve finished Quest of the curly-tailed horses, otherwise it might spoil the ending.

When it comes to measuring the benefits of marine reserves (or Marine Protected Areas aka MPAs, or marine parks, or no take zones, or whatever you want to call them) it’s usually fish populations or marine habitats that we focus on. Now it seems that protecting areas of the sea from fishing pressure can very quickly help ocean predators – including penguins.

African penguins. Photo by ClifB

A new study from South Africa reveals that when a 20km stretch of ocean – not a lot really – was declared off-limits to fishing fleets, a local colony of African penguins spent on average 30% less time out fishing for themselves. Within 3 months of the fishing ban, the penguins found more to eat inside the protected area now that the human hunters weren’t competing for fish.

Spending less time hunting for their dinner is good news for penguins because it cuts down their exposure to other ocean predators that are partial to a penguin-dinner including great white sharks, orcas and cape fur seals.

African penguins. Photo by Paul Mannix

At the same time, another penguin colony 50km away weren’t so lucky. With no protection of their local fish stocks, they had to spend longer in the sea finding enough food for themselves and their youngsters.

African penguins are considered to be vulnerable to extinction, so it’s certainly very encouraging that they can benefit so rapidly from the careful siting of relatively small marine reserves.

Hopefully more reserves like this will be created to help secure the penguins’ future.

In detail:

• African penguins, also known as the black-footed penguin live on the SW coast of Africa.
• They are listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Redlist.
• Population declines are mainly blamed on overfishing of their target prey including sardines and anchovies by purse-seine fleets.
• In 2000, a catastrophic oil spill affected nearly half the entire population of African penguins and spawned the world’s largest sea bird rescue operation.
• The paper by Pichegru et al is published in the journal Biology Letters.

Did you know that the world’s largest coral atoll is British, and that it could become the world’s largest marine reserve?

View from Diego Garcia. Photo by sushicam

Those are two impressive facts and they apply to the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, some 300 miles south of the Maldives.

The coral reefs of the chagos are among the most untouched and healthy reefs left on the planet, mainly because they happen to be a long way from any major human settlements.

I’m writing this post partly just to tell you about the Chagos – if you haven’t already heard of them – and also to ask for your help.

We have until Feb 12th – this Friday – to show support for the protection of the Chagos Archipelago and all the thousands of marine species that live there. The UK government – in a rare demonstration of expansive environmental thinking – is considering plans for a marine reserve that could cover 500,000 square kms. That is truly huge and far, far bigger than any other marine reserve anywhere today.

Containing hundreds of coral species and thousands of fish species (including, it’s thought, important tuna breeding grounds), this area is of extraordinary biodiversity value. And yes, as I’ve mentioned a few times already, this is the International Year of Biodiversity, so what better time to make this monumental pledge to the natural world.

Specifically, there are three proposals under consideration:

• Strict protection for the entire archipelago i.e. no fishing at all, anywhere
• Moderate protection for the entire area, with some deep sea fishing allowed
• Protection of only the “most important” areas of reef

Conservationists are united in their support for option one. Over 10,000 members of the public have already showed their support, signing a petition urging the UK government to Protect Chagos.

The Chagos archipelago is part of the British Indian Ocean Territories and consists of 55 islands, including Diego Garcia, home to a joint UK/US military base since the early 1970s when the native Chagosians were relocated to Mauritius and the Seychelles. This, quite rightly, stirred up a huge human rights debate that continues to rage on today.

I don’t mean to brush the human issues aside, but I’m not going to talk more about it in this post. Only, I do want to point out that plans for a marine reserve should not go against plans to allow Chagosians to return. If or when that happens, there is flexibility in the marine reserve plans to make allowances for the native islanders to come back and make a sustainable living from the seas around the archipelago. So this isn’t a case of people versus wildlife – there should be room (to some extent) for both.

Please join over 10,000 other people in signing a petition calling for the highest level of protection in the proposed marine reserve: no fishing at all.

I’ve signed it. And I urge you, dear, thoughtful, planet-loving readers, to do the same.

And don’t just take my word for it. Here is veteran environmental campaigner Tony Juniper saying much the same things as me.