Seadragons. Is there anything more mythical and magical than these guys?

Weedy seadragon. Photo by Dave Harasti

I’ve not been lucky enough to see a seadragon in the wild yet, although next time I’m in Australia I’m determined to find one.

But we can all enjoy the ornate beauty of the weedy seadragons – covered in their dapper suits of yellow spots – in the next episode of the BBC’s Life series. You can already peer at their moving mating ritual on a clip on the BBC website. This might be first time wild weedies have been caught at it on camera, so this is definitely worth 3 minutes of your next coffee break.

Quite gorgeous and a little bit hard to believe.

The violin and piano music is the perfect accompaniment, along with the warmth Sir David Attenborough’s narration. The whole thing plays out like some sort of beautiful undersea ballet.

There are two species of seadragon – the weedy and leafy varieties – both members of the same family as seahorses (the syngnathidae), both with the most extraordinary camouflage which they use to hide away among seaweed forests in the mostly chilly waters along Australia’s southern coast.

A pair of leafy seadragons. Photo by Dave Harasti.

From the BBC clip you can see the male weedy seadragon doing a great job of carrying the eggs around, safely stuck onto his belly, but he is not truly pregnant like the seahorse males. Instead of giving birth, the male seadragons simply stands by while the eggs hatch and the minute seadragons waft off to begin their own, independent lives.

Another clip on Arkive shows baby leafy seadragons making their way into the world.

These days, many seadragons are taken from the wild to put on display in aquariums all over the world. Attempts to persuade them to breed in captivity have so far been fairly unsuccessful. It seems these elegant dragons are choosy about how and where they mate.

But I can’t deny that watching these beautiful fish up close is a truly captivating experience.

Obviously, we mustn’t take too many of them from the wild. And whenever you see one in an aquarium, don’t forget their cousins roaming the southern shores of Australia, living in habitats threatened by pollution, climate change and all those other modern ocean problems.

If ever there were an animal that could persuade us to protect the seas, the seadragons must be a very strong candidate.

Because surely the world is a better place knowing there are real, live dragons lurking in the oceans.

Saturday was International Day of Climate Action run by 350.org

I meant to publish this post on Saturday – but somehow I must have hit ‘Save Draft’ instead of ‘Publish’! whoops!  Sorry about that. But it’s still not too late to get involved in the campaign.

This is an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis, the solutions, as 350.org says “that science and justice demand”.

The focus of the campaign is on the number 350, because that is becoming widely considered as the “safe upper limit” for the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (in parts per million or ppm). Keep CO2 levels beyond that and we are really in trouble.

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, if we don’t get levels down to 350 ppm we may as well wave goodbye to coral reefs and all the benefits – economic and otherwise – they provide. And given that currently the atmosphere holds around 387 ppm, there is a massive task ahead.

But we have to do something because this matters way too much.

And with the climate talks coming up in Copenhagen in December, now is the time for the international community to stand up and make themselves heard. Well, that’s what SAturday was all about anyway.

But don’t just let me go on about it. Check out the 350.org website and see what’s going on, pledge your support and spread the word.

In a USA Today blog, Desmond Tutu said this week that the 350 campaign is “the same kind of coalition that helped make the word “apartheid” known around the world. In South Africa, we showed that if we act on the side of justice, we have the power to turn tides. Worldwide, we have a chance to start turning the tide of climate change with just such a concerted effort today.”

My tiny contribution to today are these seahorses… 350 of them.

Because if CO2 levels keep on rising, then we may well see the last of the coral reefs (at least on a time scale with any meaning to humanity) and with them we would see the disappearance of many of the world’s seahorse species (and the million upon million of other species they share the reefs with).

Now we wouldn’t want that, would we?

350 seahorses. my tiny contribution to International day of Climate Action, October 24th 2009

Happy International day of Climate Action everyone. Let’s all take some action, shall we?

So, we’ve had another episode of BBC’s new big budget wildlife series Life. And while the topic this week was reptiles and amphibians – creatures not famous for their love of the sea – there was still an ocean treat in store.

Sea snakes. Or sea kraits to be precise (a sub-group of the sea snakes).

Olive green sea snake on the Great Barrier Reef. Photo by Peter Nangle.

They are quite awesome creatures to encounter underwater and despite being venomous are not especially dangerous but rather placid and inquisitive. And they are stunning when they swim in s-shaped undulations up towards the sea surface to grab a breath.

Sea krait grabbing a breath. Photo by Scubageek.

And once again, the BBC have turned out a sea snake fact I didn’t know (there was another in Planet Earth a few years ago which I’ll tell you about below). It turns out there are some sea snakes that have to lay their eggs on land.

But unlike those other great ocean reptiles – the sea turtles – sea snakes don’t crawl up a beach to lay their eggs in a vulnerable nest in the sand.

The female sea krait that appears in this episode of Life has a very cunning plan.

She was filmed in achingly clear waters off the South Pacific island of Nuie, a tiny outcrop over two thousand kms north east of New Zealand, in between Tonga and Samoa. Who wouldn’t have wanted to go on that film shoot?

Although, after watching a tangled knot of midwater copulation, things get a little scary when the female snake swims off into an underwater cave. I’ve never been a fan of confined spaces and putting those spaces underwater is even worse.

There she finds a pocket of protected air, the perfect place to leave her eggs. The film of this sparkling cave is gorgeous. Have a watch – I think this clip can be watched outside the UK. It looks like something straight out of a Harry Potter book.

But the question is, if only the sea kraits have to lay their eggs on land, what do all the other sea snakes do?

Yellow lipped sea krait. Photo by Budak.

Well, they don’t lay eggs at all.

Most sea snakes give birth to live young which emerge fully formed and ready for life in the sea.

And if you fancy some more amazing sea snake footage, check out the Shallow Seas episode of the BBC’s Planet Earth series (I can’t find a clip online of this one so you’ll have to hunt down the DVD or a repeat on TV). There is a mind blowing scene from an Indonesian coral reef where hundreds of sea snakes (not so good for ophidiophobes) go hunting, escorted by a shoal of trevally. I’ve never heard of anything like this massive multi-species hunting expedition, let alone seen it myself!

So, did I like the second episode of BBC’s Life?

For the sea snake sequence yes, definitely. For the rest of it? There were certainly some cool critters in there although I’m sure some of the footage we already saw on the Life in Cold Blood series. And I’m not quite sure how the programme as a whole hung together.

But I will certainly keep watching.

In detail:

• Sea snakes are reptiles in the family Hydrophiidae.
• Sea kraits are members of that family in the genus Laticauda.
• Sea snakes live in warm tropical seas of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
• The Caribbean Sea and west Atlantic Ocean are sea snake free.
• Most adult sea snakes grow to about 1 to 1.5m long.
• They have salt glands under and around their tongues to help remove the excess salt they accidentally swallow while living in the sea.

If you’ve been watching my tweets lately, you’ll probably already have noticed I like to link to ocean stories from around the web.

So I thought I’d give you some thoughts on my favourite ocean tweets from the past week.

For starters, it seemed to be a week of great seahorse fecundity with the announcement of baby seahorses being born in two English aquariums. We had spotted or yellow seahorses in Chester – a species native to the Indo-Pacific.

And then the patter of tiny fins could be heard in Hastings with the arrival of 200 baby short snouts. These are European seahorses that live around the UK coastline and down into the Mediterranean.

Seahorses have been having babies in British aquariums since Victorian times, so this is nothing especially new. But it obviously still exciting.

Photo by Kelly Graham/Marine Photobank

As I discuss in Poseidon’s Steed, keeping seahorses in aquariums helps spread the word about these extraordinary creatures and of course raises awareness about the problems they face in the wild. And with breeding programmes like these two, and many others around the world, aquariums don’t have to rely on wild caught seahorses for their displays.

On a more worrying note, if you haven’t already, then take 30 seconds out of your day to watch a video on the Guardian website showing the sea ice at the north pole shrinking from 1978 to 2008.

Back in the late seventies, satellites first started taking pictures from space of the extent of sea ice over the arctic. Since then, the sea ice has fluctuated annually but overall has been contracting, with 2009 being the 3rd lowest extent on record.

And despite the slight recovery from 2008, scientists are still convinced that in the next few years the arctic will become completely ice-free during the summer.

Arctic Sea ice age in February 2008 compared to the average for 1985-2000. NASA.

Believe what you will about climate change, but this to me is stark evidence of the changes that have been taking place in the environment in the past few decades, and a worying sign of the changes still to come.

And finally…

This week we saw a cheery bit of ocean trivia. A video of bottlenose dolphins getting up to some strange jellyfish tricks has been doing the rounds.

Bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). NASA.

The footage came from Tremadog Bay in Wales, and you can see the researchers onboard laughing themselves silly at the spectacle.

It’s not too obvious on the video clip but when the dolphins got a good aim, they flipped  the jellyfish clear out of the water.

It’s behaviour that’s never been see before, but perhaps goes some way to explaining why captive dolphins know what to do when a beach ball is thrown at them.

And why are they doing it? Well, who knows. I’d like to think they were just having a bit of fun.

Thanks for reading. More from me and the ocean world soon.

Today the BBC screened the first episode of their latest landmark wildlife series. This time around they’ve called it, quite simply, Life.

I must admit that back in 2006 when trailers for Planet Earth came out I was a little skeptical that we were really about to witness ‘planet earth as we’ve never seen it before’ as was promised. Surely we’ve seen it all by now?

But no. I was swept away from the opening scene to the closing credits. Planet Earth is undeniably stunning and when I watch it again and again on DVD there are still bits of my mind that get blown away.

And now we have Life. Once again, a little part of me is whispering ‘we’ve seen it all before, we’ve seen it all before’.

And once again, I have to admit that we obviously haven’t seen it all before.

Take, for example, the giant pacific octopus.

Perhaps I should already have known this, but the pregnant female finds herself a safe crevice deep down somewhere out of sight, lays a hundred thousand eggs and slowly starves as she tends and cares for them. By the time the tiny, spotty babies hatch, mother octopus has passed away. Yes it does sound a little sad, but that’s semelparity for you.

Giant Pacific Octopus (Enteroctopus dolfeini)

The first episode offers up other oceanic treats like bottlenose dolphins stirring mud rings off the Florida coast and extraordinary slo mo shots of flying fish as they try to escape sailfish (with footage that for the first time convinces me where the sailfish get their name from). These guys alone are definitely worth tuning in for (it’s on again tomorrow and on Saturday) or watching again on BBC iplayer.

This episode did feel a little bit like a quick fire round.  We see a carnival of snippets without going into too much detail. For example we whiz through madagascar and catch a tantalizing glimpse of a leaftail gecko’s foot with no mention of who it belongs to.

Mossy leaftail gecko from Madagascar. Helen Scales.

But perhaps this was a starter show parading things we’ll see later in the series. We’ll see next week.

And there were a couple of things that I’m sure we have seen before, like the poison arrow frog carrying its tadpoles one-by-one up a tree and plopping each one in a different water-filled bromeliad. These guys hopped through another BBC show a while back I think. But nevertheless they are still quite extraordinary.

We get some gnarly scenes of a leopard seal eating young chin strap penguins, flinging them about like rag dolls. But we are left with the oh-so-cute images of a baby orang utan with its mum while David Attenborough reminds us what life is all about.

So, in my humble oppinion, Life was good. I wonder if next week will be even better. I look forward to finding out.

This week is European Shark Week run by the Shark Alliance.

The idea is to spread the word about the many species of shark, ray and chimera that live in European waters, and highlight the problems they are all facing.

The Save Our Seas Foundation is running a great blog throughout the week. Offerings over the weekend include the announcement by three major european supermarkets that they plan to stock only shark products from non-threatened species. It’s a step in the right direction, but how about not selling any sharks at all?

Shark fins without the bodies they came from. Jessica King/Marine Photobank.

Shark Week has just begun and already there is one piece of encouraging news for European sharks.

It’s been announced that shark finning will be affectively banned in the UK. The plan is to close a loophole in existing legislation by no-longer giving fishermen permits to bring back fins that have been separated from sharks at sea. Hopefully this will turn the pressure up on Spain and Portugal, the two main shark-finning nations in Europe, to do something similar.

So, do look out for more European shark news this week.

And you can spread the word a little further yourself by sending out  Shark Week e-cards to your friends (check out the theme music!).

My offering to help celebrate this year’s International Cephalopod Awareness Days, is the Vampire squid from hell.

Yes, that’s right, you heard: the vampire squid from hell. Vampyroteuthis infernalis to be precise.

And why did I chose this fellow? To shine a beam of light on one of the many fabulous creatures that live hidden away out of sight (except to the most courageous aquanaut) in the inky depths of the ocean.

The Vampire Squid from Hell. Otherwise known as Vampyroteuthis infernalis.

If you don’t believe me, then you can peer briefly into hell yourself by watching a film clip on the BBC’s new online Wildlife Finder.

The vampire squid from hell, ‘the wierdest in this world of the strange’ as Sir David Attenborough puts it, will invade your screen after a few seconds with the dumbo octopus – also pretty wierd (and I love the eerie noises the filmmakers dub on top of these otherwise silent deep-sea scenes).

But I think it’s a little unfair to give these extraordinary creatures such a scary name.

The size and texture of a deflated soccer ball (about a foot long), they make themselves look mean with an array of snaggling spikes. By drawing up the skin between their arms like an inside-out umbrella they give themselves the appearance of an angry red pineapple.

But in actual fact, these spines are quite harmless protrusions called cirri – all part of the vampire squids’ trick of dressing up to look scarier than they really are.

And as Sir David tells us ‘the vampire squid has lights of its own’. These deep sea cephalopods keep bioluminescent bacteria inside their tissues. When the squid gets spooked (for example by a human being blundering past in a deep-sea submsersible vehicle) it waggles about shiny spots of light to confuse any would-be predators, and even lights up a pair of fake eyes to direct attention away from the real, delicate organs.

Vampire squid from hell have huge eyes, possibly the largest in the animal kingdom relative to body size. Six-inch youngsters have eyes the size of a large cherry (about an inch across – give me the same proportions and my eyes would be the size of basket balls). All the better for seeing with in the sunless depths: the only light vampire squid will see is produced by themselves and other living organisms.

And instead of ink they squirt out a jet of bioluminescent particles, another way of messing with the minds of unwanted intruders.

What’s more, these cephalapods aren’t strictly speaking squid. Instead they hover uneasily somewhere between squid and octopodes.

So there you go. Happy International Cephalopod Awareness Day every one.

In detail:

• Vampyroteuthis infernalis was first discovered in 1903 by Carl Chun. He thought it was an octopus because he only counted 8 arms. The 2 extra arms are thin and usually kept tucked away out of sight.
• It’s a bit of a relic, being the only surviving member of the order Vampyromorphida.

That’s it. We can’t ignore this any longer. Coral reefs are in big, serious trouble. Not the sort of trouble that might spoil a few nice dive sites. This is the sort of trouble that could spell the end of all the world’s reefs within the next century. Yes, it could mean no more reefs.

So be warned. This is an unapologetically dismal post.

But please don’t take my word for it. I urge you to find half an hour to watch Professor Charlie Veron, veteran coral reef scientist, give a lecture on the past and future of the world’s coral reefs. Is the Barrier Reef on Death Row?

Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row? ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies/Marine Photobank

J.E.N. Veron, known as Charlie, is undoubtedly the world’s most well-respected coral taxonomist and biogeographer. His three-volume Corals of the World sits behind me, reminding me of the days I’ve spent conducting underwater coral surveys.

But lately he has become increasingly worried that those books could become history books. Now he spends his time researching and lecturing about the future of coral reefs. In particular ocean acidification, the ‘great big gorilla in the cupboard that is waiting for us’ as he put it.

Dead coral and live starfish. Wolcott Henry 2005/Marine Photobank

In his lecture Veron tells us about how reef extinction has happened before. Five times in fact. Each time, corals under various guises were hit hard, but each time reefs reinvented themselves and came back.

So why is this 6th extinction any different? I actually think he nails that question most eloquently in his recent paper The coral reef crisis.

Here, Veron and his co-authors succinctly explain that the rate of current (and near future) climate change is way faster than it ever has been in the past. This leaves little hope that corals will be able to adapt their way out of trouble. Even if they could, like they have in past, it would take thousands to millions of years for them to recover: that’s hardly relevant on a human time scale.

‘The difference is that this time humanity will have been the cause and also one of the species to suffer,’ they write.

Synergism

In both his lecture and paper, Veron explains the critical importance of multiple threats. Reefs today face a scrimmage of problems, not just rising sea levels, but rising acidification, rising temperatures triggering mass coral bleaching events, overfishing, poor water quality and bigger, more frequent storms (watch his lecture for more details on all of these).

Scientists have – until now – mostly studied how reefs deal with each of these issues in turn. But what happens when they all come along together?

Synergism. The combined effect will almost certainly be greater than the sum of the separate effects.

Bleached and healthy coral. (c) Wolcott Henry 2005/Marine Photobank

It’s an idea I wrote about in my masters thesis nearly a decade ago. Back then, there were hardly any studies focussing on how different stresses launch a combined assault on reefs. Now it’s something that people are having to think about more and more.

time to give up on reefs?

Veron doesn’t shirk his responsibility of delivering some really bad news. He outlines a series of increasingly spine-chilling scenarios. As CO2 levels ramp up from the current 387 ppm (parts per million in the atmsophere), first to 400, then 500 and 600, reefs will crumble and disappear.

By the time we reach 600 there won’t be any reefs left. And that could happen within 100 years.

Telling the story through the eyes of a moray eel he met on a recent dive on the Great Barrier Reef did little to take the edge off his apocalyptic message.

Unless we deal with carbon emissions, reefs are on their way out.

‘We must approach this as reality, not as a fairy tale’ Veron entreats.

That’s a message that has to get through at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December. If we could somehow manage to keep CO2 levels below 350 ppm, there is a chance reefs will survive.

So, please. Go make yourself a cup of tea and watch Charlie’s talk. And join the campain to save the world’s coral reefs. And when December comes round, you might like to listen in to what’s going on in Copenhagen.

Because this really matters.

p.s. why coral reefs matter

You may already know this, but just in case here are a few of the many reasons why reefs matter:

• They cover just 0.2% of the world’s marine environment and yet are home to around one third of all marine species.
• Approximately 500 million people live within 100km of a coral reef, many of them relying on reefs for food and income.
• Intact reefs protect coastlines.
• Reefs globally generate something like 170-375 billion dollars of income every year, in terms of food, tourism etc. That’s really just a good guess, and doesn’t count all the services that reefs provide that we can’t imagine replacing.

In detail

• The lecture: Charlie Veron gave this talk in July this year at the Royal Society, introduced by Sir David Attenborough.
• The paper: The coral reef crisis: The critical importance of <350 ppm CO2

Could this be the end of the Chinese paddlefish?

This extraordinary aquatic giant wasn’t seen once during an intensive 3-year survey of the upper Yangtze River in China.

The Chinese paddlefish. A fish no more?

The last official reported sighting of the Chinese paddlefish was back in 2003. So, have they all gone now?

This bizarre species looks (or at least it did) a lot like a sawfish (a close relative of sharks and rays) with a huge long saw-like snout, or rostrum.

Chinese paddlefish have been measured at 3m long, while unconfirmed reports claim a 7m (22 feet) specimen weighing half a ton was found (that’s longer than three very tall men lying head to foot). Maybe they do grow that big, maybe they don’t. We may never know.

Because sadly we may never know much about Chinese paddlefish. They remain tremendously illusive with very few details uncovered about their habits. But it is thought that they probably spent time both in the sea as well as in rivers.

Overfishing and habitat destruction are named as the main culprits behind the demise of the Chinese paddlefish.

There was a possible sighting reported in Chinese newspapers earlier this year. But even so, with a team of keen-eyed scientists making every effort to find one – and failing – in the stretch of river they were most likely to hang out in, there is little doubt that there are hardly any of these magnificent beasts left in the wild.

If there are a few still hiding from us, there can’t be many.

And there aren’t even any in captivity.

What to do? Wave farewell?

Does this make the Chinese paddlefish the next on the list of species we have witnessed vanish, hot on the heals of the its former river-mate the Yangtze River dolphin?

If so, is there really anything we can do about it?

Scientists are talking about trying breeding programs, even artificial parthenogenesis. If only they could find a single, live female. Decide for yourself whether or not you think we should go to such extreme lengths to stop a single doomed species from being pushed over the edge.

A tiny part of me clutches onto a sliver of hope that there will still be Chinese paddlefish in the world in years to come. Just like I refuse to believe that I will one day wake up to the news that there are no more tigers or black rhinos or Philippine mahogany trees or any of the other critically endangered species there are.

But I’m afraid the pessimist in me seems to be winning on this one. I can’t really see how there is much chance the Chinese paddlefish will be with us for much longer, if indeed there are any out there right now. There are so many pressures crashing down on these fish – and many others species that live in the Yangtze. I just think we might be too late.

Flip side?

Is there a positive side to look on? Well, maybe.

While there may be not much hope for this particular species, I think we all need to reflect deeply on the possibility of another species lost. Stand (in your mind) on the banks of the River Yangtze, peer into the murky waters, and bid farewell to another creature gone, another fabulous product of natural selection.

It seems we never learn from our mistakes. But perhaps the story of the Chinese paddlefish could be one more reason to change that.

Because we’ve really got the stop this from happening. And not just for individual, charismatic species that we can admire and relate to, but for all creatures, great and small (as we used to sing in primary school assemblies), the species we may never meet and those we rely on in ways we may never know.

2010 is the year we said we’d reverse the tide of species loss. We’ve obviously not quite managed that yet. But I don’t think it’s time to give up.

In Detail:

• The Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) is one of only two known paddlefish, the sole members of the family Polyodontidae. The other species, the Mississippi paddlefish (Polyodon spathula) lives, as you might imagine, in rivers of southern United States.
• Photo of a tiny juvenile Chinese paddlefish.
• Link to paper: Zhang et al 2009.