Wild Ocean Blue

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.

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.

Christmas is here and I couldn’t resist writing about one of the most festive ocean inhabitants, the Christmas Tree Worms.

Xmas tree worm. Photo by Alain76

It’s their outrageous headgear that gives the Christmas Tree worms their name. Most of the worm we don’t see. They hide their rather normal-looking segmented bodies inside boulders of coral. But each worm has a pair of frilly bits called radioles, which they poke out of their burrows to sift food and oxygen from the water.

These scuba-divers’ favourites can put on eye-popping multicoloured displays on coral reefs, like forests of miniature Christmas trees.

Xmas tree worms covering a coral boulder. Photo by will48324

Creep up slowly on one and it will stay out and let you peer closely at its extraordinary spiraled protuberances that can be yellow, orange, brown, blue, red, or white or almost any colour at all. Waft a current of water past them and they flicker out of sight. (I admit that I like to watch for a while, then play magician, waving my hand above them and watching them disappear).

Xmas tree worm. Photo by Tim Sheerman-Chase

So, how do these festive critters take up home in coral in the first place? Well, they may look like nothing but feather dusters, but these hermaphrodite worms come fully equipped with reproductive organs and from time to time will shed sperm and eggs into the sea in the hope they will collide with each other, mixing the gene pool up a little. The resulting larvae then drift through the water for a while before finding a patch of coral they like the look of, settling down and building a chalky tube to live in. The coral polyps then grow around the worm until it is embedded inside the coral skeleton.

And of course these critters don’t come out only at Christmas, but you can see them decorating reefs all year round.

Xmas tree worms. Photo by Nick Hobgood.

As well as looking irresistibly pretty, Christmas tree worms might help to protect corals from attack by canivorous crown-of-thorn starfish, shoeing away any hungry predators that get near, tickling and irritating their sensitive undersides.

Anyway, I think that’s enough facts for Christmas (although do scroll down to the end for some more if you want them), so I wish you all a very HAPPY CHRISTMAS 2009 and leave you with some more photos of these wonderful beasts. Enjoy!

Xmas tree worm. Photo by sarsifa.

Xmas tree worm. Photo by jtu.

Xmas tree worm. Photo by Nick Hobgood.

In detail:

• The Latin name for Christmas Tree worms is Spirobranchus giganteus meaning ‘enormous spiralled gills’. How apt.
• Christmas Tree worms are serpulids, a type of polychaete worm.
• Their radioles grow to about an inch tall.
• There are considered to be two subspecies of S. giganteus, one living in the Indo Pacific the other in the Atlantic and Caribbean. Both subspecies come in a range of colourmorphs.
• Study of the protective role of Christmas tree worms. De Vantier et al, 1986.
• Study of the different colours of Christmas tree worms. Song, 2006. The most popular colour is white.
• Christmas tree worms can live for over 40 years.

As their name suggests, Goliath Groupers are really very big indeed. The largest known have been around 2.5m long, or 8 feet.

They are undeniably fully-fledged members of the marine megafauna.

But these big fish are in big trouble and they need your help.

Goliath Grouper. Photo by pony 33406

Because it’s become more and more difficult to spot one of these giants, the fish formerly known as jewfish. Being so very huge made them an irresistible target for fishers. Over the last few decades goliath groupers have been fished so heavily from their reefy and rocky homes on both sides of the Atlantic, in the Caribbean and the eastern reaches of the Pacific Ocean, that they are now labelled as being Critically Endangered.

In days gone by, a common place to spot a goliath grouper was strung up on a quayside alongside a grinning recreational fisher. So many goliath groupers were caught by sport and commercial fishers that their populations became economically extinct: it made no sense to try and catch them if you wanted to make money.

Goliath grouper catch from 1950s Florida. Photo from Florida Keys Public Libraries

Goliath grouper catch from 1950s Florida. Photo from Florida Keys Public Libraries.

Good news is that since the 1990 it’s been illegal to catch goliath groupers in US waters. And a fishing ban on them has been in place across the Caribbean since 1993. As a result, populations of these enormous fish have been slowly recovering.

The problem is they have apparently been recovering a bit too well for some people’s liking. There is growing pressure to lift the fishing ban in Florida, one of the only places where scuba divers have a good chance of meeting these kings of the reef. Do we really want to relive a time when killing such magnificent fish was all the rage? Couldn’t we move on from that?

In early December the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission will decide on whether to stick to the goliath grouper fishing ban or open these beasts up once again to human exploitation.

The Floridian scuba diving and conservation community are lobbying politicians hard in the hope they will hear a unified and loud voice of reason. An online petition to keep the fishing ban is gathering support and they hope to reach at least 1000 signatures.

So, do your bit and sign up. Because wouldn’t it be a crying shame if these spectacular beasts were once again allowed to be caught to make a bit of money or just for the fun of it.

Goliath grouper catch. Photo from Florida Keys Public Libraries.

It’s been well proven that big fish like the goliath grouper are far more vulnerable to extinction than smaller fish. In a twist of nature, it’s the bigger animals that grow more slowly and take longer to reach maturity (5 or 6 years for goliath groupers). So, if someone asks you to take a guess at which species are most at risk, whether they live in the sea, on land, or in freshwater, all you need do is pick out the biggest ones and you won’t go wrong.

In detail:

• Goliath groupers or jewfish (Epinephelus itajara) can live for nearly 40 years if we let them.
• They commonly grow to 1.5m from head to tail.
• Young goliath groupers live in mangrove forests, giving us yet another vital reason to care about and protect these habitats that are so often overlooked and cleared away.

This week an extract of my book Poseidon’s Steed was published in the Guardian, and the book is now available to buy in Europe from various online booksellers. So I thought it was time I blogged about my favourite fish.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is ‘Are seahorses endangered?’. And my answer is, sadly, yes they are.

Seahorses around the world are not only taken from the oceans (both deliberately and accidentally) in scarily high numbers, but they also suffer from the breakdown of their fragile habitats – especially coral reefs, seagrasses and mangroves.

So, what can we do about it? Well, here are my top ten tips for doing your bit to save the seahorses:

1. Don’t buy dead seahorses

This may sound a little odd. Why would you want a dead seahorse?

Because they live inside a coat of bony plates – which take the place of a more conventional suit of fishy scales – seahorses maintain much of their delicate and intricate shape after they die.

Obviously, it’s not quite the same, but much of the seahorses’ beauty lives on after death and there is something to be said for having your very own magical seahorse sitting on your desk (I must admit I have one on my desk, in a little cardboard jewelry box, given to me by a friend who’d had it for years – it must be a long time dead).

Dead seahorse by luv life

But don’t forget it is just the dead body of a fish that once led a quiet, gentle life on the sea floor.

Picking up a dead seahorse from the beach isn’t so bad. But the ones on sale in seaside souvenir shops will almost certainly have been taken live from the sea. So please, don’t buy them. The seahorses will thank you.

2. Make sure your pets were born on a farm

Following the publication of an extract of my book in the Guardian, a few readers have commented that keeping endangered seahorses might not be such a good idea. Have a read of chapter 5 of the book and you’ll find details of modern seahorse farms where seahorses are being bred for the aquarium trade.

Baby seahorses. Photo by pixiesticks23♥ (real busy)

So these days there is no excuse. Anyone who wants to keep these cute animals at home can do so without taking them from a wild.

In the book I also go through some of the pros and cons of keeping seahorses: for you, for seahorses, and for the environment. It’s not up to me to say if people should or shouldn’t keep seahorses – although I can see how lovely it would be to have live, beautiful seahorses in my life every day.

But if you want to keep them, make sure you go to reputable suppliers. Or check out online forums: home aquarists are often giving away spare baby seahorses that were born in their tanks. And this doesn’t just apply to seahorses; always choose captive bred not wild critters for your tank.

3. Don’t buy seahorse medicines

Again, this might sound odd.

Especially to anyone who isn’t familiar with the popular practice in various countries of using seahorses as an ingredient in traditional medicines.

Traditional Chinese medicine texts dating back 500 years prescribed seahorses for all sorts of medical conditions from broken bones and bed wetting, to skin rashes and even a flagging libido. Global demand for seahorse medicines is a driving force behind a growing market in seahorses taken from the sea – at least 25 million of them every year.

Dead seahorses on sale in a medicine shop in Vietnam. Photo by Helen Scales.

Especially worrying is the growing popularity of pre-packaged, off-the-shelf seahorse medicines that use weeny, dark-coloured seahorses that traditional Chinese medicine doctors normally don’t bother with. This means that now any seahorse, no matter what size or colour, can now be used in traditional medicines.

So, if you do use traditional medicines and can afford to buy seahorses (they aren’t cheap), then think about engaging your compassion for the natural world and choose an alternative that doesn’t include endangered species. Because there are lots of alternatives.

4. Protect the seahorses’ world

All sorts of human activities threaten the shallow coastal habitats that seahorses call home including coral reefs, seagrass meadows, mangroves, and estuaries. The list of problems is long and growing and includes pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, and ocean acidification.

And these are all things to worry about and take action over. Especially important is the creation of many more marine reserves or marine protected areas or marine parks or whatever you want to call them. Essentially these are places where the destructive influence of humankind is minimised, by banning fishing, extraction, direct input of pollutants and so on. Some strict marine reserves ban people altogether.

Healthy coral reef. Photo by Jiangang Luo Marine Photobank

There are obvioulsy problems that do not respect the boundaries of marine parks. But we know that protected habitats on the whole are healthier and can cope better when more insidious problems like climate change come along.

Currently less than 1% of the oceans are offered protection from human activities. That number needs to go up – a lot.

You may not have the power to set up your own marine reserve (who does?) but public support of local, regional, national and international campaigns to protect the oceans is vital for action.

5. Stamp out destructive fishing

A major threat to seahorses comes from trawl boats that plough through their habitat. Shrimp trawl boats don’t only catch shrimp but they also scrape up millions of seahorses every year (most seahorses made into traditional medicines are picked out of trawl nets), devastating their fragile habitats in the process. This insensitive, unselective form of fishing has to stop.

Trawl bycatch. Photo from Marine Conservation Cambodia/Marine Photobank

Do your bit by not buying fish that were caught in trawlers. How do you know, you cry? Well, you can ask. More and more these days, supermarkets and restaurants are giving customers information about how their fish is caught. If they don’t say and won’t tell you, then don’t buy.

Check out Monterey Bay Aquarium’s new Super Green List of fish that are good for you and not so bad for the oceans.

6. Take a stand against climate change

We may be releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere above our heads, but an awful lot of it ends up dissolved in the oceans where it’s already starting to wreak a particular brand of marine catastrophe. The oceans are becoming more acidic. And the seahorses – along with so many other marine creatures – are going to get hit hard, mainly because lots of them live in habitats that may soon be gone: coral reefs.

So don’t ignore the goings on in Copenhagan next month, because this really matters. Especially if you like the idea of a world with seahorses and coral reefs and other beautiful extraordinary wildlife.

And we can all do our bit to help. Switch off lights, turn down thermostats, insulate your house, recycle, drive less, fly less, ride your bike more. Get involved in campaigns like 350.org. And think of the seahorses while you do it.

7. Go see the seahorses

Aquariums around the world are home to thousands of seahorses and more of them than ever are bred in captivity and not taken from the wild (many aquariums swap baby seahorses when they have too many, which is often the case for the seahorses species that breed happily in tanks).

Seahorse and shrimp fish in an aquarium. Photo by Cal_gecko

Stop for a few minutes and watch the seahorses doing their seahorse thing, and let your thoughts wander off. When they come back, you’ll have your own personal seahorse moment to carry with you and remind you about these amazing creatures and the wild world they live in.

And have a read of the information boards at the aquarium. You never know what you might learn about the world of seahorses.

There’s a great new Secret Lives of Seahorses exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. But fear not, if you aren’t in California there are seahorse exhibitions all over the place.

8. Go dive for seahorses

If you are an addict of the underwater world like me, then there are heaps of places to go see a seahorse. Well, you can try anyway: they are extremely tricky to spot, with their cunning camouflage and shy nature.

Plus they are naturally rare creatures. You’ll not spot a big herd of them galloping by, but maybe – if you’re lucky – you might catch sight of a solitary seahorse grasping onto a blade of seagrass or coral branch. (Although, a friend of mine has just been diving in Indonesia and swears she saw a sea fan covered in dozens of pygmy seahorses. I’m not sure if she wasn’t just suffering from a case of nitrogen narcosis).

And you don’t have to venture to the tropics to see seahorses. Contrary to popular belief, seahorses inhabit shallow seas along virtually every coastline, tropical and temperate (but they don’t like really cold, icy waters, so don’t bother looking there).

Me and a seahorse. Photo by Steve Trewhella 2009.

A few weeks ago, I saw my first British seahorse off the beach at Studland in Dorset. Yes, that’s right. A British seahorse. There are two species on our fare but chilly shores.

Divers can play an important role in proving that a seahorse is worth more in the water than out. So, go out and support dive operations that care about their local seahorses.

And if you do spy a seahorse, try not to hassle it, poke it, prod it, or blind it with camera flash.

In this picture I am holding onto Troy (or rather, he is holding on to me), but I must point out, I was diving with a licensed seahorse handler (the UK species are now protected). We were conducting a survey, taking down this guy’s vital statistics, and stopped just quickly for an unmissable photo opportunity!

Check out chapter 6 of Poseidons’ Steed for more seahorse spotting tips.

9. Send in your seahorse sightings

Do your bit for seahorse research by getting involved with local seahorse spotting projects. The British Seahorse Survey collects reports of seahorse sightings from across the British Isles – and that goes for live seahorses in the water and dead seahorses too.

Get your seahorse spotting reports in!

10. Spread the seahorse love

And finally… (as they say on the news)

Recycled cashmere seahorse by snaulkter

Raspberry seahorse by snaulkter

I recently discovered these gorgeous cuddly seahorses made from recycled materials by a brilliant artist/designer snaulkter.

They are simply the most adorable – and accurate – depictions of seahorse in fabric that I’ve seen (and trust me, over my years of being a seahorse fanatic friends have given me virtually every beanie baby and cuddly seahorse ever made!). And I love that they are made from reused fabrics. Perfect!

So go get the kids hooked on seahorses, or indulge a grown up’s passion. Each seahorse is a unique critter, and each one is beautiful. Go see for yourself…

So… there you have my top 10 suggestions of how to help save seahorses. I’d love to hear you thoughts of any other things we can do.

Tonight it was the turn of fish to take centre stage on the BBC’s Life. And what an episode it was… absolutely, by far the best yet.

Clown fish. When the head female of an anemone dies, the biggest male has a sex-change & becomes the new dominant female. Photo by ecatoncheires.

Honestly. Trust me. You have to see this one. The early episodes had moments of eyebrow-raising novelty and breathtaking beauty, but so far none of them have truly enthralled me from start to finish. Until now.

And yes, it was about fish, so I’m a bit biased. But really, if anything, I was more likely to say “seen it” to whatever the BBC marched out on my screen.

What we see is scene after scene of surprises, extraordinary behaviour, and frankly stunning spectacles. We have freshwater barbel fish picking the muck off herds of grateful hippos. I never knew this sort of thing went on. Cleaning wrasse and shrimp oncoral reefs, sure. But hippos? Really! The hippos even open up those lethal jaws of theirs and have themselves a fastidious tooth clean.

Then there are the gobies that use their lips to climb up vast, roaring Hawaiian waterfalls. A few of the bravest individuals make it to glorious mountainous pools – fishy heaven. Only, their babies get swept back down the waterfall and out to sea, and the whole, exhausting process starts over again.

There are gorgeous slow motion shots of flying fish. Seeing these guys in real life is such a treat and wierder than you can ever imagine. But why not? Some birds swim don’t they? So why shouldn’t fish take to the air?

But crazier still is when the flying fish start getting together to make more flying fish. On camera, they cast their prodigious eggs and sperm onto a floating palm frond (which I suspect the film crew put there): so much that some of the fish start getting stuck in it and die. Yuck!

Flying fish eggs as sushi. Apparently some people like to eat this stuff. Photo by Roger Jones.

Imagine if you will, that when these fish start getting it on, they can produce enough gametes to sink a boat! The “behind the lens” section at the end of the programme showed a worried captain heaving a massive lump of sticky orange fish goo off the deck after the fish started spawning on his boat. The film crew make a hasty exit. (Also catch the hilarious scenes where the flying fish fly right into the camera team on their little boat).

This episode was especially poingnant for me, because I might have been involved in filming it. I’m not disgruntled that I didn’t get a chance to hob-knob with BBC film crews (although that would I’m sure have been a blast). But I’m miserable because the fish I wanted to take the BBC to film have apparently all gone.

For my PhD I studied I huge species of coral reef fish called the Napoleon wrasse or humphead wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus).

A fully grown male Napoleon wrasse. Photo by bananeman.

These are probably the biggest bony fish that live on tropical reefs and can grow up to nearly 2m long – it would tricky fitting one in a bath tub.

In this episode of Life we see snappers spawning in huge aggregations (these particular aggregations in the Caribbean attract whale sharks who come to feed on the resulting egg soup). Napoleon wrasse do this too. Or at least they used to at a site in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea where I studied their spawning aggregations.

Every day when the aggregation formed, I went a long to film these giant fish. Then later on, back in Cambridge, I studied the footage and identified individual fish returning to the site day after day, recognising them from the unique patterns of scribbles and lines each one has on its face. Napoleon wrasse, as I discovered, come stamped with an individual faceprint.

Napoleon wrasse scribbles, like a human fingerprint. Photo by Peter Nangle.

Then, after I’d finished my PhD, a few years ago now (that’s how long it takes to film these series) I was contacted by a member of the Life team who suggested we go to the remote island where I did my PhD to film the spawning wrasse once again – this time with proper cameras, and not the sony handicam I used for my research.

It was all looking good until an email came through saying he’d heard that the wrasse were all gone: rumour had it that they’d been taken away to be sold in expensive Asian restaurants, another subject I studied for my PhD.

After following the intimate love lives of individual, gorgeous fish, my Napoleon wrasse have all gone.

Napoleon wrasse eye. Photo by tetzi.

So, all in all, I love this episode of Life. It reminds me why I do what I do. The oceans are beautiful and staggering and still, after all these years that I’ve got to know them, they can take my breath away.

But they also can make me very, very sad.

At least there were some beautiful dancing dragons to help cheer me up.

Oh, and how could I forget. They showed footage of a fish called the sarcastic fringehead. For real.

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.

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

Tomorrow I’ll be attending the annual Galapagos Day talk at the Royal Geographical Society, hosted by the Galapagos Conservation Trust. I look forward to hearing what the guest speakers Sir David Attenborough, Andrew Marr and Felipe Cruz have to say about the status and future of the islands, including the underwater world.

And hopefully it won’t be all doom and gloom. Just last week, some good news shone through from Galapagos with the discovery of several new coral species including one that was thought to have been wiped out by the 1997-98 coral bleaching event.

Perhaps reefs are more resilient to rising temperatures and coral bleaching than we previously thought?

Bleaching coral inside the Galapagos Marine Reserve. David Jacobsen-Fried/Marine Photobank

Symbiotic algae living inside corals in the Galapagos are showing signs of thermal tolerance, thanks to studies since 1998 by Andrew Baker of the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science in Miami.

The 3-year Darwin Initiative study brought researchers to the northern Wolf and Darwin Islands for the first time since the 1970s.

Team leader Terry Dawson, from Southampton University, has plans to return to Galapagos on the trail of a gaggle of magnificent pelagic species – including whale sharks and hammerhead sharks.

Could it be that these and other marine migrants are cruising an oceanic highway across the eastern reaches of the Pacific, between Cocos Island off Costa Rica through to the Las Perlas and Coiba Islands in Panama and Malpelo Island off Columbia? Dawson and his team hope to find out.

You can follow up on the latest results of the Galapagos coral reef surveys in the journal Galapagos Research.