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.

Now that I’m back from snowy adventures in the Swiss Alps (under the guise of giving a graduate seminar on science communication – not bad at all) I must tell you about the latest episode of the BBC’s Life series. Because this week they went underwater again, and it was brilliant.

Centre of attention were the invertebrates, a crazy diverse group of ocean critters that get up to all sorts of tricks and never fail to amaze.

Among them were big-brained Australian Giant Cuttlefish.

Giant australian cuttlefish. Photo by Jacob Bridgeman

We watch on as the huge males (up to half a metre long plus tentacles) attempt to woo the opposite sex by putting on a flashy colour display and getting in raucous fights with each other over who’s boss.

Less well-endowed cuttlefish males adopt a very different strategy for passing on their genes to the next generation: cross-dressing. Not very macho, admitedly, but it does the job nicely. By mimicking female colouration, the little males can wander into the mating arena without being chased off. The dominant male thinks he’s lucked out with another female showing up, while in fact the intruding male gets a chance to nip in and mate with the real female. Clever, eh?

Sticking with the cephalopods, we also revisit the Giant Pacific Octopus we met in the first taster episode.

Giant Pacific Octopus. Photo by Schristia

The female lays thousands of eggs inside a cave, tending them like a conscientious farmer tends his crops. It’s such a gargantuan effort for the female that as soon as her young have hatched, she dies. But now we discover that the story of the octopus doesn’t end there.

We get a glimpse of the gruesome reality of what goes on beneath the waves when a giant Sunflower Star (a huge variety of starfish) arrives on the scene – sped up by time-lapse photography – crawls into the cave and drags out the dead mother octopus using thousands of sucky tube feet. Sunflower Star plus a gang of other scavengers swarm over the dead body getting a good feed. It’s not pretty, but it is important, otherwise the oceans would soon fill up with dead octopodes lying about the place.

Sunflower Star. Photo by Ed Bierman

Scavenging echinoderms also make an appearance in an extraordinary Antarctic scene (you can watch this clip outside the UK). The time-lapse photography is simply stunning, as we watch the sea floor crawling with colourful starfish (and rather terrifying three-metre carnivorous worms). All very pleasant until we find out what brought them there: a dead baby seal. But like I said, the world needs its carrion-eaters, scavengers and recyclers to clear things up for us.

In this underwater episode of Life we also see jellyfish eating jellyfish, peep at some on the invertebrate wonders of the coral reefs (including boxer crabs – so cool!), and watch on as herds of spiny Spider Crabs gather together by the thousand to moult and, pairing up, they tumble across the floor in a tight mating clinch.

And I’m now convinced that I don’t ever want to find myself amid a gang of Humbolt squid. If ever there was a creature in the ocean to be a bit wary of, then these are most definitely them.

A razor-sharp, flesh-ripping beak and 70,000 hooks on each one: that’s quite enough to put me off. And it seems they are very clever beings, communicating with flashes of red across their bodies.

Humbolt Squid. Photo by MBARI 2006

But I would like to go diving beneath the Antarctic sea ice. Hang on for the making-of segment at the end of the episode to find out how the film crew took the astonishing footage of the starfish scavengers. An enormous drill makes a tunnel through eight-feet of ice, opening up an eerie blue doorway for the divers to plunge through to another world, somewhere I would certainly like to visit.

And so, once again, the BBC have gathered together some eye-popping footage that serves to remind us just how wonderful, diverse and surprising the oceans can be.

Thank you BBC.

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.