Wild Ocean Blue

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.

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.

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.