Wild Ocean Blue

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.

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.

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

Last night I attended this year’s Galapagos Day talk at the Royal Geographical Society in London.

And what with this being the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and 150 years since he completed On the Origin of Species, it is obviously quite an exciting year for the group of islands he made so very famous.

Satellite image of the Galapagos Islands

Guest speakers were Sir David Attenborough (who sat all evening next to a beautiful giant photograph of a seahorse!) and Felipe Cruz (from the Charles Darwin Foundation). In the chair was Andrew Marr.

In an animated half-hour discussion, these three reflected on what makes Galapagos so special and the problems the archipelago faces today.

Sir David spoke of how Galapagos – thanks to its geographic isolation – is ‘a geological world without humanity’. Human visitors to the islands are alien observers, perhaps like no-where else on earth. And the archipelago is all the more magical for it.

In front of a packed audience, virtually all who have visited Galapagos, the speakers tackled the thorny issue of who should be allowed to go to the hallowed archipelago.

Cruz believes that restricted numbers of high-paying tourists is the only way to make Galapagos tourism work. Forget huge cruise ships. Sailing boats are the way to go.

Marr was concerned this would cut out the young, idealistic people – like Darwin himself, perhaps – for who Galapagos could be a great source of inspiration.

Cruz’s solution was to offer scholarships to the brainiest kids.

Unfortunately, Sir David admitted, ‘we can’t all go to Galapagos’. What’s most important is protecting the islands.

All three agreed on the importance of Lonesome George – the last known Pinta Island tortoise, a subspecies of the giant Galapagos tortoise – as a Galapagos icon for us all to reflect on. With George we are staring extinction in the eye.

I was thrilled when Andrew Marr steered the conversation towards the bits of the Galapagos that lie underwater.

Being a barren volcanic outcrop, everything on Galapagos comes from the sea, Sir David told us. The sea birds eat fish, their guano fertilises the plants, and so on.

‘So, if something goes wrong in the ocean, Galapagos is heading for catastrophe,’ Sir David said, reminding us that it’s not just the local issues that must be addressed but the global problems of climate change and ocean acidification.

Marr revealed his love of the oceans, when he admitted that the recent studies predicting that the world’s coral reefs may be wiped out within a few decades, was ‘the most depressing piece of journalism I’ve ever read’.

Sir David echoed some ideas I wrote about in my book Poseidon’s Steed, mentioning a paradox of our modern world, namely, that we know more about the natural world than ever before, and yet we are also more cut off from nature than we ever have been.

If we make the mistake of thinking that we are independent of the natural world, then we are heading, very swiftly, for disaster.

I couldn’t agree more.

Galapagos marine iguana

Then, on a lighter note, the speakers were asked by a member of the audience to name their favourite Galapagos species. Marr chose the boobies. Cruz picked Galapagos petrels. Sir David picked the marine iguanas, because there is ‘nothing like them in the world’

‘Except for the spitting,’ added Marr to a tittering audience.

‘It’s a nasal discharge!’ Sir David corrected him.

In detail: