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.

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.