The oceans are places of wonder.
Blue Planet II showed us the beauty and extraordinary behaviour
of marine life whilst highlighting how fragile and threatened
our seas have become.
Now, as Blue Planet Live carries out
a health check on the world's oceans,
we are staying closer to home.
Our British seas are rich, varied and key to our island heritage,
but how are our lifestyles affecting them?
Whoa!
We'll meet the unsung heroes dedicated to protecting our waters
and the wildlife that relies on them.
If we don't look after nature, nobody else will.
And celebrate the scientists striving for solutions
to the challenges.
Oh!
Plus, we'll meet the crabs with a flair for style...
They're dressing up in seaweed as a means of camouflage. Yes.
..and delve into our very own deep-sea coral reefs.
This is the most important deep-sea coral, I think, in the whole world,
and this is just off Scotland.
So dip into our UK waters and see them like you've never
seen them before.
BOTH: Welcome to Blue Planet UK.
Hi, and welcome back to the beautiful St Abbs
on the east coast of Scotland.
Now, all week, Blue Planet Live teams are around the world
monitoring the state of the world's oceans,
but we are here focusing on our home patch -
what's living in British seas and how it's all doing.
But, Steve, it's not just what's in the sea, is it?
What are you looking at?
I'm looking along here at all the marine birds
and there's so many here.
You can see they've even painted the cliffs white.
Oh, yeah. Now, these cliffs, they're made of old volcanic rock
and they create all these ledges and nice little nooks and crannies
for the bird not just to be protected in, but also to nest in.
You think he's busy now? You come back May, June, July, August -
the place is going to be alive while they're all up on these rocks
here, all nested.
You can see a cormorant out there, enjoying itself, basking in the sun.
It's nonstop and they're not just here for the protection,
also for the fishing and these clear waters.
And that's right, the waters here are clear and they're clean,
and divers come from not just around the country
but around the world to enjoy this beautiful, rich marine life.
And with a long history of fishing, this little Scottish port
is all about the fish.
And there's plenty of those coming up on today's programme,
but that's not all.
We join the very first winter survey of Scotland's
whales and dolphins.
Sighting! Coming up!
Chris finds out about a fish that is both house-proud
and camera shy.
It wouldn't be uncommon for us to come back and find the cameras
face down... Right. ..in the seabed.
Because they've knocked it over? Because they knocked it over.
The towering cliffs of the Yorkshire coast are steeped in both
sea birds and history.
Gannets, guillemots and puffins
all harbour here throughout the summer months,
attracting visitors from across the nation.
And we discover how building on the seabed affects the creatures
that call it home.
Oh, my goodness. I can tell you that is a feisty lobster.
Now these pots are a dead giveaway that crabs and lobsters
are the heart of the fishing industry in St Abbs,
but that wasn't always the case.
The harbour of St Abbs was founded in 1885,
and for nearly 100 years, one fish was king.
The herring.
In those days, boats thronged our coastline all around Britain,
chasing vast shoals.
Young women would follow, earning eightpence an hour gutting
and sorting the fish.
In Scotland alone, 10,000 women earned their living this way.
Whole communities depended on this fish.
OLD VOICEOVER: Here's a drifter which has been out
in search of fish, and now it's returning to Stornoway
to unload the catch...
..which is a welcome sight.
So there are willing hands to get this slippery cargo on to the quay.
Catches would even make the news.
At dawn on a chilly autumn morning,
another herring drifter sails into port.
Its return marks the virtual end of the herring season.
And another bit of golden news about the silver harvest - a vessel
had come home to Yarmouth with a bigger catch than had ever
been recorded in 50 years.
But the good times didn't last.
Unfortunately, overfishing saw the demise
of the British herring fishery in the 1970s.
This year, landings from those usually well-stocked seas
around the Minches are down by 70%.
Only 50 boats are now catching herring -
half the strength of last year's fleet.
Stocks of herring have been so depleted
that these fishermen in the Clyde have imposed their own limits.
It means some of them only put to sea one day a week.
They're practically at the point of no return.
We have asked for a ban on all herring fishing for two to three
to even four years.
Now there are virtually no herring left in the North Sea at all.
Despite various conservation measures,
the herring population has never recovered.
Blue Planet UK went to the north-west coast of Scotland
to check out reports that may offer a ray of hope.
Alasdair Hughson is a high-end seafood supplier.
Last year, some of his scallop divers made a surprising discovery.
The seabed was not as they would normally see it.
The whole seabed was a carpet of green.
The herring had spawned in vast shoals, carpeting the sea floor
in a layer of eggs.
They were just amazed at the extent of this herring spawn
all over the seabed.
I've been diving around this area for over 30 years now and I've never
seen anything like this.
No-one knew whether this was a one-off event or if the herring
would return to spawn again,
so we sent marine cameramen Andy Jackson to Gairloch to see
if he could find out what the herring were up to this year,
and, if possible, film the actual spawning.
Find out on Friday how he got on.
It is great to hear that herring populations are recovering or seem
to be recovering, and it's not just here in Scotland.
There have been reports of them spawning in Cornwall as well.
Now, herring, it's a great news story for them,
but it's also a great news story for the animals that feed on them,
like minke whales,
and there have been more and more reports of sightings
here in Scottish waters.
And there may be another good news story, this time from Wales.
One of the world's rarest sharks, the angel shark, is on the verge
of being declared extinct for all sorts of reasons -
there's pollution, bycatch, habitat loss and disturbance,
but that might not be the end of the story.
At a museum in Swansea, researchers are on a marine mission to locate
one of the world's rarest fish.
The angel shark.
An angel shark is one of the most incredible species of shark
in our oceans.
It's a flat shark, which means it spends most of its time
on or near to the seabed.
This species used to be common across the East Atlantic
and Mediterranean Sea.
Over the last century, their numbers have plummeted and the species
is now classed as critically endangered.
There are few places around the world where they're regularly found.
The Canary Islands is one of the only remaining strongholds.
But now, signs are pointing to a forgotten pocket of resident
angel sharks that have been living off the Welsh coast,
unnoticed for decades.
When we were working on Angel Shark Project Canary Islands,
we started to see on social media some sightings
of angel sharks in Wales.
A surviving population of angel sharks would be a lifeline
for the species,
so Joanna and the team travelled to Wales to investigate...
..where they stumbled across a goldmine of potential information.
Members of the public.
We were actually in Barmouth, at a tackle shop, where the mother
of the tackle shop owner... And we were talking about angel sharks.
She says, "I know these.
"I saw them all the time. I've got a photo of one."
And she had the photograph, dated, timed, and it was her nephew
with an angel shark and we realised that there was possibly quite a lot
of information just stored in people's houses.
These days, it's illegal to catch an angel shark, but historic photos
and sightings can provide vital clues as to where to start looking
for this secretive species.
The idea of a travelling road show evolved
that called on people to come forward with their memories,
photos and combined community knowledge
of the angel shark.
I didn't recognise them as being a shark because they looked
more like a ray cos they were flatter.
They weren't my normal idea of what a shark would look like,
so it was nice to know that they are now starting to find
a little home near us.
As the day in Swansea draws to a close,
there's a surprise in store for Joanna and the team.
Amazing. Number one, what's your name?
Graham Maddick.
So who's in this photo?
Is this one you? That's me.
Did you catch him? Yourself? Yes. Rod and line? Rod and line.
Do you know what it was or...?
No. You didn't know what it was? I didn't have a clue.
All I knew, it was big.
I was told later on in the day
by a trawlerman that the fish was a monkfish,
so as far as I was concerned, it was a monkfish for the next 58 years
until I saw the article on the BBC browser page.
These photos are like gold dust to us.
They provide so much information.
That photo is actually a really important record
cos it's the first we've got from central Swansea,
so it was caught off Swansea pier in the 1960s,
so we're going to have to go and add another sighting to our map
and definitely look into the area further.
Would you look at that, Gillian?
It's not just on the Antiques Roadshow where you might find
something valuable in the attic.
That's right. Who'd have thought it?
And, of course, if you've got any evidence of angel sharks,
then the project would love to hear from you,
and all the details are on our website.
There's a really surprising number of species of shark found
in British waters.
And, you know, it's like an amazing experience
to be able to encounter them.
Sometimes you can actually swim with blue sharks at certain times
of the year off the coast of Cornwall,
and even if it's just catching a glimpse of a basking shark
from the coast path, just the tip of that fin reminds us how big
these animals are.
Megafauna visiting our shores.
And, you know, it's more than a buzz -
you can actually add to the science. That's right,
and there's a retired couple that are doing just that,
and before Chris headed off to Mexico,
he caught up with them.
I'm pleased to say that more and more of Britain's naturalists
are contributing to citizen science projects.
They're allowing us to learn a lot more, a lot more quickly,
about the wildlife that we love,
so, in its simplest form, we send in records of birds we see or plants
we find, normally in cosy environments,
perhaps our back garden.
But today, I've come to meet three people - Matt Doggett,
Sheilah and Martin Openshaw,
who are citizen science working in an environment
which is a little bit more hostile.
Today, we call it the Cruel Sea.
Sheilah, Martin and Matt, how did you meet?
How did you get together?
Because you come from very different walks of life.
Fuel engineer. Now you're in there, studying rays.
We're all scuba divers. I see. Yeah.
So we met through an interest in scuba diving and, more particularly,
through an interest in the marine life and Seasearch,
which is sort of monitoring the sea life along the coast of the UK.
He was meant for me to say go.
He behaved just like any other man,
didn't do as he was told!
During their monitoring,
Sheilah and Martin fell in love with the graceful undulate rays,
and they began to focus their research on them.
Their dedication to these rays has inspired a scientist
at Manchester University, who's using their findings to better
understand how the populations are doing off the Dorset coast.
You're contributing significantly to some what we call citizen science.
You're gathering data on these undulate rays, which is being sent
off for analysis and everyone's learning a lot about it.
Yeah, it's happened almost accidentally.
Tell me about your swabbing,
because you're collecting material from them directly as well.
Well, we talked to Sam about a methodology and she said,
"I'll need the DNA."
We said, "Well, what do we do? Do we go and say, 'Please, Mr Ray, can you open your mouth while I stick
"this cotton bud in?'"
And we ended up with a bit of stuff that you scrub pans with
on a plastic tube and then we just rub it down its back,
but what we found was that they were...
..they were bending the other way and they were going, it was, like,
"Oh, do it again! Oh, do it again!"
So this is ray back massage? This is ray massage!
But your combined passion is not all about these rays.
There's another species you're interested in
and, Matt, this is black bream,
and I know nothing of black bream,
so tell me about this fish.
That's right. I mean, black bream is an amazing species,
And it's something that most divers have never seen,
never heard of, yet each spring,
tens if not hundreds of thousands of these fish arrive
off our shores to spawn, build huge nests,
completely changing the seabed.
What they like is bedrock covered by a thin layer of gravel or sand,
and the male fish will push that away with their tails and shove
it with their mouths and create these big, wide-open spaces of
bare rock, which they then keep very clean.
They're very meticulous about their nest.
They like to keep it absolutely spick and span.
The other problem is, though, is that black bream are very territorial.
Because they're so meticulous about their nests,
they hate foreign objects,
so it wouldn't be uncommon for us to come back and find the cameras
face down... Right. ..in the seabed.
Because they've knocked it over? Because they knocked it over.
We mount these things...
Five minutes after you left. Yeah.
We mount them on two, three kilos of lead
and they'll shove those out the way and get rid of them.
So, has the thing that you've uncovered,
identifying the spawning areas,
how long it takes, productivity and all that sort of thing,
is that able to influence future conservation efforts when it comes
to these sorts of species?
We've had a very good response to the project from anglers and some
anglers are e-mailing us to actually say,
you know, I'm going to start putting the male fish back now when I catch
them so they can go back to their nests.
So what's next, then?
You're on your rays and your black bream.
Any more plans for more good citizen science?
The thing I want to find is, where do the rays lay their eggs?
If you walk along the beach,
you find these things called mermaid's purses,
which are actually the eggs for rays and cat sharks,
but there are very few reports of where ray eggs
are found underwater.
Now, we've got a site that we've got 200 rays on.
Now, where... But you never see any eggs?
We've never seen the eggs underwater,
so we're going to try and find them.
By the sounds of things, then,
retirement's just going to get busier and busier.
I don't think it can get any busier!
It's every day, you know,
there's another idea, another thing we could go and do, something else
we could go and look at.
Well, thanks so much for all of you taking the afternoon off
to tell us about this extraordinary,
absolutely extraordinary stuff.
Well, look at that.
It just goes to show how valuable we can all be in increasing our
knowledge and understanding of UK marine life and I, for one,
love a good news story. Absolutely.
Well, all week, Blue Planet Live have been carrying out
a health check on the world's oceans,
and there's some species that are especially useful
in measuring the state of the seas.
That's right, and orcas - or killer whales - are just one of them,
and when the team headed out to Iceland to try and film them,
we got a special glimpse of what was going on behind the scenes.
The seas west of Iceland are one of the best places in the world
to find killer whales.
Fish shelter in the fjords,
and this is where the whales come to hunt.
Blue Planet Live researcher Ellis Roberts
is meeting marine scientist Filipa Samarra.
She's been studying the effects of pollution on the whales.
But to gather data, first, you have to find your whale.
I've seen them once before,
which was an absolutely amazing experience.
But they're so elusive, you just never know.
They've only got two days and today, wind chill is minus seven.
Unfortunately the conditions are too rough to go out to sea.
But we've just had a stroke of luck -
Filipa had a phone call about 15 minutes ago saying that a pod
of killer whales have been spotted just off the tip
of the peninsula that we're heading to now.
Well, we've just arrived on the peninsula where we had the
killer whale sighting reported.
We're with Alexa, a colleague of Filipa's,
who got the call through about an hour ago.
Haven't seen them yet.
Alexa managed to spot them so we're just waiting for them
to come up again.
Despite the conditions,
the team's patience is rewarded with a sighting.
We have killer whales.
I wasn't even looking for it, then,
and just behind, the huge black dorsal fin just went...
But it was such a fleeting glimpse,
they didn't manage to capture it on camera.
Two of us saw them, so not going crazy, but they're just too far away
and the conditions are too rough to make them out with the camera,
so on the boat tomorrow, hopefully we'll have better luck then.
Day two, and hopes are high.
We woke up this morning to this.
It's like an absolute mill pond here today.
When the sea is smooth, it's much easier to spot a whale.
The telltale signs are a dorsal fin or a breath from the blowhole.
An adult killer whale has a huge appetite,
and salmon, herring and seal are all on the menu.
However, little is known about their range,
so they can be difficult to find.
After seven hours' searching, and with the light fading,
the boat has to turn back.
So we've been out on the water for hours now. And, um...
..still no luck.
Filipa, is that normal?
Actually, we used to see them here very regularly
and it's only recently,
because of the herring changing its distribution,
the whales are found further and further offshore,
and it's much, much rarer to see them inside these fjords.
We knew it was a long shot. They haven't seen them in two weeks.
It wasn't our day.
We got our hopes up this morning.
You know, woke up, was flat calm, beautiful, but...
..yeah, wasn't our day.
Trying to get a shot of a creature as elusive as a killer whale
is always a challenge.
Although unsuccessful this time,
the trip still provides valuable data for Filipa.
Killer whales are an apex predator,
and their movements are a clue to the health of the seas.
It might surprise you to know that we have resident killer whales
living off our coasts as well,
but it's with a heavy heart that I say this
because the populations here haven't bred for decades
and that's because pollutants in the water
are disrupting their reproductive cycles.
These pollutants really affect marine mammals
because they're stored in the fats and, of course, marine mammals
need their fats in order to stay warm in the water.
The Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust are keeping a close eye
on how these populations are doing.
They're monitoring them from strandings on beaches
and sightings out at sea as well.
But what isn't known is how many whales and dolphins
actually live here, especially during the winter months.
Now that is changing and the Blue Planet UK cameras
were invited to join them on an early research trip.
Tobermory Harbour, on the Isle of Mull,
is a natural bay that provides shelter
from the worst that the North Atlantic throws at it.
But it's also the base for a very special vessel.
The Silurian.
Since 2002, this boat has sailed the Hebridean seas,
surveying marine life for the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust.
It's a really special part of the world
because we have this oceanic shelf
and a lot of the currents upwelling there bring rich nutrients up,
so there's a lot of important feeding
for the whales, the dolphins in this area
and they're really key indicators of the health of the area as well.
There are 23 species of cetacean that can be found in the Hebrides.
Coming up!
That's a quarter of the world's species.
The Trust monitor trends and changes in their populations.
This is a dedicated, long-term project,
and the researchers are helped on every trip by groups of volunteers.
Sighting, harbour porpoise.
Harbour porpoise.
300 degrees. 300.
To provide a year-round picture of these animals,
the team started winter surveying for the first time this January.
But surveying at this time of year has its problems.
It's a bit difficult because we've got some whitecaps on the water,
which means that it's harder to see a splash from a dolphin
or even a blow as they come up to breathe.
To combat this, the team uses an underwater audio recorder
called a hydrophone.
This records a constant stream of sound,
so even if the team cannot see the animals,
they'll be able to hear them.
So you can see here,
due to the very distinct waveform that you see here,
it's also said heard at a particular frequency,
so you can tell by this spike here
that it's definitely a harbour porpoise.
Since 2002, the Silurian has recorded over 30,000 animals.
Where possible, the team photograph the dorsal fins and tail flukes,
allowing them to identify and track the movements of individuals.
This here is a picture of Knobble the minke whale.
So he's a bit of a local celebrity.
We've seen him for 16 years in a row
and, yeah, he was seen again this year.
So shows you how important the Hebrides are for minke whales
that he's coming back year after year.
This long-term monitoring has also revealed changes
in the species that are seen here.
At the start of our surveys we didn't have many sightings
of common dolphins at all.
In fact, in 2004 we didn't have a sighting of common dolphins.
And our sightings increased by 20 times.
We do know that the water temperatures in the Hebrides
have risen by half a degree. For common dolphins
that means that their northern limit might just be extending upwards.
But it's not just the temperature of the sea that has changed over time.
Our seas are becoming increasingly noisy, busy,
from increased shipping
through to fishing activity, and that's important
for whales and dolphins, for us to understand that,
because they rely on sound to navigate, to communicate,
or finding where the fish are to eat.
It's research like this that the Trust hopes will help create
safer seas for our Hebridean cetaceans.
Their data has already helped establish
several marine protected areas, with more in the pipeline.
Whales and dolphins are really important
cos they're right at the top of the food chain.
They're what we call an umbrella species
so if we can put measures in place to protect them
we can protect everything that sits beneath them as well.
You know, it's so amazing
watching all the fishermen getting on their business in the harbour
and the gulls picking their way in between that.
You've got all the boats going on over there,
I've got all the birds over here. There's hundreds of herring gulls,
look, on that ridge - it's so pretty and tranquil.
This is a pretty special place.
I feel doubly lucky because recently I got to pick apart the history
of another huge Mecca for birds.
Bempton Cliffs is home to the UK's largest mainland seabird colony.
Between March and October, around half a million birds
gather here to breed and raise their young.
Gannets, guillemots and puffins
all harbour here throughout the summer months,
attracting visitors from across the nation.
SEABIRDS CALL
Rewind 150 years, and the birds were attracting attention
for a very different reason.
Their eggs were being harvested in a practice known as climming.
Men would hang from ropes to harvest the seabird eggs
with nothing but hats filled with straw to protect them.
It was a local tradition with the eggs being both eaten
and sold as souvenirs.
I'm meeting with RSPB volunteer Alan...
How are you? Very well, thank you. Lovely to see you.
..who has researched the history surrounding the cliffs.
Climming is climbing the cliffs in local dialect.
Ah! So they called themselves
the climmers. And the eggs that were most collected
were the large eggs of the guillemot.
But each egg is individually patterned
so they were highly collectible.
But there's something else that had a big impact on the colony,
around 1830, when the first steamer pleasure boats arrived
at Scarborough. Then the so-called sportsmen of the age
would come from all areas of the UK,
charter the boat and bring it under the cliff here
and shoot the birds out of the sky.
Literally thousands of them.
This bombardment must have
really put the colony under a lot of stress.
Of course it did. Yes, tremendous stress.
It wasn't just the seabird colony that was devastated
by the mass shootings.
Reverend HF Barnes-Lawrence became deeply concerned
by what was happening to both the seabirds
and the reputation of the community.
He gathered support
and formed The Association for the Protection of Sea Birds.
He contacted the local MP, Christopher Sykes,
and together, they put together a bill
that Christopher Sykes would put before Parliament,
and on the third reading of that bill,
it was enshrined in law in 1869.
This prevented the birds from being shot during their breeding season,
and it was a milestone for wildlife protection,
being one of the very first of its kind in the UK.
However, climming continued.
But there was a shift in attitudes towards the seabirds
and the practice was made illegal in 1954.
SEABIRDS CALL
And 50 years ago, the RSPB started managing the site,
and now the seabird colony is going from strength to strength.
Without the dedication of people past and present,
the seabird colony wouldn't be thriving today.
Quite a spectacular view of not just seabirds
but the Yorkshire coast. Oh, my word!
From the Reverend Barnes-Lawrence in the 19th century
to the current warden, Dave Aitken.
What species have we got down there?
We have got a huge number of guillemots today, and then
some of their closely related cousins, we've got razorbills.
Got gannets, we've got fulmars,
and then even out to sea we've got a few kittiwakes today.
What sort of numbers are you expecting at the peak?
At the height of the season there can be in excess of
half a million seabirds on this stretch of coast. Half a million.
Yep, and you can look down this stretch of coast
and it can look like a seabird snowglobe.
Aww, that paints such a nice picture!
You can see them already courting and fighting,
and that's just going to get more intense, isn't it?
Yep, this is the tip of the iceberg. Wow.
The colony depends on the sea for its food,
but diving for fish has always been fraught with danger.
Fishing nets were historically one of the biggest problems,
being almost invisible underwater.
Hundreds of birds were caught and drowned in them each year.
Rex Harrison has worked these waters his whole life,
but a few years ago, he decided enough was enough.
He joined with local fishermen to find ways of reducing their impact
on the seabird population, starting with their nets.
This is a ghost net.
I don't know, you can't see it in the sun.
It's deadly to anything that's in the sea.
Instead of having 200 or 300 yards of this stuff,
we've got that cut down now to 20, 25 yards a boat.
We've gone to, like, a black netting now
which the birds can see.
The net that we will be using this year will be 90-odd percent that.
We monitor the net all the time it's in the sea.
It's never left alone.
If we do get a bird in it, we can release it within minutes, alive.
Another thing is that on some of the nets had white corks,
which are like this. This white cork,
when it's floating in the water
it looks like a line of guillemots and razorbills feeding.
So was that attracting them to the net?
So we've actually started to change
the different coloured corks on the net.
The other thing it's working well with is now we've got mobile phones
and we're talking to each other,
we can monitor those birds among ourselves,
especially in the morning, and we pass on information to each other.
"Don't bother coming here. We're coming back in to the bay.
"There's too many birds, there's too much feed,
"we're keeping well clear."
Thanks to new fishing methods adopted here in Filey,
bird deaths have dramatically reduced by around 98%
from over 700 to just 15 a year per boat,
and each boat is still catching the same number of fish.
The fishermen in Filey want to make the last, the littlest impact.
Just target the sea trout,
and everything else we want to eliminate from getting in the nets.
Why are you making all this effort, Rex?
If we don't look after nature, nobody else will.
My grandchildren said we can't carry on like this,
and that was one of the key things.
You should be so proud.
The changes that you're making
not just to restore and keep the birds here
but changing the way that the people in Filey think.
No, no, it wants to go further.
We want to change the way people think around the world.
The story of Bempton Cliffs is an inspirational tale
all about changes in attitude, right from the Reverend
up to the modern day, with people like Rex
adapting their practices to save the seabirds.
And with the number of birds nesting on the cliffs increasing every year,
I'm sure it's going to be a story set to continue
for many years to come.
SEABIRDS CALL
Steve. A-ha!
You were looking at the tradition of collecting seabird eggs,
but there's another Victorian tradition
that's gone out of fashion, and that's...
..eating whelks. A-ha, whelks!
Now, you know, I've never had a whelk myself,
but what I understand is after they've been pickled
they're very vinegary and very tough to chew.
But nonetheless they were still a Victorian delicacy
and around London they used to sell 'em in wheelbarrows,
would you believe, and everyone would have them
after they'd had a night out on the gin,
almost like a Victorian doner kebab.
I love that!
Well, they may not be to everyone's taste any more,
but they really have a fascinating life history,
as The One Show's Miranda Krestovnikoff found out.
We often find British beaches
littered with a weird lifeless spongy debris.
You might have seen these rather strange-looking clumps
lying on our beaches, especially after storms,
and wondered what on Earth they are. This is known as a sea wash ball,
because back in the day, sailors used to use them as sponges.
But it is in fact the beginning of a story
of a rather unusual creature from beneath our waves.
Using a tube-shaped organ called a siphon,
whelks sniff out their prey.
With razor-sharp teeth, they can bore holes in a barnacle shell
and suck out their insides.
And with this large muscular foot,
they can pin down and suffocate cockles.
But it takes up to six years for whelks to reach this size,
and life for them begins in the comfort of the spongy sea wash ball.
Capturing the life cycle of the whelk in the wild
would be impossible. But at Bangor University,
Professor Chris Richardson and his team have been breeding them.
This offered us the chance to film some remarkable whelk behaviour
for the very first time.
With no way of predicting
the exact moment the females would start spawning,
we rigged a time-lapse camera over the university's whelk tanks.
And our patience paid off.
Over the course of a couple of hours several female whelks came together
to spawn, creating the characteristic sea wash ball.
Three months on, the egg capsules we filmed being laid
are almost ready to hatch.
Chris and his team have rigged a camera to a microscope
so I can take a closer look.
I can count the baby snails through the wall of the egg capsule.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, maybe eight in there.
So how many eggs would have actually been laid inside that capsule?
Something like 1,000, perhaps, depending on the size
of the female and the size of the capsule itself.
So if the female has laid around about 1,000 eggs
in that particular egg capsule and we've only counted eight,
what's happened to the other 992? Where have they gone?
When the female lays the eggs in the capsule,
those eggs or nurse cells provide the nutrition - food -
for the developing juvenile wells.
And so you end up with just a few developing
and then feeding on those nurse cells.
After months of patience, the team eventually captured the moment
when a whelk began emerging from the egg capsule -
a chance for us to see for the very first time
what happens when a whelk comes into the world.
And this is what emerges from that egg capsule,
and it's absolutely tiny, it's barely a millimetre long.
But it really is a miniature version of an adult whelk.
If you look at an adult whelk shell,
you'll see this tiny infant shell right at the tip,
because as it grows the shell is laid down in whirls.
But when you're this size, you're going to be on the menu
for all sorts of different predators.
If this tiny whelk is lucky,
it's going to grow to many thousands of times its size
in its lifetime and become a formidable predator
like this one here.
What extraordinary little animals!
And whelks are even helping us to understand
how our activity is affecting the sea floor.
St Abbs is home to an extraordinary laboratory that studies how
human offshore development affects the creatures that live there.
Wow, this looks all very hi-tech.
Very, very impressive.
This contraption uses high-voltage wires to recreate
the electromagnetic fields experienced by the animals
living near power cables that run along the seabed.
There's lots of tanks bubbling around here
and I can see whelk eggs in there. Can we take a look at those? Yes.
Wow, they're beautiful. So why do whelks
make such good study subjects for this experiment?
They're species where eggs could be laid on cables
and they don't move. And the results do show
that there is a higher rate of defective eggs.
So we're not getting quite as successful a hatch
as when they are not in an electromagnetic field.
So whelk eggs don't move. but lots of seabed creatures do.
And in fact things like crabs and lobsters
can navigate huge distances.
And I just noticed you have a lobster in there. Yes.
Oh, my goodness. I can tell you that is a feisty lobster.
They'll have an internal compass. And what we've found is
that is impacted by these subsea power cables
and they are drawn to these cables like magnets. Wow.
Disorientated lobsters aren't the only species
stressed by human activity.
We're building more and more on the seabed
and in St Abbs, scientists are studying the effect that
that's having on our marine life.
So these nice relaxed hermit crabs right now are what we're looking at.
At the moment. What are we going to do to them?
So we're interested in the effect of pile-driving vibrations.
Pile-driving is associated with the construction of offshore wind farms.
It basically involves hitting a steel pole into the seabed.
So this experiment here is trying to replicate that.
A laptop has a recording of the pile-driving
which runs through some amplifiers
and from the amplifiers it goes to this shaker table here.
So basically you're about to rock their world.
That's what we're about to do. OK!
PLAYS RECORDING OF PILE-DRIVING
So they were sitting still before. We're seeing increased activity.
The hermit crabs are sensing the vibration,
they're wondering what's going on, basically. Is there danger nearby?
They want to get out of this area to an area that's less disturbed.
The interesting question is if you were to expose them multiple times,
does that response diminish? Do they get used to it over time?
And that's what we're trying to find out with these experiments here.
Is it a stressful experience to them? How do you measure that?
If a crab's happy to be in one place, it will stay in one place.
If it's not, it will start moving around,
looking for somewhere else to be.
But there's a range of other things that you can look at.
You can look at the flicking rate of antennules,
between the eyes of the crab.
The rate of the flicking will reduce if the crab's stressed.
Should we give them a break and turn it off?
It's really fascinating to see their reaction,
but what is the implication in the real world?
What we're researching here
might go towards mitigation for construction such as wind farms
and offshore industry,
but also just learning how animals cope with these,
and hopefully use that information to help protect our oceans and seas.
Well, that's certainly going to
make me think differently when I look out to sea.
Now let's have a look at some of the photos you've been taking
of what inspires you about our British coastline.
Thank you for those stunning photos.
Weren't they great? Weren't they just?
And tomorrow we're going to be down on my home patch in Kent,
looking at the coastlines along there.
We have only just begun to dip our toes into
what's wonderful about British waters, so don't miss it.
Tomorrow on Blue Planet UK...
Go on.
..I take my family on a mission of prehistoric proportions.
That's a good 'un, innit?
Chris gets focused as he meets photographer Kirsty Andrews.
Hiding underneath those waves are just a whole cast
of the most amazing creatures.
We get under the skin of a festering fatberg.
It's the biggest one I've seen. It's probably about here.
And our largest bird of prey is thriving on the Isle of Mull.