The oceans are places of wonder.
Blue Planet 2 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.
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.
Hello, and welcome to what is our final Blue Planet UK. What a week!
What a week, indeed. And whilst we've been here,
there's been teams all around the world checking in on the state
of our oceans on Blue Planet Live, but for us, it's been what's
going on here and looking into more detail about our own UK marine life.
That's right. It's a real amazing place.
Now, it's not just about the wildlife,
it's about our connection with the oceans,
and we've come back to Scotland, to St Abbs,
on the south east coast, because this is an area that is
steeped in a rich history of fishing. So much of it.
And even just round the corner here is the St Abbs Lighthouse,
and that was built right on the edge, and the idea was to protect
the ships from the cliffs that are so often in fog.
Nowadays, these lighthouses are automated,
but back in the day, the lighthouse keepers had this really privileged
access, a special connection with the oceans, as we'll find out later.
I was a lighthouse keeper from 1976 till 1992.
You'd see things that other people don't see.
A wonderful feeling, to be associated with the sea like that.
Also today, we unlock the secrets of the deep at Edinburgh University.
We're actually looking at an area probably around 1,500 metres,
so that's 1.5km deep.
Chris reveals his personal connection to the coast.
I like black and white birds, simple.
And many of our seabirds are black and white,
so things like Arctic tern. What a shape!
And, in a world exclusive, Blue Planet UK brings you a sight
not witnessed in our waters for 50 years.
A great wall of herring going round and round me, like a dark shadow.
It's fantastic.
St Abbs is famed for its clear waters and great visibility,
and one of the creatures that you might come across
in the shallows around here is the snake pipefish.
Now, these fish aren't great swimmers, but they can swim
forwards and backwards, which is quite a neat trick.
Now, the numbers have been booming in recent years, which sounds like
good news, but it has implications for the seabird colonies.
You see, snake pipefish have rigid, bony structures,
and it makes it difficult for young seabirds to swallow them,
so they're not always the perfect food.
Now, pipefish are related to another creature that people believe have
almost mythical qualities, and Blue Planet UK went down to Devon
to meet a man who's dedicated his life to them.
I remember the very first time I saw a seahorse in the wild.
Absolutely amazing.
I mean, they are one of these creatures that defies
all the rules and regulations.
They're supposed to be a fish, they are actually a true fish,
but they have everything that is non-fishlike.
The most famous aspect of seahorses is the male getting pregnant.
And when he actually gives birth, he gives birth in a flurry,
and it's a really quick flurry, and it can be over in seconds.
As soon as they're born, that's it, they're gone. They're on their own.
There's no parental care whatsoever.
In fact, the male just disappears back down to the sea bed.
Not concerned any more.
People come up to me and they say,
"We don't have seahorses here, do we?
"They're a tropical fish, aren't they? They can't live here."
And I say, "No." There are more seahorses living in cold water than
there are in tropical waters.
If you take, for instance, somewhere like Studland Bay in Dorset,
every year, there are thousands of people visiting that beach.
It's not very deep, the water.
It's probably two, three metres deep at the best.
And yet, right by their feet, in amongst the sea grass,
there's seahorses.
We've got these two amazing species here.
We've got the spiny seahorse,
and we've got the short-snouted seahorse.
And they are literally right round the British Isles,
up to the Shetland Islands.
Seahorses have this very,
very unique fingerprint on either side of the head, so we can
identify individual seahorses, from dots and lines all over their heads.
Having seen so many in the wild now,
I truly believe each individual seahorse has its own personality,
not maybe the way humans have, but some of them are really bold.
They'll sit there and they'll say, "Who are you?" sort of thing.
And other ones shy down. You've got to be really careful with them.
They have this ability to change colour, very much like cuttlefish.
If they're stressed, they go a really dark colour, really black,
if they're courting, they could go white,
they can go light colours, they can go yellow.
So, the colour depends on the mood that they're actually in.
Their eyesight is amazing. They can see in full colour,
just as well as you and I can.
It's no coincidence that seahorses are found on
so many coats of arms and emblems,
because they are this mystical sort of looking creature.
In Chinese language, seahorse actually means "dragon's child,"
so they have this lovely sort of connection to dragons,
even in Chinese language.
They are a passion, purely because they're so unusual.
We think we know everything about them, but we don't.
We've literally just scratched the surface about seahorses.
It would get boring if we knew all the answers about them,
but we don't.
How beautiful were those seahorses? I love seahorses.
And do you know what's really amazing is that there's
all sorts of species found all around the world,
and they're often associated with this sort of thing.
This is a piece of coral that was found for scientific research, but
I want you to guess, Steve, where this coral might have come from.
Well, coral's coral.
You're thinking Australia, tropics, that kind of thing.
I was hoping you were going to say that! You're wrong.
Argh! This is actually from UK waters. Can you believe that?
It's a cold water specialist,
but not just that - it was found 200 metres deep.
And this species of coral will create habitats for loads
and loads of other species, and to find out more about them,
I went to Edinburgh University to meet the team
who are unlocking the secrets of the deep.
Sea creatures at home amongst the coral beds.
But not in the ocean.
In a lab, where Murray Roberts studies them.
Many of the specimens under investigation here
were gathered on an expedition of deep waters off the west coast
of Scotland, exploring life at depths of up to 1.5km.
The team use a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV,
fitted with robotic arms to collect their finds.
And Murray has hours of fascinating footage.
You're about to launch it, is that right?
It's being launched at the moment. You'll see the splashdown
just in a second. There we go. That's it. Underwater.
And this is the start of its journey now, down to the deep-water
coral habitats that are hundreds
of metres beneath the ship.
And the really exciting bit is that we'll see things on the
sea floor that have never been seen before.
Absolutely nobody's laid eyes on them?
No-one's ever seen these deep sea areas before.
So this is almost like exploring outer space, but this is our planet.
This is our planet, and this is just off our back yard.
This is the deep sea off Scotland. Touchdown.
This is touchdown, and we've landed right onto one of these
deep-water coral reefs.
So, what you can see is a whole colony of deep-water coral.
It looks like a tropical coral reef. This is lophelia, is it?
This is lophelia. This is the coral that makes all the big
reef structures in the North Atlantic, so you can see
that same really complicated skeleton that makes up the coral,
and that's the structure that all these other species use as a home.
That is a mind-blowingly huge structure.
I mean, it is actually genuinely quite exciting to see
this species in its natural habitat.
This is the most important deep sea coral, I think, in the whole world.
Really? And look at it.
We normally associate coral with, like, tropical reefs,
needing lots of sunlight.
How on Earth is this species surviving down there with
no light at all? There's no light, but if you look really closely,
you can see tiny little particles that are flowing past the corals.
The corals grow into the water currents,
and they feed from the food in the water currents.
They feed from tiny plankton, minute shrimp, little plant cells
called phytoplankton that are moving past these corals.
You can really see, it's like a thick soup of nutrients,
I suppose, just all flowing past the coral structure. It's exactly that.
The coral itself is also creating habitat, presumably,
for all kinds of species. Yes, the skeletons the corals grow,
when they die off quite naturally, they remain intact
and it's that structure that's a city beneath the sea
for the other animals to latch onto, and find a place to live.
From the footage alone, it's hard to get a sense of scale,
but Murray has a specimen picked from the sea bed which really
puts things into perspective.
Let me just get the lid off here and show you this. Oh!
That is smelly! But, my goodness me! Look at this.
This is the deep sea red crab. Very abundant in the North Atlantic.
Look at the size of this.
I'm going to put it back because we need to keep it
in the preservative, which doesn't smell too great!
Yeah, that is pretty powerful! Do you know what really strikes me
about that is I would normally think something
that lives in the deep sea, something that lives in the
dark and cold water would grow very slowly,
and getting to that size would be quite an achievement.
This is one of the surprises.
The deep oceans of the world are actually quite productive,
because they're tightly coupled to the surface ocean,
and the surface ocean in the North Atlantic,
where that plankton is growing, is very, very dynamic.
That food is focused down in these coral areas really quickly.
The cold water reef makes a home for a huge
number of species at various depths.
Octopus and Chimaera, or rabbitfish.
Murray's team went even further into the depths,
reaching the Logachev Mounds.
The landscape here starts to get eerily sparse.
But it's not without its surprises.
Seamounts are underwater extinct volcanos.
Right. And this is west of Scotland.
We're actually looking at an area probably around 1,500m deep,
so that's 1.5km deep, and we've found hundreds
if not thousands of these egg cases on the side of the seamount.
And here is one of them.
It's an extraordinary sight, 30cm long.
So, what species is this, now that you've got this back in the lab?
Have you been able to ID it?
Yes, it's called Bathyraja, this particular deep-water skate.
And they're laying their eggs 1.5km deep,
where the sea water is particularly rich in oxygen.
We think that's really important
for the development of the embryos inside these egg cases.
We think, as part of climate change, the oxygen levels in the water
are going to drop, and that could be bad news for this skate species.
They may seem like alien landscapes,
but what we do directly affects these habitats.
Since the Industrial Revolution,
we have massively increased the level of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere, and how that affects sea life
is difficult to illustrate, but I have some help.
Laurence has this really neat experiment where a rubber tube
and a beaker can actually shed light on the whole thing,
so, Laurence, tell me what I'm supposed to do.
Yes, so this beaker here represents our ocean.
So, we can use this little tube, and by blowing into the tube,
you will increase the carbon dioxide in our mini ocean, and we will see
how this increase in carbon dioxide in the ocean affects the acidity,
which this instrument measures. OK. Well, into the ocean I go. Yeah.
This number is going down,
which means that the acidity is increasing.
Gosh, that's happening very quickly. Yes.
And so this has very important implications for cold water corals,
because they're made out of limestone.
And this limestone would then dissolve, which could have
major implications for the animals that use these corals as a habitat.
It's sobering to think that our actions can affect life
found in some of our deeper waters.
But with scientists exploring these uncharted territories,
we may be able to gain a greater understanding
of how to protect them in the future.
It is so cool, seeing those deep sea creatures, but do you know?
If you come down to the shores,
you'll see all kinds of things, like this shore crab right here.
Now, they share a really similar strategy,
in fact, exactly the same strategy as those deep sea crabs,
as Miranda Krestovnikoff found out for The One Show.
A grisly scene lies scattered across a beach in North Wales.
Heaps of washed up crabs littering the shore.
Walking along this beach, I'm struck by what appears to be
a dramatic loss of life, but looks can be deceptive.
What looks like a dead crab is in fact a discarded shell,
the remnants of the moult of the common shore crab,
a truly remarkable feat of nature.
Common shore crabs live all around the coasts of Britain and Ireland.
They're found from the high tide mark,
all the way down to a depth of 60m, and they feed on anything
they can find, including dead fish, and even other shore crabs.
They're clearly a very successful species,
but their design has a flaw, which makes moulting a necessity,
as crab expert Professor Simon Webster explains.
They don't grow in a linear fashion as we do, because they have
this hard shell, an exoskeleton, so their growth is intermittent.
So their skeleton's on the outside.
Yes, it is on the outside, and so every year,,
the have to shed this and then expand to their final size.
So it's like,
if I was a child and I was wearing clothes that were too small for me,
I literally couldn't grow until I'd sort of got rid of them.
That's a perfect analogy.
Every part of the crab's body is encased in the hard skeleton,
including the delicate and complicated mouth parts,
the stalks of the eyes, and the antennae,
which the crab uses to smell in the water. Even these small
and delicate structures must be removed from the rigid exoskeleton
during moulting, and Simon's been studying how that
happens in his lab at Bangor University.
So, talk me through this incredibly complicated process.
The whole process is triggered by a series of hormones.
There are two phases. The first phase, we call the passive phase.
Here we have one that's begun to crack its shell open.
It's decalcified its shell, and you can see here this line.
It's called the epimeral line,
and this is an area of much thinner shell.
And this is like a sort of perforated seam. Yes, exactly.
Right, and it's going to expand underneath that,
and that's going to open up. Yes.
And then, what happens after that breaks?
Then, the crab undergoes a period of what we call passive ecdysis,
or moulting.
Here is one which has now taken on a little bit of water,
and it's beginning to open up.
The final active phase of the moult takes about 15 minutes,
so we're setting up a time lapse camera to film the action.
The crab drinks in more and more water, causing it to swell.
The carapace opens up, and the crab extracts itself by pushing
and compressing all of its appendages repeatedly,
until it finally wrestles free.
If the crab doesn't get out quickly, it will become trapped,
and die in the old shell.
This is the exoskeleton of a newly-moulted crab,
and this is the chap that's just come out of it.
You can see he's a lot larger than the old shell, about 20% bigger.
And if I touch him, he's absolutely as soft as jelly.
It can take a few weeks for the shell to harden.
Juvenile crabs have to endure this vulnerable state every few months,
as they grow, but even adults will moult once a year.
For females, this soft shell period is the only time they can mate.
Amorous males pick up the females and carry them around,
in the process keeping them safe from predators.
Moulting also allows animals with exoskeletons to do something
which we vertebrates can only dream of.
Besides allowing the crab to grow, moulting also allows regeneration
of lost limbs, so you can see that this one's only got one front claw.
At every subsequent moult,
missing limbs will grow back a little bit more.
After a couple of years, they should have completely regrown,
an amazing act of regeneration, taking place all around our shores.
So, next time you come across a common shore crab shell on a beach,
remember the remarkable feat of animal escapology
that created every single one of these.
Crabs are cool!
And what makes them even cooler is that
each and every one behaves slightly differently.
And I'm here at St Abbs Marine Station to find out
a little bit more about crab personality.
So, I've got Karen with me,
who's going to tell me all about crab personalities.
Karen, one thing I will say is. I've been saying this all along -
invertebrates have personalities,
and now it looks like you can prove this.
Well, I'm trying to prove that. I agree with you.
I've been thinking that many, many years
when observing crabs in the field and mangroves in Australia,
that I could actually tell who's who,
just by their personality, and years ago,
my supervisor didn't believe me,
so I decided I need to follow up on this and here at the Marine Station,
we decided to look at whether they do have personalities or not.
We run tests with them.
One would be - how do they react to a novel object, for example?
Is it an exploratory type who looks at it and says,
"I want to explore what it is.
"Could it be food? Or could it be a shelter?"
Or is it a shy personality that says,
"Hm, I don't know this and I'd rather stay away"?
And there's a really hi-tech way that you do this.
I've got this plastic brick, and apparently,
there's a bit of a technique here.
I've got to submerge it, and then let go.
And there you have it.
The drop!
And now we wait! I'm actually trying to stand back now,
because I don't want to distract him. I don't want him to see me now.
That's good. But you know this individual. You know this is
a bold and brave crab, because you've filmed this before.
When we did it before, it was one of the fastest reacting.
Playing around and taking it,
carrying it all round this little tank, actually.
And if it was a shy crab, now, you've filmed that as well, right?
Yes, shy crabs didn't do a thing. They didn't touch it.
They walked around it, and gave it a look,
and wandered around from corner to corner,
where they like to seek a bit of shelter,
but in contrast to the brave one, never went straight for it.
So, Karen, of course, I know it feels like a game,
plastic toys with crabs, but this is what it's about, isn't it?
Yeah, that's true. What you see here is a creel, crab pots,
so what sort of crabs go inside this trap?
Is it just any crab, or is it just the boldest ones,
the exploratory ones, that these pots are catching?
So, what does that mean for the whole population,
if all we're doing is catching brave crabs?
Well, obviously, there are fewer brave crabs out there,
so the problem would only really arise if we found,
and that's step three now of our research,
if brave crabs also tend to be those that grow fastest
and reproduce at a higher rate, then obviously you could decrease
the productivity of the population over time and then,
that would obviously be bad for the fishery as well.
So, in an ideal world, what you want is brave crabs, shy crabs,
and everything in between. Exactly.
It's clear that British waters have an awful lot to offer,
in terms of wildlife,
but we need to be mindful of that balance with human activities.
Exactly. And there's been a lot of damage done,
but the situation can be reversed,
as Springwatch's Iolo Williams found out
when he went to the Isle of Arran off the west coast of Scotland.
Lamlash is an idyllic coastal town on the Isle of Arran,
with pristine views out into the Firth of Clyde.
These waters were once one of Europe's most commercially
productive fishing areas, and Lamlash held international
sea angling festivals, celebrating thriving populations of white fish,
including herring, cod, and haddock.
But in the 1980s, the tide turned.
I remember fishing in 1986, and we'd catch
so many fish that we wouldn't know what to do with.
But the year after that, we went out, and caught nothing.
A change in the law allowed bottom dredging close to the UK coast,
coinciding with the introduction of a new destructive type
of scallop dredger.
There was factory boats coming in, and hoovering everything out
the sea bed. It was horrible.
It was a fishing revolution that eventually saw the Clyde
labelled as a marine desert by scientists.
Fish stocks fell by a devastating 96%.
But the passion of two local divers who couldn't bear to watch
an entire ecosystem disappear saw the creation of COAST,
the Community Of Arran Seabed Trust.
Local diver Howard Wood was one of those determined to make a change.
When did you first dive these waters, Howard? 1974.
And if I would have come with you on that first dive,
what would I have seen?
Dozens of flatfish, plaice, scabs, even big turbot.
Thornback rays, cuckoo rays, shoals of pollock.
I only really appreciated what I'd seen as a teenager
maybe 10, 15 years later, when it was starting to disappear.
But you weren't happy to just sit back and watch all this happen.
You actually took action, didn't you? My friend,
Don MacNeish, he kept poking me, saying, "We need to do something".
Don had come back from New Zealand with the idea of no take zone,
which is an area that no marine life or plants can be taken out of.
And we tried to do something.
As two or three people, nobody really took much notice,
and so we realised we really needed the community on board.
They say that, when you try and establish any kind of marine
protection area, the people to persuade are the local fishermen.
How did they react?
We knew them, and we knew them very well,
and some of them were our friends. So, it wasn't that difficult
to actually convince the local fishermen.
But even with the local fishermen on board, it took a further 13 years
of lobbying, letters, and phone calls to persuade those in power.
In 2008, the first ever no take zone in Scottish waters
was established around Lamlash Bay.
We were ecstatic. It was absolutely great. We held a small celebration.
We've campaigned for 13 years to get this no take zone,
but in reality, this is the start.
It's like a living laboratory,
what happens when you leave the sea to just naturally change,
do what it wants to do.
Now, it's been ten years since the no take zone was granted,
so I suppose the big question is - has it worked?
Dr Bryce Stewart from the University of York has been carrying out
research and surveys in this protected area for the past
ten years, documenting its recovery.
Are you seeing a lot more marine life in the no take zones now,
compared to the areas immediately around them?
We're seeing much higher biodiversity, overall,
in the no take zone. It's about 50% higher.
And also, for some particular species, like lobsters,
there's more than double the number in the no take zone.
And scallops as well, and both the scallops
and lobsters are much bigger as well, which is really important.
So, this must have a knock-on effect for the fishermen.
Yeah, that's what we think is going on, particularly for those
key species, lobsters and scallops.
Because they're much bigger, the females are producing lots of eggs,
and those eggs are hatching, the larvae is spreading out
in the currents, and reseeding the fishing grounds.
So, by protecting just these small areas,
you can actually have a big benefit.
And for Howard the benefit includes seeing more on his dives once again.
It's absolutely fantastic, to go down for a dive.
"What are we going to see? What's going to have changed this year?"
It's only 2.6 square kilometres, but it has numerous different types
of habitats, so it's great seeing things spread out.
We've seen a real good range of different types of nudibranchs,
which divers get very excited about, because of all the colour.
Last Monday, I had a great experience with a pleurobranchus,
which is also commonly known as the highland dancer...
..and some fantastic octopuses, in amongst the bright pink live maerl.
It's such a joy to see.
If you were watching Blue Planet UK earlier in the week, you would know
that the humble herring, after decades of overfishing,
seems to be making a comeback.
Last year, fishermen in Gairloch noticed that they were
coming back to spawn,
and it appears that, this year, numbers are even higher.
It was too exciting a challenge to turn down, so we sent
underwater cameraman Andy Jackson to see if he could capture the herring
on the seabed, or even better, spawning.
The west coast of Scotland has some of our most fertile waters,
and the fishing village of Gairloch lies at its heart.
Last year's news about the herring is exciting for locals
like biologist Peter Cunningham.
This winter, he's been keeping an eye out for the species,
and he's heard that fishermen have spotted signs of their return
to the area.
Cameraman Andy Jackson went out on a mission with Peter
to try and track the herring down.
I've never filmed a shoal of herring before,
and nor has anyone else in the UK.
50 odd years since they were around.
Oh, look at that sunshine.
A cracking day.
But even when you know the fish are in the area,
before you can film them, you need to find them.
Not an easy feat in the wild Scottish waters.
Well, that's surprising -
no fish, so the fish must have scattered.
Day two and it's flat calm - perfect.
But there's not a herring in sight.
They haven't come into the shallow water yet to spawn.
We're maybe just a few days too early.
It's day four,
and the forecast was absolutely bang on.
There's no way we're going anywhere today!
Finally, the skies are clear.
We spotted the gannets. The gannets were the main clue.
The gannets and the seals are hunting.
It's a sure sign that fish are about.
There is a huge number of seals here.
I think they're mostly grey seals.
This is exciting, seals and gannets in the same place,
and they're feeding.
But are they herring?
With bad weather forecast soon, it's a tense moment.
Out of the murk, there is a glimmer.
This extraordinary sight hasn't been seen off Britain's coasts
for 50 years.
I've been surrounded by herring.
A great wall of herring going round and round me like a dark shadow,
it's fantastic.
Whoa!
A true natural wonder,
but Andy still hasn't found what he came here for.
Will he see the herring spawn?
Over the next couple of weeks Andy stayed on.
He was determined to capture that sequence he was really after,
and this is what he got.
Just after dawn, Andy dives again.
This time the fish are too busy to be afraid.
The reason?
The water is murky with the magical sight of herring eggs
which settle on the seabed.
In a few weeks, millions of embryos will be visible.
No-one has ever filmed herring breeding here before.
These pictures are unique.
More eggs this year should mean there's more fish the next.
The future looks bright for the herring.
This is their second year spawning here,
and their numbers are greater than in decades.
Andy's perseverance has finally paid off.
He's almost lost for words.
It's all a bit much at the moment, I can't take it all in.
It's just so fresh.
You know, we've been trying to do this for the last two weeks,
and then suddenly, you know, you go out, you get up early,
there's a window in the weather, you go out and you do it,
and it's all over, and we're finished.
I'm stunned!
What can I say?
Stunned.
GILLIAN: What a beautiful sight.
Now, behind me is St Abbs lighthouse,
and if there was one historic job that meant you got to see everything
that went on out at sea, whether it was whales breaching,
or a fishing fleet, it was that of a lighthouse keeper.
Nowadays, of course, lighthouses are all automated.
The one behind me, the lighthouse keeper left in 1993.
And that's just a year before one of Scotland's most remote
lighthouses was automated.
My name is Ian Duff.
I was the lighthouse keeper from 1976 till 1992.
When I was a little boy, I said
I wanted to be a lighthouse keeper when I grew up.
To be a lighthouse keeper at these places in Scotland
allows you access to places that most normal people
don't ever get to see,
or live in.
You see things that other people don't see -
the puffins would walk into the lighthouse accommodation.
A wonderful feeling to be associated with the sea like that.
On a wild day,
in the morning, we would stand in the door for two hours
till lunchtime, just watching the power of the sea breaking over
the grating, or jumping back in if the sea was going to hit the door
which is 30 feet up.
One day, I was to go ashore, the helicopter landed on the helipad,
and a giant freak wave just broke over the top of the
lighthouse helicopter and injured one of the keepers who was coming on
to replace me.
I mean, all the time I was at Duncansby, you could see,
year on year out, more plastic fish boxes and other bits of plastic
that washed in. I even collected a plastic milk bottle,
and I took it home because it had a lighthouse on it,
and it came from Norway, funnily enough.
When I was at Pladda, they were still hunting for sharks
at that particular time, and one day, we saw, when we looked
through the binoculars, they had a shark on deck of the boat,
and they were cutting it up -
hopefully never see anything like that any more.
Quite often seen basking sharks at Hyskeir.
That's a nice place to view them at Hyskeir,
because the water, the sea at Hyskeir used to be
a different colour from the sea at Skerryvore,
it used to be a lovely aquamarine sort of green.
I do miss being a lighthouse keeper.
I think it was a great honour to be at these lighthouses
when they were manned.
I just loved waking up on a summer's morning,
or being on watch on a summer's morning, at a place like Skerryvore,
seeing all the seals lying in the rock and at peace with the world.
And then, of course, in the winter time when the sea's breaking up
over the tower door, you stand, awe-inspiring...
Watching the waves breaking past you.
It's a great honour to be a lighthouse keeper
in that environment, I think.
What a beautiful film, and you have all been sending us
beautiful pictures, as well, from across the country
right around our coastlines,
and here is a selection of just a few of them.
Someone who's checking up on the health
of the world's oceans is Chris Packham.
He's in Mexico right now, but his heart is always at home.
Before he left, he explained why he champions the British Seas.
Now, all week, I've been meeting people who get into the sea,
either because they feel a spiritual connection with it,
a need to immerse their body, to connect with a purer form of nature,
or because they're fascinated with the extraordinary marine life
that's living just out there.
That's them, and I'm me,
because if I'm very honest with you, I'm frightened of that.
You know, historically, in my family
people have drowned in those oceans.
I'm not a great swimmer.
But I still feel a closeness to the sea because of the creatures
that I admire that prosper in that environment,
and principally the birds, of course.
Now, when it comes to birds,
all birds are equal, but some are more equal than others
and the ones that, for me, are the better ones
are the ones which are simplest in their form.
So, I'm not a kingfisher man, I'm not a puffin bloke,
all that colour, all of that mess, no.
I like black and white birds, simple,
and many of our seabirds are black and white.
So, things like arctic tern.
What a shape!
What a beautiful natural construction they are,
with their long wings and their tail streamers.
And I love to photograph them, because against the light,
with it shining through their feathers, they glow.
And then you've got bigger, more powerful species,
things like gannets with their beautiful faces,
that cappuccino wash,
those beautiful almost sort of Art Deco lines that run
around the eyes and down the beak,
but you're still looking at the sea,
you're looking at that powerful beak which breaks their entrance
into the water when they're plunge diving at speeds of up to 40mph.
And then, of course, when you see them in the air,
those wings,
strong and powerful.
But if I have one favourite seabird to photograph,
it would be the northern fulmar,
because, really, they're a Northern Hemisphere albatross,
a little bit smaller, of course, and they've got very stiff wings.
They look a bit wooden when they're flying and gliding,
and from a photographic point of view,
we're talking about a grey bird,
so you've got to do something with that, using the light,
using the water.
It's always a challenge, when you take something
that you feel so passionately about,
that you love the shape and the form of, the movement...
Everything about it.
And you're trying to capture it in one photograph and say all of that,
that's why photography is so difficult,
and particularly when you're working with these sorts of elements.
And, I suppose, that's a challenge that connects me to the sea.
It's the birds that are an intrinsic part of that environment,
and I love photographing them.
I haven't got a decent photograph yet,
but I'll be working hard for the rest of my life.
GILLIAN: Don't forget to watch Chris, Liz and Steve
on Blue Planet Live this weekend.
They have already witnessed some incredible spectacles, and no doubt
they've saved the best till last.
Well, fingers crossed, let's hope so.
We've had a fantastic time here on Blue Planet UK,
not just learning about the marine life on our doorstep,
but how human interaction can have such an impact on it.
Well, all that's left to do is to say a huge thank you to everyone
that's taken part in the series,
and we're going to leave you with the highlights.
Bye. Bye-bye.
That's my first haul.
My goodness me!
I can't believe you call this a job!