16. Nov, 2017

He swims with the fishes (but in a good way)

Blue Planet is remarkable.  I think, most astonishing is the evidence that what came later on land lived first and is still evolving in the sea, in all its shapes and forms.  There's a fish that's grown its fins into feet to poddle along with on the bottom, for example.   I, for one, never realised how noisy it all is down in the deeps.  Fish, it seems, chatter all the time, as birds do.  Not just mammalian dolphins and whales in their pods, but all of them!  There's even a dawn chorus.  I was just enjoying the sweet chirrupings of a tiny yellow fish, when something nasty ate it midsong.  I was as sick as a parrot about it.

Nature in the deep is just as red in tooth and claw as on land, particularly in tooth.  There's the bobbit, not a cute type of sea hobbit, but a hideous fanged marine worm, a metre long, lurking in the sand to gobble up the unwary with its churning, garbage disposal jaws.  You can't just potter down to the coral reef as if along to the allotment, humming  as you go, because quite frankly, if you do, you've had it.  The bream are altogether too dreamy.

There's no doubt though, that some sea animals really do have poetic souls.  Who would have thought the humble crab to be so aesthetically sensitive that it practically faints at the beauty of the lightshow the cunning cuttlefish puts on for it, simply staring transfixed as the hunter is fluttering plumply in front of it like an illuminated hovercraft.  One can only hope it dies happy.

There are playful moments (dolphins, often) and serious ones.  If you've missed a spawning photo opportunity by a moontide, you are one seriously pissed off marine biologist, at least until next year.  Then there's the bleaching of the coral reefs, and there's nothing unearthly about that, it's all to do with warming seas.  Narrated in the familiar tones of Sir David Attenborough, he gently reminds us of our responsibilities to the blue planet and its ecosystems, which at ninety one, he explores as intrepidly as ever.  His own ecosystem is clearly in great shape, and long may it continue to be so.