The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
EPISODE 4 Oceans
Indonesia
Although five oceans wrap our Blue Planet, they belong to one body of water. A highway of currents, rich in nutrients, feeds lifeforms so curious they could belong in outer space. One colourful character is the male flamboyant cuttlefish, a 2in-long master of camouflage, which impresses its mate with vivid displays. Slowly walking along a featureless seabed, he can instantaneously change appearance.
“Once they got used to our presence, they would assume their brighter colours, flashing an everchanging display of white, purple, yellow and black,” says episode producer Ed Charles, who filmed the critters in Indonesia, “especially when meeting a female (four times bigger) to woo her.” Lembeh Strait has some of the best muck diving sites, where the showy cuttlefish are frequently found.
Dive Worldwide (01962 302087; diveworldwide.com) offers an 11-day Muck & Magic photography dive trip from £1,475pp full-board, excluding flights. Departures in June and July.
Australia
Oceans can plummet to unfathomable depths, but action also takes place in the shallows. Offshore from Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef, black-tip sharks and trevally fish form a formidable predatory powerhouse as they join forces to hunt shoals of hardyheads.
“The sharks would surge on to the beach, so they could snatch a mouthful off the sand,” Ed Charles explains. “Any hardyheads that managed to get away would panic and flee into deeper water, where the trevally fish were waiting for them.”
It’s proof, as Attenborough notes, that “You don’t need to be a great underwater swimmer to see the miracle of a flourishing coral reef ”. He highlights the aquatic forests as a place he would love to visit “over and over again” – but laments they will likely be the first casualties of global warming.