A humpback whale breaches the sea off New York and rises silhouetted against the towers of Manhattan. Bottlenose dolphins hunt by trapping fish with sea sponges in Western Australia. Swarms of small Smith’s swimming crabs drift across the vastness of the Indian Ocean and, closer to home, four-metre-long bluefin tuna arrow through Cornish waters.
This spectacular footage, and much more like it, announces the return of the BBC’s matchless natural history of the world’s oceans, . Four years in the making, the six episodes of are packed with astonishing underwater scenes, many of which are TV firsts. “Pretty much every story we have filmed has a new behaviour or a new species in it,” says Lara Bickerton, series producer for the opening , and episodes.
Some of this is thanks to advances in filming technology, like the drone footage that allows us to watch from above as a bowhead whale uses its reinforced skull to break through the Arctic pack ice; one of the most enthralling things you will see on television this year. Or the new deep-sea cameras that catch footage of only recently discovered species in depths of up to 4,000 metres, a region where sunlight never reaches.
But however new the tech is, says James Brickell, series producer for the final three episodes including , “It doesn’t replace old-fashioned fieldcraft: reading the environment, reading the animals, using local knowledge.” The oceanic trenches and open seas are dangerous places but so are the shores of Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, where the crew filmed young polar bears hunting harbour seals. “Polar bears are one of the very few predators that will deliberately target humans,” Brickell points out.
Pretty much every story we have filmed has a new behaviour or a new species in it
For the film-makers, such risks are worth taking. For many of them, working on this series is the culmination of years-long ambition. “I grew up on the Dorset coastline loving sea,” says Bickerton. “I became a scuba diving instructor, applied for and didn’t get the job. Now I’m finally on and I’m still slightly pinching myself.” Perhaps the greatest thrill is the privilege of working with Sir David Attenborough. “He’s an icon,” says Bickerton. “It was the first time I’ve worked with him. When he read his opening line in the studio the producer and I looked at each other and burst out crying because we were in such a special moment.”
“Every project I have worked on with Attenborough, he seems to get better and stronger,” says executive producer Elizabeth White. “It blew me away how engaged he was on this series; his personality and humour, the love he brings to the show. He still has innate curiosity and wonder. When we showed him clips we knew were new behaviour, like the bottle- nose dolphin (see overleaf) and the gathering of millions of Smith’s swimming crabs, he was almost like an excited boy.”
Nine years ago, shocked the world with images of whales and turtles caught up in plastic and discarded fishing nets, effectively declaring an ocean emergency. The series is estimated to have reached 500 million global viewers and nudged the international community into action. In 2019, 170 countries at the UN Environment Assembly agreed to “significantly reduce” single-use plastics by 2030. This was called The Blue Planet effect.
Since then, global warming has increased and other threats to the ocean have become clear. Those Svalbard bears are hunting on the shore because they no longer have access to ice. And as the polar cap melts, the crucial Labrador Current that moves nutrient-rich cold water down the Eastern Seaboard of North America is also failing. As we’ll see, puffins in Maine face starvation as their main food source – sand eels – disappears.
Those rising temperatures are affecting all oceans. The Great Barrier Reef is suffering bleaching that kills coral and the anemones that provide a habitat for the clown fish – the orange and white striped species made famous by . Yet, despite these threats, feels hopeful. Many of the animals featured are thriving or adapting. The clownfish have taken to cleaning the anemones to keep them alive.
“We purposely didn’t want to have a sense of doom in the series,” says White. “We show adaptation because that’s honest, there are animals that are adapting. Where we have protected areas in the ocean, animals are coming back.” And that, perhaps, is the strongest message of this stunning series. “The humpback whales are breaching off the coast of New York because the fisheries have come back,” says White. “They altered the way they fish and the animals returned. There are lots of stories of hope.”