David Attenborough at 99: 'I will not see how the story ends'

My earliest memory of the ocean is of a tropical lagoon. Ammonites rose and fell in the warm water column, occasionally propelling themselves forwards, their curled ram’s horn shells surprisingly streamlined in the water.

This tropical lagoon was in fact in my imagination, fired as I explored the old limestone quarry near my childhood home in Leicester, some 60 miles from the coast.

For a small boy in the 1930s this was a marvellous place for adventures, and the knowledge that millions of years ago it would have been a warm and wild lagoon only increased its appeal. Here I could spend days searching for treasure buried in rocks laid down in ancient tropical seas. Holding the fossils of long-dead sea creatures that I had chipped out of the rock, knowing my eyes were the first ever to see them, ignited my curiosity. I would spend much of the rest of my life wondering what lived below the surface of the ocean.

I have been fortunate enough to live for nearly 100 years. During this time we have discovered more about our ocean than in any other span of human history. Marine science has revealed natural wonders a young boy in the 1930s could never have imagined. New technology has allowed us to film wildlife behaviour I could only have dreamt of recording in the early stages of my career, and we have changed the ocean so profoundly that the next 100 years could either witness a mass extinction of ocean life or a spectacular recovery.

To date we have done such a good job of telling the stories of demise and collapse that many of us can all too easily picture a future ocean of bleached reefs, turtles choking on plastic, sewage plumes, jellyfish swarms and ghost towns where fishing villages were once full of life. There may be much to fear in the near future, yet it could also be the most exciting time to be alive.

We know already that the ocean can recover. Mangroves and kelp forests can regrow, whales can return and dying coastal communities can flourish once again.

Attenborough prepares for a dive while filming Life on Earth, 1979. The series was watched by 500 million people worldwide

BBC

We now understand how to fix many of the biggest problems we face as a species, and we have centuries of progress to draw on for inspiration. Indeed, in the past 100 years alone we have dramatically reduced infant mortality, suppressed many of our most feared diseases, increased access to education and healthcare, acquired scientific knowledge that has transformed our understanding of the world and co-operated on global issues to a degree never seen before.

Young children playing on a beach today will live through perhaps the most consequential time for the human species in the past 10,000 years. They will grow up to see how this story ends, to see how our choices play out. If we use our great discoveries, apply our unique minds and direct our unparalleled communication and problem-solving skills to restoring our ocean, then those children will bring their own into a world where the biggest challenges our species has ever faced have already been navigated.

They will witness decades of recovery and restoration. They will see shoals of fish, roosts of seabirds and pods of whales beyond anything anyone alive has ever laid eyes upon. They will experience the rebirth of coastal communities and the turning point in the stabilisation of our climate. But more than that, they will live in a world where our species, the most intelligent to exist on Earth, has moved beyond trying to rule the waves and instead has learnt to thrive alongside the greatest wilderness of all.

I will not see how that story ends but, after a lifetime of exploring our planet, I remain convinced that the more people enjoy and understand the natural world, the greater our hope of saving both it and ourselves becomes. With that in mind, here are some of my favourite ocean experiences, which I hope will inspire you to look beyond the shore and beneath the waves.

Filming a blue whale in the Gulf of California, 2001

A blue whale cruises off the coast of Sri Lanka

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Blue whales are perfectly adapted for ocean voyaging. Their powerful yet streamlined bodies enable them to travel unseen for thousands of miles each year. But in certain places, and at certain times, they come close to the shore in order to give birth and to suckle their young.

One such place and time is the Gulf of California during the winter months. It was there that I went with a team from the BBC to try and film a blue whale for a series called The Life of Mammals. Even today, no one would describe the blue whale as easy to film. But almost 25 years ago it was far more challenging. There were no drones to launch within seconds from a boat; nor were there satellite tags to alert you to a tracked whale’s location. We had to rely on spotters on the shore and hope that a light plane guided by them could fly to the right place in time to capture an aerial view of a whale swimming alongside our boat.

The beginning of the new millennium was only 15 years after the ban on commercial whaling had been agreed. So the total number of blue whales in the ocean was approximately 5,000 — only 2 per cent of their natural level.

David Attenborough gets wet as a whale surfaces close to his boat in The Life of Mammals, which aired in 2002-3

BBC

To these difficulties we added a challenge of our own. The shot we wanted was one in which, as I was speaking in a small inflatable launch, a whale would break the surface alongside me so that both it and I appeared in the same frame, and thus give as vivid an idea as possible of just how gigantic it is.

Early one morning we left harbour and headed for the bay. Our pilot guide in his slow-flying aircraft appeared overhead and circled several hundred feet above the ocean. He had explained to us how he could distinguish the spout of a blue whale from that of other species — it shoots up to 30 feet in a relatively straight jet, and the height, volume and sheer power make it hang in the air for far longer than a spout made by any other kind of whale.

Once he had spotted one, he would tell us on the radio which way to go in the hope that we could catch up with it before it dived again. After several attempts we managed to do that. As soon as we were within 20 yards of it, we pushed a small inflatable launch over the side. I jumped in, tied myself on, and within seconds we were above the whale as it cruised 20 feet or so below the surface.

“It’s a blue whale,” I shouted excitedly over the noise of our outboard engine, and a great spout of water shot into the air and fell, drenching me. It was one of the most thrilling moments of my life.

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Sea otters in southern California, 1970s

A southern sea otter cracks open a clam in California

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Drifting in a wetsuit above a submarine forest in southern California, I found myself alongside one of the most blissful of creatures. On its back, all four paws tucked into its body fur for warmth, gently rolling in a manner that brought to mind a swaddled newborn baby, lay a southern sea otter. They were once seen linked together in rafts hundreds strong, but this one was alone and seemed to be quite unconcerned by my clumsy attempts to float nearby.

I was no more than 200 yards offshore, preparing to record a piece to camera on the wildlife of the Pacific coast of North America. If I looked towards shore I could see houses and the odd car, yet if I looked down I felt I was in a wilderness. The forest beneath my otter companion and me was one of giant kelp, each frond anchored by a holdfast to a rock on the sea floor some 150 feet below. I only had a snorkel, so those depths were out of reach.

But not for my neighbour. Periodically it dived down beyond my sight. A sea otter’s hind paws are fully webbed and reasonably flat, so although they are capable of moving fast on land, they are also effective divers. They can close their nostrils and ears, and their lungs are so big that not only can they float without any effort but they can also remain underwater for about four minutes at a time. This otter was diving in one of the richest marine environments on the planet, so finding food was no problem.

The sea otter suddenly reappeared beside me. It had used its sensitive whiskers and front paws to locate and collect a clam from the sea floor. Once back on the surface and floating on its back, it produced both a clam and a rock from a pouch of skin under its forelegs. I watched, captivated by the practised skill with which it balanced the rock on its belly and then smashed the clamshell repeatedly against it until the shell broke apart. Sea otters are one of the few species that, like human beings, regularly use tools.

They eat a wide range of the inhabitants of the kelp forest but one is of particular importance to them — sea urchins. In a healthy, balanced kelp forest sea urchins play a key role, acting like a kind of kelp gardener. They gnaw away at the algae growing on the rocks and in doing so create pits that enable the kelp to anchor their holdfast. Left unchecked, the urchins can destroy such a forest by eating the holdfasts that keep the kelp in place.

The importance of the sea otter was revealed when almost 200 years of hunting brought them to the verge of extinction. Unusually for a marine mammal, sea otters don’t have blubber, so they were not targeted by humans in the way that seals were, for the extraction of oil.

In lieu of blubber, however, they have the thickest fur of any mammal, a double-layered pelt that enables them to keep warm in these frigid seas, and in the 18th and 19th centuries they were hunted for that in their thousands. As a consequence, the global population fell from 150,000-300,000 to fewer than 2,000 individuals.

Urchin numbers exploded and as a result many kelp forests all but vanished, taking with them much of the other life that used the forests for food or shelter. The delicate balance of this complex system was devastatingly disrupted by the targeted removal of a single species.

But promisingly, this process can also happen in reverse. Since hunting sea otters was banned in the early 1900s, numbers have slowly recovered across significant parts of their old habitats. Recovery is not yet complete, but where it has happened the effects on the kelp forests are often spectacular. As the otters feast on the urchins, the kelp gets some respite. Being so fast-growing, it quickly begins to provide habitat that attracts other species, including other urchin eaters.

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Capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica, 2001

Capuchin monkeys use ‘sheer intelligence’ to survive in the mangrove forest

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While making The Life of Mammals I spent several weeks in a mangrove forest hoping to film the behaviour of two separate troops of extremely intelligent monkeys — capuchins. We wanted to show how sheer intelligence enabled different monkey species to thrive in a variety of difficult conditions — and it is fair to say that none of us expected to be filming it in an ocean habitat! But we had read scientific studies of the way capuchins harvested shellfish at low tide in a mangrove forest in Costa Rica, and it sounded an interesting way to begin the programme.

The capuchin is a particularly clever species of monkey. Capuchins are often described simply as “inquisitive”, but when watching them at close range for a period of time you realise that, much like ourselves, they are able to imagine the future and plan how to deal with the problems it will bring — exactly the characteristics required to exploit the complex world of mangroves.

We couldn’t hope to track the capuchins in the mangroves; they moved through the tangles of aerial roots much faster than we could. But we found a suitably open area well stocked with crabs, clams and oysters, and waited. Eventually a troop of capuchins arrived. Some of the braver ones plunged their hands into holes in the mud. The successful ones pulled out crabs, the unsuccessful quickly withdrew in pain! It was fascinating to watch. But the behaviour we really wanted to film was the way in which they located and ate clams.

The troop moved with the ebb and flow of the tides. Each day the muddy ground would be exposed approximately 50 minutes later than the previous day, and the monkeys adjusted their movements accordingly. By the time we had been filming for a few days, they took little notice of us and allowed us to get close and film as they dug in the mud and located clams.

The shellfish clamp the two halves of their shell so tightly that even a human can’t open them without a knife or similar tool. But the capuchins have worked out their own way of getting at a clam’s flesh. Having collected one, they take it to a convenient branch and start knocking it, over and over again. Eventually the clam gets so tired it relaxes its muscle and the capuchin is able to prise it open.

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Green turtles on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, mid-1950s

A green turtle builds her nest on a beach

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Ever since I was a boy I had been thrilled by pictures of the Great Barrier Reef ’s multicoloured, infinitely varied colonies of coral and its islands thronged by immense numbers of breeding seabirds. I had always yearned to see this wonder with my own eyes. This was my chance.

With the help of Vince, the acquaintance of a friend, I sailed northwards from Cairns up the reef, stopping to investigate any island or reef that particularly attracted us, until on the 14th day we reached Raine Island — the reef’s northern limit.

The island was said to have one of the biggest and most varied colonies of breeding seabirds to be found anywhere on the reef. It was also the world’s largest breeding site for green turtles.

Happily for us, there were clouds of seabirds as numerous and dense as I have ever seen. The most abundant were two species of tern — the noddy and the white-capped. There were three species of booby — the common, the brown and the red-footed. But for me the most impressive and certainly least familiar were the frigate birds: glossy black, with six-foot wingspans and long, deeply forked tails.

On our first walk around the island we saw perhaps twenty curving tracks weaving through the sand hills. I didn’t know at the time, but scientists now believe that every year more than 60,000 female green turtles travel immense distances to get to this one small and remote island. The few here now were just end-of-season stragglers.

Attenborough filming the series Life on Earth in 1978 — a three-year project that raised the bar for natural history film-making

BBC

Each morning we found several that had dragged themselves far enough inland to be beyond the reach of a high tide and were now digging with powerful swishes of their fore-flippers. Every now and then they swivelled slightly so that the holes they were creating were circular. When one female was down in the sand by about 12 inches, she started to use her hind flippers as well, until finally the top of her shell was virtually level with the surface of the sand. Then, using just one hind flipper at a time, she begins to widen the downward passage to create an egg chamber.

All the time she weeps to clear sand from her eyes. She gasps, making great breathy exhalations, and follows each one with a sudden intake of air, as though she is still in the sea and preparing to make another dive. The nest hole must not be too deep, for the eggs will need the warmth of the sun if they are to develop. But it must, nonetheless, be deep enough to be beyond the reach of predators. Then she lays a hundred or so eggs, fills in the hole and returns to the sea. A single female may repeat this exhausting process half a dozen times during a single breeding season.

The sheer quantity of hatchlings that emerge on the beaches of Raine Island in a single season is hard to imagine. But great numbers are essential because only one out of every thousand hatchlings is likely to reach maturity. Within minutes of appearing on the surface of the sand, most are eaten by birds. Those that do reach the water are then attacked by marine predators. Only a tiny minority reach the relative safety of the open ocean.

I didn’t get to dive in the shallow, warm waters of the Great Barrier Reef until 1957. I was so taken aback by the spectacle before me that I momentarily forgot to breathe. I could have spent days swimming above it and never tired of the colours, the movement, the interactions. It is life at its most mesmerising.

Nothing can prepare you for actually seeing so many different species, all with their own way of overcoming life’s trials, somehow fitting together in an ecosystem so vivid and vibrant. Even though we know that a tropical rainforest harbours extraordinary animal diversity, you see relatively little of it on a single walk. Yet on that half-hour dive I saw more species of animals than I could have begun to count, let alone identify.

© Sir David Attenborough and Colin Butfield, 2025. Extracted from Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness by Sir David Attenborough and Colin Butfield (John Murray Press £28), published on Thursday. Order at timesbookshop.co.uk

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