Blogger: Aggie Rothon, Communications Officer
It was my birthday in the week and I had an unexpectedly marvellous day. I was taking the dog for a walk around the footpaths of Worstead. As we neared the end of our route we ambled past a girl pruning the hedge of a neat cottage. It was raining but still a goat gambled happily in the garden. Fantastically the girl turned out to be a friend that I had regrettably lost touch with five years earlier. We spent the rest of the morning drinking tea and catching up.
With animals a big part of her world, it was great to meet her menagerie of goats, cats, fish and geckos. Most intriguing however was the sea anemone I caught sight of floating happily near the back of the fish tank.
A glossy black ball about the size of a child’s clenched fist sends out malleable chewing-gum tentacles that drift on the small tide of the tank. From its centre juts a neon orange stalk (my friend says she is unsure whether it is an eye or an alimentary protuberance.) From time to time the anemone spurts out great showers of gravel, the remnants of its feasting on invisible watery organisms.
It is a bizarre creature and left me amazed at the sheer variety and eccentricity of the natural world. That our coast is full of creatures similar to these fills me with delight. That’s what I find so fascinating about the seas. They are great billowing, wild unknowns full to the brim of things that we don’t even know are there. 230,000 sea creatures are known to science but there are three times as many that we don’t know about. In fact, the grand total could surpass over one million species. We can only begin to imagine what it must be like to drift endlessly on salty sea winds as our seabirds do, or creep in the dark depths of metres of water. Even the strange and onomatopoeic words ‘mollusc’ and ‘crustacean’ are enough to send the imaginative mind into spirals.
So isn’t it grim, that without even knowing what wonderful, life enriching living things are out there right now, scurrying and slithering and creeping and eking an existence in and beyond our shorelines, that we are gradually destroying our seas. Over fishing, offshore developments and pollution have all helped to start destroying what the natural world has given us. With less than 0.001% of the UK’s seas fully protected from these damaging activities it doesn’t look like the situation will improve.
This is where we can all step in and step up for nature. Support our campaign to ensure that more sea life is fully protected. Go to http://bit.ly/l7x2v1 and sign our pledge.
Photo Credit: Carolyn Merrett (rspb-images.com)
Article in Eastern Daily Press on Saturday 23 July 2011.