Another Life: When you live by the sea there's always tomorrow for doing some of the interesting-sounding things proposed in natural history books. Inspired by Rachel Carson's The Edge of the Sea, I once went at low tide at night, with a torch, to watch crabs cavorting over the rocks - but there weren't any, writes Michael Viney.
And I hadn't a bucket, so I couldn't do something else the books suggest. If you scoop out a bucket of sea water and shine a torch into it, the chances are it will come alive with tiny shadows cast by copepods, the otherwise invisible, transparent glass menagerie of animal plankton.
There are probably more billions of copepods than any other multi-celled creature on Earth - even more than ants. If there weren't, most of the ocean's animals would go hungry. Copepods - minute crustaceans mostly no bigger than a grain of rice - graze on the phytoplankton, the microscopic plants conjured up in the sea each spring. They become the second bite, so to speak, in the food chain that nourishes the larvae of mackerel and herring and everything up to the great whales.
Most copepods, when you can see them, look much the same, like a rudimentary shrimp. They move in jerks, with a staggering acceleration, and in deep sea make remarkable vertical migrations - fathoms deep by day, and up to the surface at night.
In the north Atlantic, the great bulk of copepods consist of Calanus species - beautifully transparent except for a few spots of bright scarlet pigment. For almost 60 years, ships crossing the Atlantic have sampled the plankton to provide a continuous record of species and their distribution, a matter of vital interest to both marine science and the fishing industry. Just lately, for example, southern species have been moving northwards off our shores, while northern species have been moving southwards off North America - signs that global warming is changing the long-standing patterns of the ocean.
It is easy to grasp the point of research into copepods that clearly relates to human benefit, such as keeping fish on the table. The kinds of copepod that have obsessed Viv Gotto for most of a long life, however, have not often played such a role. Indeed, as he admits in his memoirs - Footprints in the Sea, launched in Belfast this week - one question has dogged his zoological career: "What the hell am I doing this for? Does it really make any significant difference to anyone?". Generations of marine biology students who were instructed and enthused by him in Queen's University might be the best people to answer.
The copepods on which he is now a leading world authority (he has written 60 papers on them) do not get around much. They live with other marine animals in ways that are frankly parasitic. Clamped on to the skin of a sea cucumber, or tucked into the gut of a sea squirt on the floor of Strangford Lough, they tend to lose much of their free-swimming charm, along with most of their appendages. This does not rob their procreative lives of considerable mystery.
"Over the past half century," writes Gotto, "the copepods have exposed me to undreamt-of marvels. I have been bombarded by the extraordinary, drenched by the totally unexpected, pulled willy-nilly through magic gateways." Following his rapt obsession through the pages of Footprints in the Sea, one can actually begin to believe him.
Consider, for example, his tactics for studying the habits of female copepods in situ, as it were, within sea squirts retrieved from the lough. Needing somewhere cold enough for his big glass carboys of seawater, he hauled them up to the top of a little tower at Queen's, where broken windows ensured a freezing wind, especially at night.
There he improvised, with assorted old lenses, cardboard tubes and screens made from photographic plates, a way of projecting - like a camera obscura - enlarged silhouettes of the sea-squirts' interiors and of the 4mm-long copepods living therein. Watching their slow-motion activities, often until after midnight, he was the first in the world to see a batch of copepod eggs, protected in transparent bubbles, shoot out at high speed from a sea squirt's anus. "With each discovery," he writes, "I marvelled at the complex perfection of adaptation and timing." His own timing wasn't bad: as an international tennis player, he represented Ireland in the Davis Cup. Now in his 80s, he has written a wonderfully unstuffy and zestful memoir, studded with memorable anecdotes (I like the one about the 12 dozen condoms). Science teachers everywhere should treat themselves to a tonic.
Footprints in the Sea is published by Ballyhay Books, Donaghadee, Co Down. Price £7.99
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