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- A guide to Blue Planet III: Producer Joanna Haley reveals the secrets behind the new series
A guide to Blue Planet III: Producer Joanna Haley reveals the secrets behind the new series
Producer/director Joanna Haley on magical encounters and sad spectacles
BBC Studios
- Michael Hodges
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On the coast of Chile, film-makers witnessed the disastrous effects of climate change on a sea lion colony and its newborn pups. Storms have sent giant rollers across the Pacific Ocean,
with the rocky islands the pups once sheltered on overwhelmed by water.
“It was a dramatic shoot,” says Joanna Haley, who spent a year as producer and director filming the third episode, Seasonal Seas. “Getting there was adrenaline-fuelled: a 15-hour flight and then an eight-hour drive. The water was wild when we arrived. It’s very tumultuous, a difficult place to film. We put the drone up and straightaway we could see the pups being washed off the rocks.”
The footage of helpless pups in the crashing surf had a deep effect on the crew. “We are used to things dying when we film,” says Haley, “but this wasn’t part of a natural food chain. It’s something that climate change is causing, so it felt particularly difficult. It takes a toll, I cried on that shoot.”
Haley would cry again on the coast of Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, where the crew caught the unique behaviour of the aptly named overland octopus. This phenomenally intelligent creature risks its life to leave the sea at low tide and hunt natal lightfoot crabs and blenny fish in rock pools.
“They had never seen a person before,” says Haley, “so they were wary at the beginning, just poking their little eyes above the water of the rock pools. I thought it was going to be very difficult to get anything, but then one octopus tentatively put her tentacles out and then just slowly started walking. She was watching me the whole time.”
Haley, who has directed more than 35 shoots across six continents and more than 60 countries in her career, is fantastically experienced but this, she says, was something new. “They kind of outsmarted us, which I wasn’t prepared for. I knew that an octopus is very intelligent, but when you’re there you genuinely feel an understanding with them. They feel out the world a lot with their tentacles, which is also how they taste things, and they would put them out and touch you or the lens. It’s like they’re trying to work out what you are by taste.”
With trust established, the octopus embarked on its hazardous trip across the rocks – needing to catch its prey and return before it ran out of oxygen and the temperature – which can reach 32°C – became unsurvivable.
Happily, this creature made it back to safety, allowing the strange connection between octopus and film-makers to have an unlikely coda. “At the very end of the shoot she walked right up to us, underneath the camera, and just stared at us,” recalls Haley. “It was like a little goodbye.”
That goodbye was even more poignant because overland octopus is a delicacy on the Ogasawara Islands – and of course octopus is eaten around the world. “I found it hard being there and knowing that they’re not protected and could be fished at any time,” says Haley. “Part of the reason I was emotional when I left was the thought that the next person that the octopus encountered wouldn’t be so nice to them.
“That’s why we showed an assembly of our footage to local people at the end of our time there. I wanted them to see how amazingly intelligent and sentient these creatures were.” Now, thanks to Haley and her crew, we can see that, too.
Episode 1: Tropical Seas
BBC
For 40 years, experts have been baffled by reports of bottlenose dolphins in Western Australia carrying sea sponges. Now Blue Planet III has cracked the mystery, showing for the first time on screen that the ingenious mammals use sponges when hunting fish. By blocking holes in rocks, they prevent their prey escaping.
Episode 2: Open Ocean
BBC
Far from the Californian shore a Mola mola, a strange and ungainly fish “the size of a bath”, heads to the surface for a pitstop. After feasting on jellyfish, it allows halfmoon fish to nibble its parasites. Finally it sunbathes – hence its other name, sunfish – until it’s warm enough to hunt in the cold 200 metres below.
Episode 3: Seasonal Seas
The overland octopus walks across rocks in search of food. BBC
Episode 4: Polar Waters
BBC
A puffin colony in Maine on the US Atlantic Seaboard must find another source of food to hunt now that global warming has decimated the sand eel population. But the butterfish they catch instead are too big for their chicks to eat.
Episode 5: The Deep
BBC
New technology enables Blue Planet to capture vivid footage in the depths, such as the clever behaviour of a tiny pelagic octopus called the argonaut. For its epic journey to shallower waters, it hitches a ride on a jellyfish.
Episode 6: Future Seas
BBC
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Coral biologist Dr Dean Miller photographs collected fragments for the world’s first living coral biobank, in Queensland, Australia, to create a “living ark” and protect species before they’re lost for ever.
Authors
Michael Hodges
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