Brilliant Bioluminescence

This is a repost from earlier this year but now we have this Youtube clip from Ammonite's latest film Hunt For The Giant Squid it seems like a good idea to remind you of that magical filming expedition.




We are in Belize filming bioluminescent marine creatures. The bit of Belize where we are doing this is an hour’s bumpy ride on a boat from Dangriga to South Water Caye, an island which measures about the size of a cruise ship. The lodge where we are staying and working is also a marine biology study centre. Professor Jim Morin is working with us and has set up a laboratory there so we can film the work that he is doing with bioluminescent animals.

One especially astonishing creature that he is studying is a bioluminescent Ostracod, an animal the size of a sesame seed which has the capacity to set itself ablaze in blue light in order to attract a girlfriend.

Every night after a full moon an extraordinary spectacle takes place; one night Jim took us to the marine mating grounds where we waited in the boat until sunset, then we slipped into the water and waited for the light show.

The beautiful prelude to ostracod action is the dance of the female marine worms who rise to the water’s surface spraying out their eggs in a mass of green light attracting hundreds of males who rush over to fertilise them, the water fizzes with action, it's like watching hundreds of tiny catherine wheels going off all over the water.

Ten minutes after the worms have got going, the ostracods start swimming upwards, slowly at first, we just see the odd line of vertical lights coming up among the corals and seaweeds, moving gently in the current. Each male ostracod gives off four dots to signal their presence to any females who might be around, then the lights become more and more until the water is pulsating with wavy lines of vertical blue dots all moving upwards.

Just when the water seems already full of light, the horizontal swimmers start, their trails of blue light spots fan out laterally, soon the ocean becomes an intense trippy matrix, it's mesmerising. Finally the lights fade away and we come up out of the water to make our way home, the night sky is indigo and massed with stars, we sit quietly in the boat on the way home because we can’t quite believe what we saw.

If you click on the Facebook button on the right you'll find an album of photos from Belize.

Ammonite Celebrates Squid Delivery

Rob Morgan who worked at Ammonite across the Night Stalkers series and The Hunt For The Giant Squid shares his donuts with Alf the fox.


The Ammonite crew are elated and exhausted, FIVE films have been delivered to National Geographic this year, on Monday our incredible Giant Squid film arrived in its final state on the Nat Geo desk and we can now start celebrating our achievements.

The celebrations are tinged with sadness however, because we are saying farewell to some wonderful people who have worked with us over the last months; Alice Marlow, Rob Morgan and John Ruthven have now gone on to other projects - we have no doubts we'll be seeing more of them at Ammonite in the future

More photos can be found on our Facebook page

Giant Squid In Post

Ammonite's film about the Giant Squid is now in the last stages of post-production and will be delivered to National Geographic in time to be show as part of Expedition Week this autumn.

Check our Facebook page and Twitter feeds for updates and get ready for an updated website later this year.

Meeting With A Mola Mola

The open ocean is blue and clear. It is vast. Rick Rosenthal has spent most of his life trying to discover its secrets and it was amazing to free dive with him into the abyss. As part of the ‘squid team’ in the Azores Rick was charged with filming sperm whales. They are the ‘witness’ in our story because they, unlike humans, have seen giant squid in their natural habitat. In the Azores about an 1/8th of the sperm whale diet by mass is estimated to be giant squid. In the days of whaling, before 1986, cut up sperm whales revealed their stomach contents and sometimes had giant squid inside. Rick set out to learn what the sperm whales knew.

Every day on the sea is different. As Rick has often told me, 'the sea has a switch and sometimes it is on, and sometimes it is off'. Days, costly days, can be spent finding nothing, 'you have to pay your dues,' says Rick. He did. In just a few days the weather cleared and we had series of amazing encounters.

One evening, about 25 miles out, we were just about to go back. Rick suggested I should use his kayak and go and see what we could find. Mario, Rick’s Azorean teammate, propelled the amazing craft, by a bicycle-like mechanism, which flaps rowing blades below. Soon we were jetting over the sea, a slight swell raising and lowering our vision of a whale as we silently (and most importantly without distress for the animal) came closer. But at over a hundred yards away we saw its tail (the 'fluke’) raise into the air – the sign that the game was up – it had dived and disappeared, perhaps a mile below. It was then that we saw the gigantic fin above the surface. Could it be a shark ? This was probably not the time to remember that the world record for the king of all sharks, a 41.2 foot great white, comes from exactly this spot.

Tentatively I held the camera over the side of the kayak – a good compromise between getting the shot and not getting eaten. Then there were shouts from Rick on the main boat that I didn’t understand at first, 'John, John, it’s a mola mola, get in, get in!' A mola mola or sunfish is an entirely peaceful creature and is found in all the world’s seas. It is a gigantic ocean traveler and often comes to the surface where it rolls around for a while in the sun, I presume. Time slowed down, now I was in the water inches away from one of the largest fishes in the sea, perhaps even the largest bony fish on Earth. This was a beautiful monster, weighing over a ton, quite a bit longer than me, and the world record is about 9 feet. It seemed to blink as its eye swiveled to spot me going past. I blinked back; who wouldn’t at meeting such a giant?

Rick, nearly twenty years my senior and twenty times as fit had dived off the boat and was beside me. He swam for a while by the gentle giant and filmed it as it quietly turned and plummeted into the dark below, to go who knows where?

Now we know we are in the right place, an ocean crossroads where the giants come. And we are paying our dues to see a giant squid.

This film will be showing during Expedition Week on National Geographic Channel in November this year watch it to see what other amazing encounters the crew have in the Azores

John Ruthven producer for the giant squid-hunting film, pictured above in our Azorean production office

Rick Rosenthal Filming For Ammonite

Rick Rosenthal has just gone back to the US, he was with us in the Azores for two weeks and the experience was incredible.

Rick is an oceanographer and a legendary cinematogragrapher. Enthusiasm radiates from him as he talks about the life he has witnessed in the ocean. It is clear that the more he sees the more incredible and mysterious this underwater world is. Ammonite is concerned with filming the natural, uninhibited behaviour of animals and Rick has developed a way of filming that gets closer to marine life than most other people.

Using a motor boat to get far out to sea, Nounou the skipper lets down a microphone on a long underwater cable to listen in to the activity going on all around us, Nounou differentiates between the dolphins and whales and then works out how fast the whales are moving and in which direction. We are looking for large groups of whales including full grown males, these are the ones that will dive deep and swallow massive amounts of whatever is living down there – including quantities of giant squid.

The boat stops a considerable distance from some whales that are close to the ocean’s surface. Rick then lowers an inflatable kayak into the water and paddles over towards the animals, they see the kayak but the approach is quiet and non-threatening and the animal usually stays around, unbothered. When he is very close, if Rick feels that his presence is of no concern, he will get in the water, the animal might choose to swim away but often it simply continues to do whatever it was doing.

The footage from these trips is magical, we’ve seen a lot of whales but we’ve seen plenty of other interesting things too. At one point our producer John Ruthven was scared out of his skin when a large fin sticking out of the water looking remarkably like a large shark came very close to the kayak. On investigation this turned out to be the biggest Mola Mola (ocean sunfish) anybody had ever seen, these are deep sea creatures and comparatively rare. Rick and John got in the water and shot some fantastic footage of the strange animal as it swam around surveying them.

We’ve also discovered quite a lot of debris that has floated up from the depths, the remains of a whale’s dinner that has come to the surface, giving us a tantalising glimpse of what we might find when the Giant Cable is lowered down to 500 metres tonight.

The Guppster: More Modifications

After the first dip in the water we realised that a wooden cradle that could hold the Guppster out of the water would make life a lot easier than trying to get it in and out of the boat.

We also realised that we had made this beast far too strong, it was pulling the boat down when in the water. So we have clipped it's wings, making it lighter and less powerful. The latest test went really well, now all we have to do is sort out the camera electronics.

More pics of the Guppster and crew are on Ammonite Film's Facebook page

Guppster Gets A Tattoo

Luis Roque is an Azorean diver, boatman and an artist, he is working with Ammonite on our giant squid challenge and has given the Guppster a proper ocean-going tattoo.

The Giant Cable Arrives ...

... and then what?

After several nail-biting days when the Giant Cable* appeared to be lost in transit, a lorry turned up and dumped it on our driveway.

The next problem was how to shift it somewhere useful, here's how we managed it.



*The Giant Cable is the lynchpin of our efforts to find the Giant Squid - without it we might as well go home.

Where Are We?

We are in the Atlantic Ocean, on a volcanic pinnacle rising 3000 metres out of the Atlantic Ridge.

Apparently we are a long away, but it doesn't feel so, it's the sort of place that feels very familiar. Here on Faial potatoes, bananas and pineapples thrive,blue hydrangeas bloom abundantly in hedgerows and every sort of weather is a daily occurrence. Strange - but in a good way

Ammonite's Night Shift

This was the scene at 4am last Friday morning at Heathrow airport.

We have now arrived in the Azores, the 500 metre cable that got lost has finally been delivered and we are in the process of adapting our boat, the Maikira.

News Flashes and photos are posted on our Facebook page.

How Many Filmmakers Fit In A Cupboard?

Last week the Southampton Oceanographic Centre appeared to be trying to enter the record books for the amount of people it could squeeze into one of it's small research labs; apart from all the tanks and microscopes in the cupboard-sized space, there were three camera people and a producer plus Charlotte Marcinko (pictured above) and Martha Valiadi who are working on aspects of bioluminescence in plankton at the Oceanographic Centre.

Charlotte and Martha have been extremely patient and helpful over the last few months while we have been trying to set this shoot up. Cultivating the plankton (Pyrocystis fusiformis)is a skilled feat, these animals are difficult to cultivate in the quantities that we need for filming.

We got the light show and an important sequence in our story of how important bioluminescence is to a marine ecosystem.

We will now make a giant step to the next phase of filming as we head for the Azores in our grand quest to find and film a giant squid.

Why Are We So Interested In Bioluminescence?

When Martin Dohrn first observed Bioluminescence he knew that he wanted to record and explore this amazing natural phenomenon. Thus began the story of Ammonite's incredible Starlight Cameras.

Early results were impressive but commissioners were far more interested in capturing the night life of land animals - until last year Ammonite's low-light camera stayed in the dry.

Last year National Geographic Channel laid down the challenge for us to find the Giant Squid, it was the opportunity we have been waiting for and we leapt at it.

To date, most of the deep sea exploration has been made using trawlers dragging nets or using noisy ROV's these haven't really yielded great results.

We knew that Ammonite's cameras could be the secret weapon in this search for the animal that has eluded all other expeditions. There have been so many difficulties; we have had to work out how to overcome the logistical problems of getting our camera deep enough into the ocean, how to keep it steady in the water and we needed to understand where and how to look for the giant squid. We have had enormous help from many scientists who have already spent their working lifetime trying to enrich our knowledge of life in the ocean, one of these scientific giants is Edie Widder, her TED talk is a great introduction to the wonders of bioluminescence and gives some idea of what we are trying to build on: