CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Hello and welcome to Nature Fix with me,
Claire Hickinbotham. Every month we take you with us as we meet
the people who spend their time outside and join them in a place
that most inspires them.
Today we're in the Isle Of Wight to meet Theo Vickers, who took a
childhood hobby and turned it into a career, shunning the
lifestyle many his age opt for and choosing a path that would
see him spending a lot of time at the beach.
So I've just arrived at Compton Bay on the Isle Of Wight. And
actually we drove past this spot a couple of hours ago when the
tide was all the way in up to the bottom of the cliffs.
And in just a couple of hours, the tide's gone out probably 80,
100 m?
And you can see that this is rock pool heaven. So I'm going
to go down onto the beach and meet Theo Vickers, who is a bit
of an expert rock pooler.
Hello, you must be Theo.
THEO VICKERS: I am yes, how are you?
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Good. How are you?
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, not too bad at all.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So before we get started on rock pooling,
is that a shipwreck?
THEO VICKERS: That is a shipwreck. Yes, it's the SS
carbon. I think a 1940s, 1950s tug that ran aground. It's been
left there ever since.
Compton Bay is this nice big stretch of coast, sand with
these big rocky ledges, and so it stays quite shallow, quite a
long way out.
And so historically if you were a like an 18th century vessel
without modern navigation equipment, very easy to run
aground and to to kind of wreck on those rocks.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And where we are now, this is Compton Bay,
and that's a part of the bigger freshwater bay?
THEO VICKERS: So to the south, we've got this kind of coastline
of sandstone and clay so the wessex relation, the otherwise
famous dinosaur fossil producing rock that will run down this
winds southwest stretch for like 3 or 4 miles.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So we're gonna go rock pooling.
THEO VICKERS: Yes, we are. Brilliant.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: What kit have you got with you?
THEO VICKERS: We've got some wellies, we've got some nets and
containers, got my underwater cameras. I'll go out on the
rocky ledge at Hanover Point, see what we can find.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And we're OK to do this even though we're
not kids?
THEO VICKERS: Yes, we're absolutely fine to do this even
though we're not kids!
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Brilliant! Let's go!
I can't walk past these cliffs without asking you a little
question about dinosaurs.
So growing up on the Isle Of Wight, dinosaurs must have been
a big part of why you would come to the beach and finding
fossils.
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, so I'm, I'm quite heavily involved with
fossil hunting on the island as well. So over the years I've
collected quite a few fossil things like ammonites and and
fossil mammals and some bits of dinosaur bone from along here.
So that's always been a part of my interest in natural history
as well.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Does it all link together for you?
THEO VICKERS: It's easy to think they're separate, but actually
this is just modern life on Earth, and that's past life on
Earth. It's the same interest in animals and biology. It's just
that stuff's really, really dead and this stuff's alive,
basically.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Is that a big pull for people to come to
the Isle Of Wight?
THEO VICKERS: We get lots of visitors around the world and
across the UK who are coming here for the sole purpose of
dinosaur fossils.
Where we are at Hanover Point now, you've got the dinosaur
footprints, famous dinosaur footcasts in the summer months
we'll take hundreds of people down here to see them because
that is a really big draw, a big part of our heritage on the Isle
of Wight.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: What is it about rock pooling that appeals
to you?
THEO VICKERS: It was how my interest in the sea began really
as a child, and I think it's being able to kind of find like
a really amazing diversity of things without actually having
to get too wet.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Are you from the Isle Of Wight?
THEO VICKERS: Yes, I was born here
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So rock pooling was weekly activity for
you?
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, weekends, school holidays, those sorts of
things. I was always the nature kid, I always had a fascination
with natural history, so like dinosaurs, sharks, all those
sort of things.
Growing up here, you were able to engage with that a bit more
than perhaps might do in other places, and so rock pooling was
a big thing, that kind of got me into marine biology in the first
place.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And what would people from the Isle Of
Wight normally do? Do you leave the island and come back at some
point?
THEO VICKERS: A lot of people in my generation, they'll head to
the mainland because that's where a lot of the economic
opportunity is.
And certainly if you're not so interested in nature in the
outdoors, there isn't much here for you.
And it's part of the issues that we have here with things like
social deprivation and those sorts of things. But if you're
into the outdoors, you're into nature, it's a perfect, perfect
place to grow up.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: It was never something that you
fancied?
THEO VICKERS: So I went to the university in Portsmouth,
commuted on the ferry. I spent a year living in Falmouth in
Cornwall doing my masters, so not really pushing the boat out
very far in terms of like environmental change or
anything.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: But if you found your happy place, you
know, you don't need to change it, do you?
THEO VICKERS: I think if you got those interests, this is a
perfect place to be.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So what are we hoping to see in the rock
pools today?
THEO VICKERS: We'll see a good amount of species, I think. So
we'll see things like velvet swimming crabs, so they'll be
underneath some of the boulders, hopefully some things like sea
slugs, sea urchins.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Do you rock pool in all weathers?
THEO VICKERS: You can do it in some reasonably uncomfortable
conditions if you're really into it and you're really interested.
And at night, actually in the rock pools and under the sea
here, there are lots of species that become much more active. So
we do safaris where we take guests out at night, we have big
torches.
So then you can see things like Conger Eels and some of the
pools, lots of really active crabs.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh wow.
THEO VICKERS: We can see biofluorescence, so we use UV
torches and you shine it across some of these rock ledges in
particular species of sea anemone, or biofluoresce,
they'll glow in the dark, essentially, so that's quite a
cool thing. People seem to really enjoy them.
So we're gonna head, you can see like a channel between us and
our families, that's the best spot, so we'll head down there.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So you're wearing wellies, Theo.
THEO VICKERS: Yes Yeah
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: That's very sensible.
Are you looking for something already?
THEO VICKERS: There's a little animal here...
Ah, so there's a tail you can see...
The tail of a fish.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh yeah.
THEO VICKERS: So that is-
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Just burrowing away into a hole in a
rock
THEO VICKERS: There we go. And he's got lightning into there!
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh he's a speedy little thing isn't he!
THEO VICKERS: So that's a little species of Blennies. It's
probably the most common rock pool fish we get.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: They're making use of the holes in the
rock.
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, the rock ledges here at Compton Bay are
actually quite soft. It's this sort of clay. These are the
burrows of piddocks.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: What's a piddock?
THEO VICKERS: A species of clam that will burrow through this
kind of soft sediment, creating these very surgical holes that
you're seeing drilled into all of the clay around us.
So what happens is once these guys die, they create these
holes. So like we were seeing that fish using their abandoned
hole.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And that was just a little-
THEO VICKERS: A little puddle!
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: But I wasn't gonna call it a puddle. I
thought that wouldn't be scientific enough!
It effectively is!
THEO VICKERS: So if you just sort of move a bit slowly. You
can sometimes see stuff moving.
I might whisk some of the seaweed aside. Yeah, there's
nothing crazy under that one actually. There is a little
anemone down here though, little Snakelocks Anemone just there.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh yeah, like a little tuft of grass.
THEO VICKERS: There's two of them together, so they're
probably clones of each other, so they reproduce asexually many
Anemone. They just split their bodies and one half will become
another individual.
So those guys are just filter feeding and they're waiting for
small shrimps, crustaceans to come by and just grab them with
the tentacles and pull them in and feed on them, essentially.
So they're like these passive carnivores. And this is the
species that when we do the night safaris, that
biofluoresces, so those guys glow in the dark under UV light.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: That's fascinating because it's tiny,
isn't it? And you'd very easily walk past that without realizing
what you're looking at. But even just you picking it up and using
the word clone makes it interesting!
THEO VICKERS: It's pretty weird!
And then what we'll do, we'll go down into that channel we'll
start flipping big rocks, and we'll find some hopefully some
bigger stuff.
You wanna find a rock, you almost wanna kind of put your
fingers in the danger zone.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Are you being nibbled by anything?
THEO VICKERS: No, not yet.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So I wouldn't think if I were to go
rock pooling.
That it would be OK to lift up the rocks.
THEO VICKERS: It's, it, it's a very good point.
So it's OK to do it as long as you do it properly. And what
we're gonna do, and this is the cardinal rule of rock pulling on
that topic, we're gonna make sure it goes back the right way
up.
We've got an interesting rock here I'll have a look under this
one. Big velvet swimming crab, you can see in that pool that.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh yeah, our first crab!
THEO VICKERS: They're quite aggressive.
They've got the name Devil crab is one of their other common
names and you can see two blood red eyes in there, so that's
partly where the name comes from, and they're also often
quite aggressive.
So you can see when it thought we'd seen it there, the arms
went up like that, and it's like a threat display, it's like stay
away, I'm really big.
But you can see, so for a crab that's got like a really bad
reputation.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: It's very close to me!
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, let's move out the way slightly! If you
stroke its back, you can feel what it's called a velvet
swimming crab.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh god yeah!
THEO VICKERS: It's sort of really soft, yeah. So it's all
these fine little hairs. And again, it might be to help with
getting sand stuck to you to like camouflage you a little
bit.
But yeah, so for a crab that's got this really like mean
attitude, they're actually quite soft and they look quite good,
yeah.
They can be pretty big. There we go, and they're quite strong as
well.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So did he just propell himself out of your
hand?
THEO VICKERS: One of their kind of protective moves is they are
swimming crabs, so if you look to their back legs. You can see
like a flat paddle, so they often go like that because they
think it's defense to get away from anything, it's to try and
swim.
And so they're quite strong so they can just hop out sometimes
like he just did. So fair play to him he's, he's escaped.
There we go.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh that was a good spot.
THEO VICKERS: So you can kind of see now there's really lush
seaweed. So we're right down on like the lowest extent of the
shore, so the diversity here is higher because the exposure's
less on average, so this place is exposed to the air less
frequently than it would be like up by the the dinosaur tracks.
So a high tide, this might be 2/3 m deep. And then off the
back of the rocks here you've got like the beginnings of like
kelp forest and deeper subtidal habitats.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Anyone ever says kelp forest, it makes me
think of the Octonauts.
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, get that a lot on me.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Do you?
THEO VICKERS: Yeah.
Oh, actually there's some kelp there.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: What is kelp?
THEO VICKERS: So kelp is an informal name for a group of
brown algae essentially. So it usually describes quite big
forest forming species. So that's really cool to see. And
that one there's sea oak.
Oh, there's a velvet crab, so you can see the little ones
again, it's gone under that bowl there.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So that was the same with the devil eyes?
THEO VICKERS: With the devilish eyes, and actually he was
missing an arm, probably through fighting other crabs. A lot of
them can be quite cannibalistic, they might feed on each other,
so you often see crabs are missing arms, but actually that
will grow back.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And how long have you been rock pooling?
THEO VICKERS: So I was like 4 or 5 years old. So a lifetime
pursuit, basically, yeah.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And what have you noticed has changed in
that time?
THEO VICKERS: You're seeing lots of species. We'd more typically
see in Cornwall and Devon than we would have done here, maybe
20 years ago, arriving because the winters in our seas are
milder on average as sea temperatures are rising through
climate change, and so that means that species within the UK
will just shift their ranges, their distributions.
So the Mantis crab's a really good example here. That's a crab
that we've picked up on the safaris here now quite a few
times, but before 2020 it hadn't ever been seen on the Isle Of
Wight, and historically it was only really found in West
Cornwall. So if you go rock pooling in Falmouth, it's
everywhere.
It's a really, really common species of crab, but it was
never here when I was a child.
And we're starting to see females like mature females, the
eggs, so we know they're breeding here now.
This incremental advance as the crab's gone it's a bit more
comfortable further east now, oh, it's a bit more comfortable
further east, and then it just keeps going and going and going.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Didn't you have a term that you used for
it?
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, it's my colloquial term. I call it south
westification!
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: I think it's a great term!
THEO VICKERS: Yeah so becoming more like Cornwall and Devon. I
think I have made up, yeah.
I mean, it describes what's happening. A lot of the species
we're seeing are from the rocky shores in the southwest.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And a big part of what you do is record
keeping, isn't it? Even if you don't keep the records to give
that data to somebody else to keep those records, because our
lifetime is almost insignificant in the big scheme of things,
isn't it? But it's important that those records exist forever
more, really.
THEO VICKERS: I mean, the Isle Of Wight's marine biological
records are quite limited. There hasn't really been a lot of
marine recording here, whereas there's been loads of stuff with
insects and birds and stuff on land.
And so with these, we're partly trying to just create these
really cool baselines for different sites like Compton Bay
here, St Helen's, Culver, you know, on the east side of the
Isle Of Wight, so that you've then got this really like
exhaustive list of all the animals when they were first
seen. And so as we can keep doing these for years, you might
get some really cool data sets of, you know, when stuff's
appeared.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: It's more than a job really, isn't it?
THEO VICKERS: A bit of an obsession to be honest with you!
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Let's go with obession!
Shall we?
THEO VICKERS: Yeah we'll have a look at some more rocks.
There's a good one here actually, we'll have a look
under that one.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And there's something there moving, what's
that? Is that a tiny little crab?
THEO VICKERS: Yes, that's a hairy crab. You see, it's like a
little tarantula, pop in your hand. These guys are like really
docile. He's actually playing dead.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh, is he dead?
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, well, he's playing dead. So he thinks that
if it's dead, then we're a bird, we're not gonna eat it. We won't
be quite that interested.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: I mean, I'm not being funny, but that's
smaller than a peanut.
THEO VICKERS: I know yeah.
They're a cool little species and you can see it's got one
massive arm like Popeye and one little arm there, so probably
the big arm for crushing, the little arm for maybe cutting and
manipulating things a bit more.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: We should mention we've got another person
with us really, shouldn't we? Laura, who's working away in the
background!
THEO VICKERS: Laura look that rock is a fossil tree.
You can see that. These segmented things. So these are
big petrified fossil trees from the Wessex Formation. So from
the dinosaur bearing-
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: They're segments of the original tree
trunk?
It's quite obvious to see, isn't it.
THEO VICKERS: About 130 million years old or so.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So we've got your assistant?
THEO VICKERS: Yes, partner, girlfriend! Laura!
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Laura, how do you feel about the word
assistant, Laura?
LAURA: I'll take it!
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Laura is on the rock pool safari with this,
working ahead of us, finding the good stuff.
THEO VICKERS: Is there anything over there?
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Oh. What have you seen?
THEO VICKERS: There's a little, oh, fantastic, right. That's
find of the day. That's really cool. That is little clingfish.
They're like a really specialized species of fish and
what's happened to them is the pectoral fins, like the arm fins
basically.
Have become almost like a suction cup, and so it means
they can like adhere themselves to to the to the rocks
basically.
So in a in a wave exposed place like this, it means you can like
happily feed all day long just hopping along the bottom of the
rocks. But they're very, very cool, that's a really cool
little fish to see. That was very cool though.
Ah there's a hermit crab! I can see there walking.
Walking away there. And there is, is that there's something
else, it's like really tiny. That's a hairy hermit crab.
So you can literally see how hairy the like claws are. So if
you look at a hermit crab out of its shell, it's entire body
after the head has almost spiraled, they have evolved
almost in like symbiosis with shells.
So they've evolved that entire lifestyle, they have to have a
shell to survive.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: It's incredible isn't it!
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, it's really, really cool. And so as they get
bigger, they will like kind of upsizing the house you live in,
they'll look for bigger shells. So we've seen them in the sea
grass on the island, literally walking from a smaller shell to
a bigger shell and popping into it and then walking off with a
bigger shell.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So you've been carrying quite an
impressive camera.
THEO VICKERS: So it's a little Sony mirrorless camera, but it's
in like a dive housing, yes, it's in underwater housing.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So we're gonna try and get a good shot of
the seaweed.
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You often see the underwater
pictures, there's a very like fish eye kind of appearance to
it. So that's what that lens will help to create. It's just
getting people on the island interested in marine life around
the island, that's the big thing.
I think you can say it for the whole UK you can say it locally
as well. Marine literacy in Britain is relatively poor, even
though we're an island nation of islands.
People actually have relatively limited knowledge of the natural
history of the marine environment around the UK, maybe
much less than they do, for example, like birds or, you
know, they might have in their back garden.
You can show people pictures of a cuttlefish, and I'll say that
I have no idea what that is, and you'll say, well, that's the
white thing that you might find washed up on the beach, and then
they go, hang on, you know, that makes sense.
So for me, the real impetus and the drive has been to get people
thinking that marine life's cool, it's worth taking interest
in, and then they can take action locally and we can create
a better environment for our seas.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Sounds perfect. Should we start heading
back?
So I know, it's a kind of-
It's something you've loved doing from childhood and you've
made it your, your life, your job, your career.
And you've got that natural interest, but does it give you
more than that?
THEO VICKERS: Yeah, it's just that for me, like, it's a sense
of like purpose, like I'm on a, a sort of mission, I suppose.
I've found what I wanna do. I wanna be the guy on the island
of what that helped get marine life big, get the community
interested in nature and, and get local people living more
closely with nature, understanding it better.
So yeah, it's given me actually like a real like mission, like a
sense of purpose, so it's, it's cool, yeah.
Like living on an island that I grew up on that I feel really
passionately about where I feel very much at home doing what
I've always loved doing, you know
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: And sharing it with other people?
THEO VICKERS: It's really cool yeah and showing other people
and getting people interested in it in the same way.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: What's a marker for you of that success,
you know, is it a kid that goes away and they're happy and, or
do you want to hear those stories of, oh, I've become a
marine biologist?
THEO VICKERS: We get lots of examples like this. We get
families give us really nice feed, oh, my kid's really
interested in in marine life now and there's lots of people that
kind of recognize me now around the island.
They go, Oh hi Theo, I saw your pictures, you know, I saw your
video the other day and things like that.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: So you're a local celebrity!
THEO VICKERS: Well, I wouldn't call myself that, but it's cool
when people, you know, they recognize you for what you've
done, and they've got that positive view of it, and they
obviously have taken interest in it because of, you know, a
picture I've shared and that sort of thing, It's cool.
There's a perception in this country again that we don't have
the big megafauna.
You know, there's a really good selection of whales and dolphins
in our waters. We've got large sharks off the coast of the Isle
Of Wight.
For some people it might be, you know, going rock pooling is the
way you first go, oh actually this is really interesting,
there's some cool stuff down here.
CLAIRE HICKINBOTHAM: Thanks for listening to Nature Fix. We'll
be back next month with a new episode. Why not give us a
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