Loch Creran Coast

.

Loch Creran is a conservation area,

because of its incredible marine life.

but what makes it so special

are some very shy tube worms that are busy building their own city

out there under the water and this I've got to see.

These waters conceal some curious little worms that build tube-shaped shells around themselves.

Those tube worms have created their own version of a tropical coral reef,

the largest of its kind in the northern hemisphere.

It's down there somewhere and I've got to find it.

-Hi there.

-Hi, how you doing?

My guides in Loch Creran are David Hughes, a marine biologist

and Emily Venables, an oceanographer.

This loch's global claim to fame is down to the shells that the worms build around themselves.

Each individual worm secretes a hard calcified tube around itself that it uses to protect itself.

Normally, we find these worms

just growing as single individuals on stones or bits of shell.

But in a very small number of places you get large numbers of worms

settling together, growing on top of each other.

'Those hard tubes are the building blocks of an underwater city and I want to see it.

'Emily Venables is my tour guide.'

-OK.

-OK, good.

And here we are.

What's incredible about these tube worm reefs is there's just silt everywhere on the bottom

of the loch here and suddenly you come across this little oasis.

Inside these tubes is a creature much like an earth worm,

but the only part you can see is its delicate fan of tentacles,

used to filter food from the water.

And the slightest disturbance causes them to pull back lightning fast

into their hard tubes for protection.

I love it when you just swim over them and it's like fireworks in reverse.

They all just dart in very quickly.

These shy little worms fashion their tubes out of the same hard

material as other sea shells, calcium carbonate,

but because they form vertical branch structures,

they build up a reef where other creatures come to hide or hunt.

There's so many things living here - we've got a hermit crabs, we've got anemones, we've got sea urchins.

It's just a whole cast of characters living in this little city.

It's absolutely brilliant, it's teeming with life.

That's what we wanted to see, the scallop just swimming away.

It's like a pair of comedy false teeth, isn't it?

These are queen scallops, they're fascinating, they suck in some water

and then they squirt it out really quickly - it's like a jet.

There is a huge amount of marine life living in this one little spot

and if it wasn't for the tube worms, there wouldn't be all these creatures here.

Mooring boats and fishing are restricted in Loch Creran to protect the reefs.

We should treasure our underwater worm city.