Newcastle Waterworld

We're heading south on another personal journey,

to a shore where I've been rock-pooling since childhood.

But this is a special trip below Bloody Bridge, near Newcastle,

because I'm searching the nooks and crannies

with a superb naturalist, Trevor Norton.

Now, this actually looks quite a good shore,

because it's very exposed to the waves,

and therefore there's not so much seaweed

-and you can actually see what's going on.

-Uh-huh.

And the interesting thing about these shores

is that a lot of the features of them are identically the same

wherever you are in the world.

Almost anywhere in the world, there'll be a barnacle zone like this

and there'll be a zone with little periwinkles above it

and there'll be a band of red seaweeds down below.

And the voice of the ocean is the same no matter where you go.

-Yes, the lisp of the waves.

-Yeah!

I wonder why we actually are so fond of the sound of water.

'Trevor heard a whisper in the shells when he was a lad.

'Now he's a retired marine scientist

'whose books chronicle his lifelong love affair with the sea.'

One of the things I love most about the pools here is the colour.

It's fantastic, isn't it? We can't see any rock here.

That's all pink seaweed, hard as the rock.

-It's inedible. It's safe from grazing.

-It does look just like rock.

It's just a normal seaweed.

It's got normal cells, and it spreads,

but it impregnates the cells with calcium. Simple as that.

This goes back to childhood. It probably does with you as well.

You come to somewhere like this

and it's different every single time you come here.

Every time I discover a rock pool like this, it's magic.

It never ceases to amaze me.

They say "Life's a box of chocolates, you never know what you'll get". Like this.

If you just peel back that coralline seaweed, look.

-A common starfish.

-It is a starfish, yeah.

Isn't that beautiful?

When you think of predators, you think of lions

and things like that.

But these guys are killers.

Once a starfish embraces a clam,

it's doomed,

because the clam can only clam shut with its muscles, which get tired,

but the starfish works on hydraulics. It never gets tired.

It always wins.

As soon as the clam gapes,

out comes its stomach like an air bag in a car

and it just squirts acid in, dissolves it alive. That's your fate.

Lucky we're big. If we were small, the first time we went to the seaside

-would be our last.

-Truth is always stranger than fiction.

If you think about how these creatures live... We found a starfish

which has got missing limbs, but they can regenerate them.

It's quite common. Fishermen used to cut them into bits,

because they'd steal their clams and things,

but each bit, if it had a bit of the middle in,

would regenerate into a whole starfish.

And the little crab that we found, as well, he's missing claws.

They often lose a claw or two. Again, no problem,

-they can regenerate it.

-But how's he going to eat?

Without the claws to pinch and hold on, how's he going to make a living?

They'll eat things that are decaying,

so if the eggs are softened, he can eat them

with the tiny bits of knives and forks close to his mouth.

We don't think of those as being fantastically good predators,

but they would be one of the kings, if not THE king,

-in this environment, wouldn't they?

-Crabs are assassins in pie crust.

This is one of the few places in the British Isles that's still wild.

There's nowhere on land that hasn't been modified by our activities,

whereas the pools here are exactly as they were a million years ago.

There's a fantastic tradition

of people coming to the shore, isn't there?

The Victorians loved the shore and would ravage

the rock pools for their collections.

But there was frustration. They'd look towards the sea

and they'd know that down there there was more, perhaps better,

and they couldn't go. Incredibly frustrating.

But no longer. You must go.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd