This is some footage I shot (with a great deal of help from the wonderful Ben Stiel) in Indonesia in January this year. Of course it feels like a few lifetimes ago now.
We shot it in Komodo National Park, well, underwater there, just off the Eastern tip of Flores.
Ben and I had never been diving before, but we did our beginners' course in Bali, then our advanced course in Flores, before diving for 3 days straight off a dive boat, that allowed us to find all the life you see in the video. Unfortunately the last day of the trip I fell on the boat and broke my shoulder blade, but luckily Ben picked up the camera and continued filming underwater the rest of the day.
I hope you like the footage, it was one of the most magical experiences of my life filming it. Finally, I had been filming the Great Barrier Reef in December 2019, a month beforehand, and we hadn't found anything like what I found in Indonesia. In fact what I saw of the Great Barrier Reef was scary, as it was so damaged and degraded. The reef has been devastated both by extreme weather (e.g. Cyclone Debbie) and bleaching events (at least the sections near Airlie Beach that I saw). Increasing intensity of extreme weather events and increasing temperatures that lead to bleaching are both caused by climate change (https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/c..., https://www.marineconservation.org.au...).
If we want to protect the kind of life that you can see in this video, we have to stop polluting our air and oceans, we need to use renewable energy and put life on our planet before profit.