When I first left university, I immediately went to work in television, and one of the first companies I worked with was Ammonite Films, an independent production company headed by filmmaker Martin Dohrn. In 2016, the year before I graduated, they produced “Attenborough’s Light on Earth“, a fantastic film wherein the team travelled around the world capturing fantastic footage of bioluminescent wildlife. That’s right, wildlife that emits light. How cool is that?!
The team developed, as part of their production, specialised software techniques that allowed them to improve grainy, night time footage of glow worms, beetles, squids and most excitingly for me, algae. Of course, algae in itself might not be that exciting, but go online now and find footage of surfers and dolphins travelling through it, and come back to me and try and tell me that algae is not the coolest shit on the planet with a straight face.
Really short bit of science here, some algae have special chemicals inside of them, luciferin (imagine this is the fuel), and luciferase (imagine this is a spark). The algae floats around in the sea, millions and millions of tiny little lifeforms. When the algae gets shaken about by the ocean waves, or by something swimming through it, the fuel and the spark ignite together to create a bright blue glow – the bioluminescence!
This is Pokémon level shit, and I’ve always wanted to see it in person, so I added it to ✓ Project Bucket List. On our trip to Los Angeles, we actually managed to get COVID after an elderly man at the airport spluttered all over me, so we weren’t entirely lucid during the middle of our trip. Still, we took advantage of the change of scenery as much as we could, and went over to Santa Monica Pier.
A few nights later, something happened and it’s one of the few times that I’ve felt like the universe must’ve been telling me something. Something that, somehow, I heard. I cannot tell what inspired me to look for “bioluminescence Los Angeles” on Facebook, perhaps I’d picked up on something subconsciously while stumbling around Santa Monica, but I found a group for people to report sightings, and over the last few nights, there had been hundreds!
On November 1st, Day of the Dead, we took a long nap and decided that if there was just one single report, we’d hope in the car and go over to Santa Monica Pier and try to see the glow. Luckily, at around 9pm, we got our first notice, a sighting, just south of Santa Monica Pier, so we threw on the most comfortable clothes we had, and dragged ourselves out of bed to take the 45 minute drive over to the beach.
As we staggered across the sand, getting closer and closer, I realised that I’d also somehow lost my driving licence. We laughed at the idea that if there wasn’t any algae here, we’d at the very least have a story to tell. Lo and behold, there, right in front of us, a wave broke across the horizon and the sea lit up a beautiful shade of deep but bright blue. We gasped, and join the small pattering of onlookers staring out into the water.
I cannot claim the pictures do it justice, there’s something magical about seeing it in person, something that just doesn’t translate digitally. Not every wave is the same, some are bigger than others and we constantly found ourselves exclaiming “OOH that one! That one!” over and over.
There are certain things that I believe you must experience in person. Seeing the Milky Way without light pollution, feeling an earthquake, seeing fork lightning light up the sky across a mountain – all BIG things to experience, but I class bioluminescent algae as a miniscule David against these Goliaths. If you find yourself in a place you don’t usually spend time, especially warmer climates, have a quick check and see if you can see bioluminescent algae there. It’s an incredible experience.
We stuck around for a little less than half an hour. The sickness was getting to us again, we were both sweating buckets at that point, and I had started to worry about my driving licence again. Santa Monica Pier (Brighton pier, just with an America accent, FYI), loomed over us, it’s bright features casting light down upon us and making us increasingly aware that we should be at home, in bed.
I found the driving licence down the side of the seat of the car, and lost it again the next day in the same way.