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When you put your head underwater on a coral reef it is just an absolutely dizzying array of shapes

and colours and noises and sounds. It's completely overwhelming.

Coral reefs, to me, are the most beautiful and most valuable ecosystems we have on this planet.

People refer to them as the rainforests of the sea because they are so fantastically diverse

and full of different forms of animals and plants. Dr Tim Lamont is a marine biologist at

Lancaster University in England. He spent most of his childhood in East Africa and the first time

he swam in a reef was off the coast of Kenya. And I still remember that sense of swimming around

and seeing some things that I knew what they were and all sorts of things that I'd never seen

before had no idea what they were and it really did feel and there are times when it still feels

like you could swim around the corner and come across anything.

To most of us coral reefs conjure up magical places full of colourful species and life

but they're also unknown and otherworldly humans don't belong there. Scoobert hanks and breathing

apparatus seem a bit clunky and out of place. And you get this real sense of being a visitor

in this ecosystem and this real sense of powerlessness almost. You know everything around you on the

reef is swimming around so effortlessly and elegantly and beautifully and it looks naturally in

its place and you feel like this sort of ungainly unwieldy being. That's what you're doing around

...