On a small yacht off the coast of the Mediterranean island of Malta, Marlon Clark held up a grizzled root of the seagrass Posidonia oceanica to admire its potential. His bright orange anorak ruffled in the breeze as the beaming 29-year-old pointed out a khaki patch on the root, smaller than a thumbnail. Clark was fascinated. What looked like the “moss of the ocean” was actually an animal. “It’s just weird because, on land, it’s very obvious what’s an animal and what’s a plant. I feel like when you go into the ocean, there’s stuff that just doesn’t look like either of those,” he said. “It feels like you’re going to a different planet.”
Clark is a “bioprospector”, a modern-day explorer who searches the seas for undiscovered life. This is not the swashbuckling adventure of a Francis Drake, nor of Charles Darwin spotting a blue-footed booby for the first time. But, in the seagrass root named after the god of the ocean, there could be millions of microbes that could hold clues to solving human problems or even saving lives. Clark works with a team of divers who explore the shipwrecks scattered around Malta, hunting for such treasures.
Diving down to 60 metres underwater — the equivalent of a 20-storey building — has plenty of challenges, even for someone accustomed to chainsawing through Antarctic ice like Clark. Sometimes, the divers struggle to unfurl a tape measure on the sea floor. Sometimes they lose their grip on sample bottles, which bob to the surface like escaped balloons. But they press on, harvesting the rich diversity of flora and fauna around crashed boats, planes and submarines from the second world war.