Nature legend's feature film Ocean plumbs depths of ravaging by industrial fishing fleets

DAVID Attenborough is using his 99th birthday to deliver a powerful message to world leaders: you have one last big chance to save our seas.

- BY MARK JEFFERIES

The film Ocean, released today, features what is expected to be his final scenes shot on location, on England's Jurassic Coast cliffside.

As the cinema film is not a BBC production, Attenborough is free from the corporation's impartiality rules.

And he uses this freedom to hit out at industrial fishing ships "sent by a few wealthy nations" that he says are "starving coastal communities of the food sources they have relied on for millennia".

As small Liberian fishing craft are dwarfed by industrial trawlers off the west coast of Africa, Attenborough argues: "This is modern colonialism at sea. Some 400,000 industrial vessels now hunt every corner of the ocean. Nowhere is too far or too deep."

MEADOWS

He also explains how ocean "jungles" and "meadows" absorb far more carbon than rainforest on land and, if they are not destroyed by boats, they can help Earth avoid climate disaster.

It is hoped the feature-length film will play a decisive role in saving biodiversity and protecting the planet from climate change.

In it, Attenborough also blasts giant fishing nets and trawler boats, saying: "The idea of bulldozing through a pristine rainforest causes outrage.

"Yet we do the equivalent underwater thousands of times every day."

And he warns the human campaign of violence against sea creatures even rivals the power of huge natural disasters.

He explains: "Sharks and turtles survived the extinction of the dinosaurs but may not outlive this.