S1 E13: Top 8 Animals to See at the Great Barrier Reef (and Where to Find Them)

Tahn Miller is a Master Reef Guide who has spent 14 years observing and teaching people about magical creatures on the Great Barrier Reef. Join us as we swap crazy stories about close encounters with these incredible animals, while counting down the Top 8 Fantastic Beasts of the Great Barrier Reef and Where to Find Them! (JK Rowling reference, for the Muggles out there).

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SPEAKER_00 0:08

Before we start this episode, I'd just like to acknowledge the 70 different traditional owner groups whose sea country makes up the Great Barrier Reef, and pay my respects to elders, past, present, and emerging. Hello and welcome to Word on the Reef, a podcast where we take the plunge into one of the world's most spectacular natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef. I'm very excited about this episode because today we're going to be counting down the top eight fantastic beasts of the Great Barrier Reef and where to find them. And yes, this is a reference to the JK Rowling movie about a Magi zoologist, Newt Scamander, who has dedicated his life to studying and protecting magical creatures. So today we're going to be talking to a real-life magi zoologist, a master reef guide who has spent years observing and teaching people about the magical creatures on the Great Barrier Reef. Tarn Miller. And with nearly 30 years of experience diving on the reef between us, we've both got a ton of crazy stories to tell about close encounters with these incredible animals, and you won't believe some of the stuff we've seen. It was such a fun chat to record, and I know you're going to really enjoy it. Of course, a coral is the most important and significant animal that you want to see on a coral reef. Because without it, there would be no reef for all the other animals to live on. I explained how corals grow, feed, and breed back in episode 2. So if you haven't already, I highly recommend you go back and listen to that episode first, as it will help you understand some of the things we'll be talking about in today's episode. But basically, what you need to know is that some sea creatures, including corals, can survive for long periods without eating. That's because they absorb colourful microscopic plant cells called zoxanthulae out of the water column and allow those plant cells to live inside their skin. The plant cells give these animals their bright colours. They also photosynthesize sunlight to produce sugar, which they share, providing the animal with most of the energy it needs to survive. Now that you understand that, we can dive right into the interview. Hello, Tan, how are you?

SPEAKER_01 2:38

G'day Tanya, not too bad, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Yeah, good thanks. So can you please tell us about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 2:45

I've been working in the tourism industry for nearly 14 years. I work for Wavelength Reef Cruisers out of Port Douglas. We're a snorkeling operation that goes to the outer reef.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

I understand Wavelength is a tour vessel which is quite dedicated to education and marine protection. What are some of the things you do to help protect the reef?

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Well, we take part in site stewardship programs, daily and weekly monitoring of our sites. We also are in a unique partnership with the University Technology Sydney, where we have a permit to propagate and outplant coral in situ on the reef. It's pretty nice. I think you had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Lorna Howlett. Yeah, so it's exciting and rewarding to be just even a part of it.

SPEAKER_00 3:34

With all the time you've spent in the water over the 14 years, I'm sure you've had some really magical moments with some of these animals, as have I. So I'm really looking forward to sharing some of those magical encounters today. So without further ado, let's leap right into our countdown. And let's be honest, all eight of these animals are equally incredible to see, but I'm going to start off with some which are relatively easy to find almost anywhere on the reef. So let's start off with the very famous clownfish. What can you tell us about clownfish, Tan?

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Well, everybody wants to find Nemo when they come to the reef.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

So where does Nemo live?

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Nemo has a very unique partnership with their a cool creature called the Anemone. And the anemone is part of the Nedarian family, so that means it's closely related to corals and jellyfish.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

The anemone has the ability to sting predators, right? So by hiding inside the anemone, that's how Nemo is protected from predators. But somehow Nemo doesn't get stung because he covers himself in a layer of slime.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

But one of the cool things that I uh that I hear often, no matter where I travel on the reef, is that you know the anemone fish or Nemo is one of the most aggressive fishes on the reef. So uh he, so I should be saying she, because after all, it's a a matriarchy inside the uh anemone with their little system. Uh and they protect that at all costs, even doesn't matter the size of anything coming past, whether it's a turtle or even a scuba diver coming past, that anemone fish will come out and give you a stern warning that you perhaps are too close.

SPEAKER_00 5:33

Absolutely. I've I've witnessed it, I can confirm, even though anemone fish only grow, the biggest they can grow is only about 10 or 11 centimetres long. A lot of the time they're even smaller than that, but they will have a go at things a thousand times their size. So when you're diving on the reef, you should never touch any of the marine life. But I have seen a diver waving their fingers in front of a clownfish before, and they got a nip on the end of their finger, and I guess it didn't hurt very much because the clownfish is so tiny, but it's really cool to see how brave they are defending their anemone. And I've seen them use the same technique when a turtle came to try and eat the anemone. And I've watched, you know, I I took some tourists to show them this clownfish that lived in this anemone, and it was kind of sad watching this turtle eating the anemone, but it was also really amazing seeing the clownfish swimming out, biting the turtle on the eye, trying to bite it on the eye to make it go away.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

So the the anemone fish is you know a part of the damselfish family, and damselfish are very well known for being super territorial. One of the most common ones is the farmer damsel, and uh there's I've seen with my own eyes people drop a tiny little piece of shell into their area that the damselfish grows its algae, and um that damselfish will be so annoyed it'll swim in, pick that piece up, and swim out and drop it beyond its zone. It's uh quite unique to see and can be repeated often.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

And then it'll give you a stern look and say, What are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 7:04

If only speech bubbles or thought bubbles existed in the ocean, what they what the story they'd tell.

SPEAKER_00 7:08

Yeah, they'll have a go at your fins as well, won't they? You mentioned how the clownfish is a sort of a matriarchal family. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Well, one of the biggest misconceptions about clownfish and the we always say, hey, look, there's a family of clownfish, we generalize, but it's not actually the case because they're they're not actually related. The the largest one, she's a dominant female. She rules that anemone with an iron fist, kind of like your average household home. Uh she decides or controls decides most of the heavy decisions in the anemone, and all the smaller ones, it could be anywhere from two to three, perhaps four. I don't think I've seen many more true clownfish and more than that. Definitely on some of the other anemones fish species you have bigger units, but the smaller ones are males and they're not related. And that's because when you know the the female, which is the the breeding female and the largest male, they uh the breeding pair. She'll lay eggs outside the anemone, and the male will spend uh a week or two oxygenating with his flipper and um getting those eggs you know ready to hatch, and they go, they hatch and then swim into the anemone, and then the mother goes, absolutely not. I will not have that many little nappies to change. So she chases them all out, and they have to fend for themselves out amongst the reef ecosystem, perhaps out in the plankton, and they they have to find their way to another anemone. And this is a pretty mean feat because out of the 30 or so anemones we find big enough on the reef, there's only around 10 of them that will actually allow anemone fish in, and it's not only got to find an anemone, but find the right anemone with the right species. And once all this has happened, it has to be accepted by that dominant female because if there's too many in that unit already, then she'll just reject them out. So it's pretty, pretty unique.

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Wow, that is a really interesting life story of the wandering clownfish because they can't really live outside of the anemone, can they? So they have to find one where they'll be accepted.

SPEAKER_01 9:11

The crazier thing is when you know, if you think back to the movie, the opening credits, right? Nemo's mum, they're on the drop-off, she swims out, and she uh spoiler alert, if for anyone that hasn't seen the very well-known, famous finding Nemo, she uh unfortunately comes to an end. And uh if this was to happen in nature, what would happen is that breeding male, the largest one, would change his sex over a matter of weeks into a female and then start breeding with the next largest male. So, what should have happened in the movie is, and again, spoiler alert, Nemo's mum died, Nemo's dad would have then become mum, and then Nemo would have stepped up the ladder and became dad. So Nemo would have actually had the next generation with dad slash mum. It gets confusing, and we see this through the animal kingdom, especially in the ocean, particularly in the ocean, of uh fish starting their life as one gender and and switching to the other. It's not a rule of thumb, one way or the other. Some species all start as females, um, and then perhaps one will emerge as a male to be dominant, like some of our smaller planktovores. But in the anemone fish's case, yeah, it's the boys turning into a girl if if they're lucky.

SPEAKER_00 10:24

Yes, the ocean is full of gender changing, so perfectly natural um behaviour we find in the ocean. Um what else is there to say about clownfish? What would you say are the main threats?

SPEAKER_01 10:39

Well, the drawback to becoming famous is that you become in high demand, I've heard, but and it's pretty well documented that it was well over a million anemone fish uh sorry, anemones and associated anemone fish units got poached off the Great Barrier Reef for the aquarium trade. So one of the things the Marine Park is very, very closely monitoring, and they don't tolerate poaching, so the fines and the penalties are pretty hard because particularly of what happened to the anemone fish.

SPEAKER_00 11:13

I also read that clownfish communicate by making popping and clicking noises to each other.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

One of my favourite things when I do my videography and I record audio as well. I like to call them chirps. When I record damselfish in general, I sample that audio and I love to sneak that damselfish or an enemy chirp into it's like a little Easter eggy type thing into some of my um mini social media productions. So they're quite vocal and they can be easily heard from metres away underwater.

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Wow, the chirping clownfish. Keep your ears peeled when you're snorkeling, everyone. So there are about 30 species of clownfish or anemone fish on the Great Barrier Reef, and the most famous one is bright orange with three white stripes, which was found in the Disney movie. But you also have various other different types. What are some of the other ones to look out for that you'll commonly see?

SPEAKER_01 12:09

One of the cool and uh confusing things about the names of the anemone fish is that some names are localized throughout the world. So, of course, you've got the true clownfish, you've got the false clownfish, you've got the Clarks anemone fish, and you have the Great Barrier Reef anemone fish, which is almost identical except for the white band that goes over the crest of its uh the top of its body, comes to a point rather than it's joined. There's the skunk anemone fish, which some people call the pink anemone fish. But yeah, some of these fish, if you look in different books throughout you know the last 50 years, they've they've actually got different names, and it can be a little confusing, but that's everyone's sort of getting it together these days.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

Yeah, so I think the pink anemone fish, as the name suggests, is you can spot it because it's pink, but doesn't have the three white stripes on its side. It's got one white stripe along the top like a skunk, which is its other name, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

And one of the cool things that you find mainly with that skunk or pink anemone fish is they and not by rule of thumb, but it's more common to find them in a pink or purple anemone, which is called a magnificent anemone, which is just a sight to be seen. These colours that the reef can produce is phenomenal, especially in that one species of anemone. You would have had to encounter some in many hours under the water.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Yeah, absolutely. The clownfish are beautiful, but then the anemone itself can be bright purple, bright green, absolutely amazing. And another type of clownfish that stands out for me is the black anemone fish. They have mainly black body, I think one stripe, one, yeah and orange on their face and their fins.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

Yeah, sometimes people say that anemone fish had a blue stripe, and uh different depths of water, different lights, it can look a little blue. That black anemone fish white stripe.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Yeah, well, don't even get me started down that avenue of the fact that fish can see colours that humans can't see, right? So they can see into ultraviolet. So what looks like a white stripe in sunlight is probably looks ultraviolet to a fish, and some people can see different colours in the spectrum as well, I think.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

Isn't it incredible that this whole new light spectrum analysis of fish colouring is sort of coming to the forefront, especially in the last 12-18 months, where we used to just think that bright colours were a defensive mechanism, meaning poisonous, don't eat me. But now it's actually these colours under different spectrums of light, especially ultraviolet, they do actually um give the fish defensive you know benefits. It's it's incredible. And I'm watching the space pretty closely and um trying to gather a lot of information on that. Hey, you know, one other fun fact about the anemone, it said that the more an anemone eats, the bigger it gets. So anemone can live from its symbionts, which it has algae inside them just like corals. The Zosinthele dinoflagellate symbiodiniaceae, I believe we call it.

SPEAKER_00 15:07

Okay, repeat that at home, please, everyone.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Let's do it again. Uh depending on where you are in the world, zoosentheli or zozentheli, dinoflagellate, symbiodiniaceae. Well symbiodinium, um, which just means a single-celled algae. Uh, and it the anemone has that, which obviously photosynthesizes, produces sugar and oxygen, uh, you know, giving the anemone energy. But it's it is a pretty crazy carnivorous hunter as well. There's one anemone which is a magnificent anemone, a purple, one of those purple ones we mentioned at one of our sites at a place called Bashful Bombie, and it's a couple of companies or half a dozen companies have actually used this site over the last 46 or 7 years that we've been taking, people have been taking tourism there. And I had the pleasure of taking one of the original guides there last year, and he said that anemone had been there about 38 years ago, so that one anemone has lived for that long, and that sort of you know, I st I step back and I often think about that when I visit that still, I didn't think that they were that long living. So I visit it more often now than to just reflect on that.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

Grandpappy anemone, hey, like that that's incredible because they're an anemone is just a soft, squishy mass, so it seems so vulnerable to think that it could live that long. And yeah, like you said, they can photosynthesize in the way that corals do, but they can also swallow food.

SPEAKER_01 16:39

Yeah, they you know, corals can also feed two different ways as well. But I think the anemone would, and I don't have a percentage, but it it you see them curl up. If you ever see an anemone while you're snorkeling or diving and it's curled up and uh a clownfish are on the outside, which means it's feeding. It's it's either eating one of those parasites or it could be a little copepod or anything landing out of the plankton, or as even big as a as a fish that swam in and thought, uh there's a free anemone, I'm going in there, and it just grabs it and pretty much neutralizes it straight away, and in it goes.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Wow, so the clownfish are are living in the jaws of death, but they never get swallowed because the anemone somehow knows these fish are here to keep me clean and help defend me, right?

SPEAKER_01 17:22

Yeah, and like the corals, there's only a the tentacles, the mouth, the gut. There's no actual anus, so what goes in has to come back out that mouth.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Wow, okay. Well, I feel like we could keep talking about clownfish alone for a really long time, but let's move on to number two on our countdown, which is the giant clam.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

One of my favourites.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

Me too. So what can you tell us about giant clams, Tom?

SPEAKER_01 17:49

How long do we have? Um, firstly, I believe it's ten different species of clam on the reef, something like that. Um the ones that people see, uh there's usually three or four, like the little boring clams which burrow into the the reef themselves. We have the smooth shell clam, the giant clam, and what we call the giant giant clam, the big one that everybody wants to see. I think they get over a meter long.

SPEAKER_00 18:13

Yeah, they do. They can grow more than one meter or three feet long and weigh more than two hundred kilos, and they can live over a hundred years.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

That's right. Well, we call them giant giant clams, but their their true Latin name is the Tridacno gigas, the biggest one. So the giant clam is something that takes you away straight away when you see it. The first thing you are confronted by the size, and the second thing is by the colours through the clam's mantle. And they say that there's no two clams that are exactly the same. You definitely see some traits within species and like the colour morphs, but what's really cool about them is that they have that same variety of algae inside their tissues, like the anemone, like the corals, again, that zosanthele algae, that dinoflagellate algae. Then you start to look a bit closer, and there's two different holes, and that's because they're a filter feeder, they get a lot of their food from filter feeding, you know, plankton, whether it's a plant or animal out of the water, but most of their energy comes from that relationship between algae that they hold in their tissue. Now, with the symbiotic algae, the zooks or the symbionts, we used to think that there was only just a few species of this stuff. You know, no one really bothered to look, but these days I think the official count of Zosanthele algae species is 103. And that's separated into five different clades, and like five groups, and they all operate a different way. So, one thing that corals, anemones, and clams do is they just take in everything they can. And you would think because they're found so richly throughout the animal kingdom, they would be widely distributed through the water column. But the research suggests that it's pretty thinly spread through, so there's a bit of a mystery how they get so many. But the clam does it the best out of any other creature in the animal kingdom, like one coral polyp in one of the colonial corals, they say one polyp will hold anywhere from one million to eight million single-celled algae per polyp. And a polyp's about you know the size of a ballpoint pen tip, maybe a little bit larger. So in the clam, which is over a meter long and sometimes a meter high as well, there's literally billions. But rather than just take it in randomly and store it in their cell walls like a coral, they'll actually arrange it into columns or clusters of columns in their tissue, as the way I believe it. Now, what they've recently found out a couple of years ago is that the surface of the clamp's tissue has what we are calling solar windows. So not only do they have massive amounts of wide varieties of algae from different clades in their tissue, but they also can bend, like if you think of a solar farm, like how they turn the mirrors to the direction of the sun to reflect that at the point they want. Yep. The clam's tissue can do that as well. So they have the ability to bend light internally to direct the light deeper down into the tissue, so they get more photosynthesis, more oxygen, and I'm sure there's a level of amino acids and carbohydrates, sugar, chlorophyll, it's all being produced, and all of these bits and pieces inside them reflect light, and they have this bioluminescent protein which makes all of that stuff reflect the light in such an amazing way to our eyes. So they bend light internally. So you mentioned that the clam can weigh up to maybe even over 200 kilos, and I can definitely say that I've seen clams that big, and it that's heavy for a mollusk to pull itself together and close itself for protection. And um, I read on a website somewhere that it's the largest mollusk in the ocean, but I think it's the second largest. Largest mollusks, because the since the discovery of the giant deep sea squid, um, I think that's taken number one. But the coolest thing about the giant, giant clam, and this might blow everyone's mind out of the park. So the giant clam, when it's a a juvenile, is a massive food item for many of the carnivorous fish and creatures on the reef. So there needs to be a lot of them. And when a clam spawns in you know November to match up with the coral spawning, which I'm sure everyone has heard about and knows, it is said that they will spawn up to 500 million eggs on one night, sperm on the next, with the hope that that will meet up and mix up and populate vast expanses of the reef, helping bolster and boost that ability, that potential for biodiversity. Now producing that many potential young actually makes them the largest uh producers of life on earth.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 23:01

Let that sink in for a minute. The largest producer of life on earth that lives for a hundred years, that spawns every year, and I'm not I can't actually recall when they sexually mature. I can imagine it's anywhere from five to fifteen, someone probably able to quote me on that. But if you blow expand your mind way out into the solar system and universe, we haven't found life anywhere else in the universe yet. There's no life. I'm sure there is somewhere. I have hope. So if you think that that is the largest producer of of life that we've found so far on Earth, that means that that's the largest producer of life that there is. And when we celebrate biodiversity and things that are so biologically capable, that is something very, very special. And we need to protect it. And and you probably know this, that uh they're actually endangered, but we protect them pretty heavily on the Great Barrier Reef.

SPEAKER_00 23:55

Yeah, what are the threats to the giant clam? Us.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

The whole clam isn't edible. Uh it's only the what we call the oyster, the white cylindrical disc-shaped part in the centre. And there's definitely archaeological evidence that people have been coming down to the Great Barrier Reef for thousands of years and taking shell. We know that they're they're very few far between in the Philippines, you know, throughout Indonesia, they're you know, local peoples, you know, it's a food item. People find them and and eat them, so the numbers have dropped considerably. But on the Great Barrier Reef, which especially the northern sector, which people have been coming down, and that was happening up until very very recently, only a hundred and something years ago, boats were still coming down and stocking their holes full of giant clams, and I believe there's a there's a wreck out there with a clam boat off the Agincourt at a place called Wreck Bay. They say it was a clam boat, but one of the coolest things about the giant clam story is what happened at Orpheus Island. So there was a fellow. The story goes that they spawned a hundred thousand clams, put them around the island, and this was about the the same time farming them, basically. They're and they were gonna it was going to be used for clam chowder in the restaurants. But this is about the same time as the the marine park was getting going, and the way I understand it, a green zone was put around Orpheus Island, so they had all these clams that were closely placed together that couldn't open. I'm sure you've heard of it. And with JCU, the Great Barrier Marine Park and the Australian Navy, they actually, it's the only time the Marine Park has worked with the Australian Navy in an ecological pursuit. And the information that I have, one newspaper article says that they removed 90,000 clams off the island, but another article that I've seen suggests it was 10,000. But what they did is they kept this really covert and they took these clams up and down the northern sectors of the Great Barrier Reef and they placed clusters of them. And these the information is still classified to this day. It's really hard to find. I've actually already applied to get the info, but they didn't want people to poach these clams. And I think that I've I know where two spots are, I know one definitely, and I know another one where there's uh over a hundred clams within a couple of hundred meters, and for me that is a telltale sign of clams being placed there. And so marine biologists, scientists, they teamed up with the Navy. The vessel was called HMAS Tarikin, I believe, and you what's really cool is they actually used those little baby clamshell swimming pools and put them on the deck and carried the clams in clams to drop them off on the reef. Oh wow. Yeah, there's a picture of that that exists in the public space, which is kind of cool.

SPEAKER_00 26:40

Wow, so many cool stories there. I know that I've seen either baby or even full-grown clam shells being used as decorations as well. I suspect they're left over from back in the day because they're protected now in the green zones. So, in terms of where to find them, I think pretty much anyone listening, if you want to see a giant clam, just go out with any pretty much any tour operator on the Great Barrier Reef, and the staff will be able to point out where they're where the giant clams are on their site. And of course, one of the questions we get is are they dangerous? Can you get your arm trapped inside one? Not that you should be sticking your arm in a clam anyway, but um yeah, so there was a bit of a myth.

SPEAKER_01 27:20

If you put your hand in a clam, would you not get your hand out? And the uh answer is yeah, you would. It would relax pretty quickly and you'd be able to get your hand straight back out. And the guy that proved this on TV was Steve Backshaw in his Deadly 60 episode. And I was lucky enough to take Steve and his lovely wife, Helen Glover, out to the reef diving on the Agincourt Reefs a few years back. And Helen even came back a second day to dive with me while he had to do a big show with all the kids in cans. So and we got uh double manter encounter that that second day, and that was pretty cool to spend the day with Steve Baxhaw. He was a nothing but a gentleman and a great influence on the world, and um he was able to put that one to bed.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

Myth busted. By the way, I should say don't try this at home, don't go sticking your arm in a giant clam just to test this theory, because at the Great Barry Reef everything's protected, and we're not going to be touching anything because that would be very stressful for the clam. Um but if you swim over it or even wave your arm over it, sometimes you'll get to watch them close up as a protective mechanism. But I did actually know one person who did get injured by a clam because he put his hand in really close to the edge, like where the hinge is.

SPEAKER_01 28:33

Oh yes.

SPEAKER_00 28:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:35

That that could be and that the the skeleton's made of calcium carbonate, just like the reef is. But unlike the corals, the clam, it's its defensive structure. So um yeah, down in the tight spots, it you could probably you'd probably lose a finger, I guess, if you tried to pick it up and it closed down near the join.

SPEAKER_00 28:53

So yeah, no touching the clams, in conclusion. That's all we have time for in today's episode. But make sure you hit subscribe because we will be counting down the rest of the top eight animals to see at the Great Barrier Reef and where to find them very soon. And if you thought today's animals were wild, you haven't heard anything yet. But before we close the book on clams and clownfish, I just want to add that climate change is a huge threat to these iconic animals. As we learned back in episode 2, climate change, caused by the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas, is heating up our planet and our oceans, causing corals to expel their colourful zozanthella algae and turn white in a phenomenon known as coral bleaching. But did you know clams and anemones, which clownfish live in, also rely on zozanthulae for most of their energy. They too will expel their colourful symbionts during extreme heat stress events, causing them to bleach white and face starvation as well. I've seen it happening, it's becoming more and more common to see poor little Nemo swimming around in a bleached white anemone during the summer, which is not normal, they're supposed to be colourful, and it is incredibly sad to know that these iconic species are at risk of losing their homes due to rising sea temperatures caused by climate change. So if you'd like to help protect clams, anemone fish, corals, and all the other marine life on the Great Barrier Reef, I'm going to put a link in the episode description to a petition you can sign asking the Australian government to implement stronger climate policies, among other measures to help protect the Great Barrier Reef. So please check it out and sign it. It only takes about 20 seconds. Also, I just want to acknowledge that during this so-called countdown interview, I accidentally counted upwards instead of downwards. So the top animal, which I will reveal last, is going to be at number eight. But anyway, the main point is I'd love to hear from you. What do you think are the best animals for people to see on the Great Barrier Reef? I've posted this question over on Word on the Reef Podcast Instagram. So drop a comment there and let me know what your favourite animals are. And see if you can guess which animal is at the top of my list, which is going to be revealed last at number 8, because evidently I don't know how to do a countdown properly. Also, a friendly reminder that I am researching, recording, and editing this podcast voluntarily in my spare time, and the podcast hosting and software subscriptions are quite costly. So if you'd like to help sponsor this podcast, please consider becoming a patron for as little as $5 a month over at patreon.com slash WordOnTheReef Podcast. You'll get a shout out, and the proceeds will help to cover all those costs and ensure this podcast can continue to raise awareness about the reef for a long time into the future. You can also help by writing a review and sharing this podcast with a friend. And don't forget to follow Word on the Reef on Instagram. Also make sure you follow Tarn as well. That's T-A-H-N-Tan Miller. He has some amazing photos and videos up there of his adventures on the reef, so definitely give him a follow. That's all for now. Best fishes and see you next time.