Mike and Sue Scott

Mike and Sue Scott are a well-known couple, Mike as a conservationist, writer and broadcaster, Sue as a marine biologist and photographer. But they come from very different backgrounds, Mike confessing to being a city boy who derived much of his early enthusiasm for wildlife from Edinburgh Zoo while Sue grew up around her parent’s market garden in Pembrokeshire. Being only a mile from the coast she very quickly developed her own particular interest in marine life, especially seaweeds. John Barrett’s Pocket Guide was her early inspirationand she attended his field courses at the nearby study centres of Orielton and Dale Fort.

Mike set his heart on being a zoologist, thinking that meant travelling round the zoos of the world. But at the age of 11 the family moved to St Andrew’s and Mike’s horizons extended to the Eden Estuary. His next door neighbour, a university lecturer, introduced him to the wonders of the Isle of May. As a student at Aberdeen University, his fascination transferred to botany and field courses to Bettyhill in Sutherland first introduced him to the Highlands. He did join the university diving club but being rather tall, he could not easily find a wet suit that fitted him. Besides he quickly realised that diving meant many hours preparing for a dive that might only last half an hour, while with botanising it was the other way around, taking only minutes to get ready for a whole day on the hill!

Sue studied marine biology at Bangor University but was introduced to serious diving when she joined the survey teams undertaking the Marine Nature Conservation Review. At first she worked around the Pembrokeshire islands but was soon asked to survey the west of Scotland where she developed a fascination for sealochs. At first they might seem to have little to offer, but it was what lived in the muddy bottom that proved so interesting. Deeper dives opened an amazing world of big white anemones half a metre across and ‘giant naked foraminiferans – something only a biologist could enthuse about perhaps – five centimetres across and looking like lumps of cheese. Single-celled they act a bit like an amoeba, organising themselves into a fragile blob and trying to climb out of the sample jar!’