In my job I get to... understand the secrets of the sea

Helen has many jobs, including being a marine biologist, writing books and teaching at Cambridge University. If you have any questions of your own for Helen, you can contact her on helen@helenscales.com

On a field trip to Devon, the teachers showed me how to find more species in rock pools than I’d ever spotted before. Later, I studied coral reefs in Malaysia, then got my first job as a marine biologist.

My family and I spent almost every holiday in Cornwall – I loved swimming and rock pooling at the beach. When I was 17, I learned to scuba dive at my local swimming pool and I got totally hooked on the underwater world. My first outdoor dive was absolutely freezing, but when I saw my first fish, I knew I wanted to be a marine biologist.

I was snorkelling off the coast of France with my friends and found it sitting inside a lobster trap where it was happily munching on all the bait! It was huge and red. I was also very excited to spot a seahorse in a seagrass meadow, right next to the beach at Studland Bay, Dorset. Swimming and diving allow me to explore the ocean and see new things.

Swimming with sharks in Fiji

They can tell you loads about the animals that made them. They can tell you if it was a snail (most have spiralling shells) or a type of animal called a bivalve, like cockles and clams (they have shells in two parts that open and close like a book). You can sometimes tell how long the shell-making animal lived by counting the ridges on it, like rings in a tree trunk. You can even tell how the shell-making animal died. If it has a neat round hole punched in its shell, then it was eaten by a hunting snail which drills the hole, then slurps out the inside!

1. Read books, watch TV programmes and videos about sea creatures – soak up any sea-related information.

2. If you have the chance, do explore the coast. Rock pools are a particularly great place to learn about sea creatures.

3. Practise swimming (and snorkelling, if you can). You don’t need masses of expensive kit – just a mask and a snorkel could help you to explore the ocean.

Five winners will each win copies of Scientists in the Wild: Galapagos and The Great Barrier Reef, both by Helen Scales. Find out how to enter on our blog!

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Plastic pollution is a big problem, so try to use as little single-use plastic as possible. We also need to stop water companies flushing sewage straight into rivers and then the sea. Organisations like Surfers Against Sewage campaign to stop this kind of pollution.