MONTEREY >> “Our Oceans,” a new docuseries by Netflix, takes a deep dive into what’s just outside our backdoor — the Pacific Ocean.

Earlier this fall, the Monterey Bay Aquarium opened its doors for a private screening for a group of about 80 journalists, ocean enthusiasts and even some Girl Scouts to not only see the first episode in the five-episode series but to hear from some of those involved in making the series.

“Having all of this knowledge for yourself is great but the best thing you can do is share that knowledge,” said Inka Creswell, one of the series researchers, while recalling her time studying marine biology.

Narrated by former President Barack Obama, Freeborne Media’s “Our Oceans” is available for streaming on Netflix starting Wednesday. “Our Oceans” takes viewers on a journey through the crew-dubbed “Global Ocean Current,” traveling across the five oceans.

“When we started out, our intention was to tell the story of five incredible oceans, each with their own character and their own story to tell,” said Executive Producer James Honeyborne. “But as we began to look more closely, we knew the ocean was split by the currents, but actually there’s a path that connects them all and ties them together.”

Honeyborne put an emphasis on the interconnectivity of the oceans. “The amazing conclusion, of course, is that it’s not five oceans. It’s one ocean,” he said as audience members clapped, “and it’s all connected. And that means whatever we do anywhere can have an impact everywhere. It’s all connected.”

While filming, crewmembers recorded a few behaviors from the animals which may have never been witnessed by humans.

“There’s nowhere that is as full of new discoveries as the oceans,” said series producer Jonathan Smith. The crew wanted to film things nobody had ever seen before. The participating researchers and scientists became a team of over 700 people.

“Scientists were prepared to share their life’s work with us, to trust us with it, to capture these behaviors that they’ve been seeing,” Smith said.

One of Smith’s favorite moments was the clip of a little octopus that lives in and around trash, featured in the second episode of the series, because “nature never follows a script, and that means it will throw these absolute bombshells of surprise at us that then we’ll do our best to capture and turn into a proper story.”

While filming the octopus looking for a place to hunt, it went into a plastic cup.

The octopus knew both predators and things it wanted to catch would be able to see it.

He explained the octopus found half a clam shell, then “it went looking for the perfect match to then find another. So now, it can have a plan. So our octopus, armed with its two clams, became a clam!”

The octopus was able to hunt crabs with this method. However, Smith said the octopus made one mistake. The crab shells were too big for the octopus to digest, so it tossed the shells, which attracted the attention of bigger fish.

“So this is where the story took a really crazy turn,” Smith said. “I’m going to start off by saying that our camera team didn’t even spot it until they were back in their hotel room in the evening looking at the rushes.”

They had found a behavior totally new to science.

“The octopus, surrounded by these big fish, and what it does … Well, it sucks up a stone. And then, it aims up, it picks a fish, it aims up, it shoots, and it shoots a fish in the head. It turns itself into a gun. And it doesn’t just do it at once, it keeps doing it to scare all the fish away.”

Twenty scientific papers are being written thanks to the findings of “Our Oceans,” including one about the behaviors the octopus exhibited.

In addition to being quite a scientific feat, “Our Oceans” also got creative in terms of production and filming. “The technology wasn’t out there to do it, so we had to develop it specifically for the series,” said Smith.

“We built motorized spiders and motion control rigs underwater with straight scopes, so you could be right down on their eye level. We pioneered low light filming as well,” Smith said.

“We developed really long running cameras so as to essentially stake out certain moments in the Indian Ocean film.”

Saving the ocean

“The best thing you can do after this is to become an advocate yourselves,” said Creswell. “And every one of you has an experience and has a story to tell. And you can think about the best way that you can share your knowledge. And that is the best possible way that you can help save our oceans.”

The “Our Oceans” team didn’t want to shy away from the impact humans have on the oceans.

“One of the briefs to the teams when they went on location was to tell it how it is,” said Honeyborne. “Don’t frame out the fishing nets. Don’t frame out the plastic pollution. Don’t frame out the effects of the climate crisis because they’re real and that we’re feeling that impact.

“There is, across the series, a sense of the pressures that the ocean’s health is under at the moment,” Honeyborne said. Throughout the series, they cover topics including overfishing, pollution and warming oceans. “The picture we therefore paint is that we need to be concerned about ocean health right now.”

One sequence they wanted to film for episode five was between a sea lion and an orca. Honeyborne explained that normally you can see between 20 and 30 interactions between a sea lion and an orca in a day — they found one interaction over seven weeks.

The team’s backup plan had been to film krill aggregations but “because there was no sea ice, we couldn’t find any krill either. And this is how you realize it’s all connected,” Honeyborne said. “We’ve got a very poignant shot in the fifth episode of an empty ocean with one single little krill swimming through the middle of it.”

Despite this Honeyborne, Smith and Creswell were all hopeful, sharing appreciation for the ocean’s incredible ability to heal and recover. “That’s why we’ve got to protect these places, and that’s why we need to change our relationship with the ocean,” Honeyborne said.

“I hope that (people watching) see how connected we are to the oceans and how familiar our lives are to theirs and that it is this space of just magic and wonder and there’s so much there that is still there to be protected and that it’s not too late,” said Creswell.

“It’s an amazing, amazing place and I just hope they really see that beauty and it inspires them to make a difference.”