The humble shrimp is hardly the first thing that would spring to mind if you were going to have a creature named after you. But Britain’s best-known wildlife daredevil, TV presenter Steve Backshall, is thrilled to have had a newly discovered species christened the Backshall Snapping Shrimp.

‘It’s got one giant claw and one tiny one but it uses the large one to snap and create an incredibly loud sound as a powerful deterrent to other animals,’ says Steve. ‘It was named after me because I was on a dive in Tenerife when we found this new creature. It’s tiny but utterly beautiful under a microscope.’

Steve, 51, came across the species as part of a mission with Ocean Census to accelerate the discovery and protection of marine life by finding 100,000 new species in the next decade, and he’ll be telling tales from his adventures – and his thrilling career in general – on his forthcoming UK touring show Ocean.

‘It’s so special knowing you could be holding a creature in your hand that nobody else has seen before, that yours are the first human eyes to have seen it,’ he says. 

‘Also, knowing that our deep seas are the biggest but least-known habitable environment in the universe is thrilling. The opportunities to find creatures we don’t know about yet is limitless.’

Wildlife daredevil Steve Backshall (pictured), 51, poses with a crocodile called Henry at Crocworld Conservation Centre in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Aged 120, Henry is the oldest living crocodile in the world

Steve doesn’t relish the claustrophobic submarine journeys to the depths of the ocean to find new marine life, but the results make them more than worthwhile. ‘We recently found three new species – a tiny fish and a small mollusc inside a bigger mollusc,’ he says.

‘After each discovery, we take the new species to the dockside labs where experts in every form of marine life process DNA samples and imagery before the samples are returned to the ocean.’

Some of the huge creatures he’s encountered in the seas will be on stage with him on the tour, but the audience need not be worried – they will be life-sized replicas. As well as these props, the show features stunts, experiments, cutting-edge science and footage shown on big screens to bring the icons of the sea to life.

‘We have a life-size reproduction of a 6m great white shark, a life-size orca that’s 10m long and a sperm whale – it’s a challenge to fit them into a lot of the theatres. But it’s very difficult to get a sense of scale with these animals on television as they’re so big. The show brings them to life.’

Steve has been passionate about the natural world ever since he could crawl. Growing up he counted the animals that lived around him as his best friends, from the family’s asthmatic donkey to the grass snakes in the manure heap on their idyllic smallholding in Bagshot, Surrey.

He went on to make documentaries for the National Geographic channel, but became a household name in 2009 when he began presenting CBBC’s Deadly 60 in which he seeks to understand – and educate us about – the most dangerous creatures on the planet via close encounters. That has subsequently been broadcast worldwide, and its spin-off roadshows draw massive crowds.

Despite numerous brushes with death, Steve isn’t afraid of danger, nor of taking carefully calculated risks. His adventures have seen him throttled by a python, stalked by a polar bear, encircled by sharks, charged at by hippos and bitten by a crocodile while searching for anacondas in an Argentinian swamp.

‘The key is not to be afraid because animals smell fear and that brings danger,’ he says. ‘But there have been some hairy moments. The times I’ve felt most fearful have been with hippos. They’re one of the most dangerous, grumpy and unpredictable animals. They charge readily in water or on land. They may weigh three tons but they can run like racehorses.

Steve is pictured with a hippo in South Africa – one of the most dangerous, grumpy and unpredictable animals 

‘On the last show I did I got caught on land with a hippo. We were looking for crocodiles at night with a light and surprised a hippo feeding nearby. My heart raced when I saw an animal that size thundering along, first on land and then deep water.

‘We were staggered at how fast it ran. It just didn’t stop. Thank goodness he charged away from us as we were a long way from our vehicle. It’s likely we would have been trampled to death if he’d run towards us.

‘We rely on local experience and in that part of Zambia where there’s no poaching or hunting, the local guys said we were going to head down a river. I said, “But there’s a pod of 200 hippos!” I was getting very nervous because if that had been in South Africa we would have been killed, 100 per cent. But the locals said, “Trust us. It’s going to be fine.” And it was.

Crocodiles are more predictable, but no less dangerous. ‘Crocodiles my size or smaller will swim away from you,’ says Steve. ‘Those that are slightly bigger may posture a bit, but the much bigger ones could well see you as potential food so you need to know if they’re around.’

Diving with Nile crocodiles with his cameraman proved way too close for comfort though. ‘It was the closest call I’ve ever had with an animal. I was sitting next to a huge crocodile in the Okavango Delta in Botswana when a massive four-and-a-half-metre male croc turned towards me. He went up to the surface then came straight back down towards us. We all swam off in different directions. Miraculously, we made it back to the boat just in time.

‘You could toss a coin as to whether we lived or died in that situation. If we were to do the exact same thing ten times over, I think eight times out of ten someone would have been killed. We haven’t dived with big crocs again.’

Steve lives by the river Thames on the border of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire with his wife, 38-year-old Olympic champion rower Helen Glover, and their three children, six-year-old Logan and four-year-old twins Kit and Bo. Helen is in Paris right now where she begins her quest for a third gold medal tomorrow in the women’s four, so he has his hands fuller than usual at home.

‘It’s been a battle the last few years, with Helen maintaining her life as a full-time athlete and us having three small children. There’s been a huge amount of compromise and heartache. If she makes it to her fourth Olympic final we’ll be there in Paris cheering her on, hoping she can be a figurehead for parents who want to carry on living their lives to the full, and to women everywhere.’

Steve is pictured with his wife, Olympic champion rower Helen Glover, with whom he shares three children 

A daily fitness regime has become non-negotiable for Steve after a cliff fall in the Wye Valley in 2008 left him fearing he’d never walk again. Steve fell onto rocks from more than 25ft, breaking his back in two places and smashing his left ankle. He’s had 12 operations since and spent 18 months on crutches.

‘It was a defining moment. It split my life into “before” and “after”. I was ultra-fit but for five years I was having constant operations and constantly trying to find a new normal.’

Another near-death experience was while filming the series Expedition in the Himalayas in 2018, when Steve flipped his kayak and spent nearly five minutes upside down in glacial water. ‘I was going to drown. I was very lucky my paddling partner Sal Montgomery paddled back to haul me out. She saved my life.’

Steve’s first love has always been sharks, though. He saw his first when he was nine and snorkelling in Malaysia, a black-tip reef shark that was just a couple of feet long and not at all dangerous. ‘It started my fascination,’ he says. ‘So now, in the right conditions, I could swim with a bull shark, a tiger shark, a hammerhead or a great white and feel much calmer than I did as a nine-year-old.’

‘I’ve had all of the signs of aggression and some full-on approaches. But I always carry a camera when diving with them. Usually a firm push with the camera or hand on the snout is enough to give them a shock. If you push the snout down they can’t bite you.’

Steve saw his first shark when he was nine and snorkelling in Malaysia 

For all Steve’s loyalty to sharks, his most magical marine encounter was with a female orca when he swam with a group attacking a humpback whale in the fjords of Norway near the Arctic Circle. ‘Normally they cruise on past, but this female circled around me, eyeing us up and showing off by jumping out of the water and flipping onto her back as if she wanted her tummy tickled. It was magic,’ he says.

Steve’s next stop for TV is something a little tamer, a show about honey bees for Channel 5. ‘Except for one dog, we don’t have any other pets,’ he laughs. ‘But we now have 20,000 honey bees.’

• Steve Backshall’s UK tour, Ocean, runs from 19 October- 3 November. For venues and tickets go to stevebackshall.com.