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The science of rogue waves in optics is now over five years old, and it has emerged as an area of broad interest to researchers across the physical sciences [1]. This area of study was initiated by the pioneering measurement of Solli et al [2] when analysing supercontinuum generation in optical fibres. Their measurements, using a novel dispersive Fourier transform technique to capture high-speed events in the time domain, observed extraordinarily high amplitude peaks at certain wavelengths in the chaotic spectrum from the supercontinuum. By analogy with the extreme waves in the ocean [3], of wide interest after 1995, such high amplitude pulses were described as ‘optical rogue waves’. This analogy between localized structures in optics and extreme waves on the ocean has opened up many possibilities for exploring extreme value dynamics in convenient table-top optical experiments. In addition to the …