Fabien Cousteau is a French aquatic filmmaker who has many claims to fame, the one thrust upon him being his lineage, as grandson of famed oceanographic explorer Jacques Cousteau. The grandfather had set world record by spending 30 days underwater which the grandson broke by spending 31 days under water. He tells us, “I want to go explore the oceans of Mars, but until we can go there, I think the oceans still hold quite a few secrets. As a matter of fact, if you take our planet as the oasis in space that it is and dissect it into a living space, the ocean represents over 3.4 billion cubic kilometres of volume, within which we’ve explored less than five per cent. And I look at this, and I go, well, there are tools to go deeper, longer and further: submarines, ROVs, even scuba diving.”
His next sentence is refreshing, “But if we’re going to explore the final frontier on this planet, we need to live there. We need to build a log cabin, if you will, at the bottom of the sea.”
He continues, “And so there was a great curiosity in my soul when I went to go visit a TED Prize winner by the name of Dr. Sylvia Earle…Two years ago, she was staked out at the last undersea marine laboratory to try and save it, to try and petition for us not to scrap it and bring it back on land. We’ve only had about a dozen or so scientific labs at the bottom of the sea. There’s only one left in the world: it’s nine miles offshore and 65 feet down. It’s called Aquarius… I realized that my time is short if I wanted to experience what it was like to become an aquanaut. When we swam towards this after many moons of torture and two years of preparation, this habitat waiting to invite us was like a new home.”
Cousteau says, “We had mega fauna come and visit us. This spotted eagle ray is a fairly common sight in the oceans. But why this is so important is because this particular animal brought his friends around, and instead of being the pelagic animals that they were, they started getting curious about us, these new strangers that were moving into the neighbourhood, doing things with plankton. We were studying all sorts of animals and critters, and they got closer and closer to us, and because of the luxury of time, these animals, these residents of the coral reef, were starting to get used to us… So mission 31 wasn’t so much about breaking records. It was about that human-ocean connection.”
In the process of establishing these connections, Cousteau was able to study sharks and groupers very close. “It’s like seeing dogs and cats behaving well together. Even being able to commune with animals that are much larger than us, such as this endangered goliath grouper who only still resides in the Florida Keys…”
They studied climatic change, fluorescence of corals as it pertains to pollutants in water, predator-prey issues etc. “…predator-prey behaviour is an interesting thing, because as we take away some of the predators on these coral reefs around the world, the prey, or the forage fish, act very differently. What we realized is not only do they stop taking care of the reef, darting in, grabbing a little bit of algae and going back into their homes, they start spreading out and disappearing from those particular coral reefs.”
Cousteau, of course, took many pictures and videos for our benefit, some of which he shows during his talk. “One of the most precious gifts that we had underwater is that we had wi-fi, and for 31 days straight we were able to connect with the world in real time from the bottom of the sea and share all of these experiences. …I dream of the day that we have underwater cities…and may be some of you will become the future aquanauts.”
sudhamahi@gmail.com
