Deep

by James Nestor

  The sea lily had long been thought to be extinct, but there it was, in a wooden bucket on the deck of Sars’s boat, clearly flourishing a thousand feet down. The deep sea, Sars posited, was not only abundant with life but also a link to our planet’s ancient past. And the farther down we went, the farther back in time we reached. While land life was in a state of constant tumult, ravaged by storms, earthquakes, floods, droughts, meteors, and ice ages, nothing much seemed to roil the deep water. Every day featured the same dim blue light; every night was inky black. The weather never changed. It was a living museum.

  A decade after Sars’s discoveries, scientists had found more than 4,700 new species in the deep sea. They had also sounded the seafloor and mapped out a geography as dramatic as any on land—wide-open plains, rolling mountains, and valleys five miles deep.

  A more accurate view of the ocean’s depths was emerging, but it was still rudimentary at best—the equivalent of exploring life on land by lowering a butterfly net over the side of a hot-air balloon at night. The mesopelagic, or “middle” zone, now had a proper name, but it still had no face. Nobody had actually seen what it looked like, and nobody knew what really went on down there.

  It took another thirty years for someone to take a picture. The man who did it was William Beebe, a researcher at the New York Zoological Society. Beebe had no engineering experience and had never seen a vessel capable of plummeting hundreds of feet down into the ocean, but that didn’t deter him. He designed a deep-sea machine called a bathysphere (Greek for “deep sphere”) and parked it just off the coast of Nonsuch Island, Bermuda. In June 1930, he prepared it for its first manned submersion.

  The bathysphere was essentially a large, hollow cannonball with three three-inch-thick fused-quartz windows and a four-hundred-pound entrance hatch on top. It was just big enough to hold two men with one kneeling on his heels and the other sitting directly in front with his legs drawn up. A steel cable, attached to the roof and wound around a mechanical winch, was used to lower it into the water and bring it up again, like a yo-yo. Canisters of compressed air supplied oxygen; air conditioning came in the form of palm-frond leaves that would be used as a fan.

  Things went wrong all the time. On unmanned test dives, the roof cables would tangle and bind. In strong currents, it would swing and sway violently, flinging objects around the cabin. Sometimes it leaked.

  Once, Beebe and the boat’s crew hoisted the vessel on deck after a test run and saw through one of the windows that it was completely filled with water. As Beebe began loosening the top hatch, a bolt shot across the deck, leaving a half-inch indentation in a piece of steel thirty feet away. From the bolt hole, a stream of water shot out with such force that, in Beebe’s words, “it looked like hot steam.” He realized that the bathysphere must have taken on water at extreme depths, and as it was hoisted back to the surface, the pressure inside it had steadily mounted, reaching upwards of thirteen hundred pounds per square inch. The loosened bolt shot out like a bullet. If Beebe had been inside the bathysphere during the dive, his body would have been pulped.

  Dangers be damned. On June 6, 1930, he crawled into the bathysphere and readied himself for the first dive. Beside him was a Harvard engineer, Otis Barton, who had done much of the design work for the vessel and raised most of the money to build it. The crew released the winch, and the bathysphere splashed into the water. The cable spooled out, and Beebe and Barton disappeared.

  By the time the men had descended three hundred feet, the cabin had sprung a leak. Beebe decided to continue on. At six hundred feet, a shower of sparks erupted from a light socket. Barton pressed on the wire fitting, and the sparks stopped. The bathysphere sank deeper.

  Beebe and Barton watched as the water darkened around them, like houselights slowly dimming before a performance. “I pressed my face against the glass and looked upward and in the slight segment which I could manage I saw a faint paling of the blue,” Beebe would later write. “I peered down and again I felt the old longing to go further, although it looked like the black pit-mouth of hell itself.”

  The depths were alive with fantastic creatures—fish, gelatinous orbs, and never-before-seen life forms. As they approached seven hundred feet, the water wasn’t black, as Beebe had thought it would be, but a dusty blue. “On earth at night in moonlight I can always imagine the yellow of sunshine, the scarlet of invisible blossoms,” he wrote. “But here, when the searchlight was off, yellow and orange and red were unthinkable. The blue which filled all space admitted no thought of other colors.”

  On their initial manned dive, Beebe and Barton became the first men to lay eyes on the deep, blue world of the mesopelagic, diving down just over eight hundred feet.

  And yet, being inside the bathysphere was a hopelessly isolating experience. Beebe and Barton could catch glimpses of the animals of the deep, but, dangling from a steel cable, they were unable to follow, interact, or study them in any significant way. They could barely even take photographs. They proved that animals actually existed at great depths—Beebe and Barton would eventually make it to 3,028 feet, over a half a mile down—but beyond that, they knew little of where this alien life went, what it ate, or how it could navigate through the dark, featureless waters of the deep ocean.

  That began to change in the 1940s and 1950s, when researchers started tracking marine animals with plastic identification tags. While it was impossible to track or study animals that stayed down in the mesopelagic, vertical feeders, like sharks, that spent much of their time in the mesopelagic but often came to the surface to feed, could be tagged.

  A shark tagged in one area and observed in another would show scientists how far sharks were migrating and where they were going. Some researchers captured sharks, slit their abdomens, inserted tags, sewed them up, and released them back into the water. These tags could last for decades. (One inserted into a shark in 1949 was discovered forty-two years later.) In a U.S. campaign started in the late 1950s and continuing for about thirty years, some 106,000 sharks in the northwest Atlantic, comprising thirty-three species, were fitted with tags.

  By the 1960s, researchers started tagging sharks with transmitters, which, for the first time, offered immediate data about how fast they swam, where they went, how far, and at what depth.

  The results were startling. Half of all known species spent much of their time in the cold and dark waters of the deep ocean. At that depth, they’d migrate thousands of miles in schools of hundreds, swimming head to tail in perfect unison, following an invisible line. Then they would return to their point of origin, following the same invisible line with the same precision.

  Even in the clearest tropical ocean, there is very little light at 650 feet down, and there was nothing to feel or smell or see that could help the sharks find their way. And yet they seemed to know where they were and where they were going at all times. For a human, that would be like putting on a blindfold and earplugs and walking three thousand miles from Venice Beach, California, to Coney Island and then back again. And doing it every year.

  AROUND THE SAME TIME MARINE researchers were scratching their heads over these new findings, a German zoologist named Friedrich Merkel heard about some peculiar behavior among European robins. Merkel’s colleagues had witnessed the robins hopping in the same direction that they naturally migrated in. The birds continued this directional hopping even in enclosed areas, where they couldn’t take cues from the sun or sky. It was as if the birds had an innate sense of their location and destination, even when they couldn’t see anything.

  In 1958, Merkel gathered a flock of robins and placed them, one at a time, inside a chamber about the size of a wash bucket that blocked the sky, stars, and sun. The floor of the chamber was covered with a touch-sensitive electric pad that recorded the direction the robin hopped in. Over several months, Merkel observed their movements. The results were always the same: In the spring, the robins hopped north; in the fall, they’d hop south. In other words, the robins hopped in the exact direct
ions of their normal migration routes.

  Merkel repeated the tests in various chambers under various conditions and got nearly identical results—with one exception. When he put the robins in a magnetically shielded chamber, their sense of direction disappeared.

  On a compass, the pull toward magnetic north is a reaction to the Earth’s magnetic field—positive and negative charges created by the circulating molten iron in the planet’s core. For Merkel and his colleagues, these experiments provided ample proof that robins had a magnetic sense of direction. Other scientists balked, claiming the data was weak. The idea that birds, animals, or any creatures could orient themselves by the subtle energy of magnetic fields—using a sense other than vision, hearing, feel, taste, or smell—was just too weird a proposition for most scientists to accept.

  But Merkel was right.

  Twenty-five years after his experiments, this magnetic sense (which became known as magnetoreception) was shown to exist in bacteria, and shortly after that, scientists found overwhelming evidence that other creatures used it as well, including birds, bees, ants, fish, and sharks.

  Experiments for magnetoreception in humans conducted over the next thirty years suggested that we too might have this sixth sense. But to prove it, scientists needed to know exactly how it worked in the human body. To do that, they needed a sensory receptor. They’d find a likely candidate in 2012.

  FRED BUYLE WALKS THROUGH THE security gates of Roland Garros International Airport in Saint-Denis, the capital of Réunion, pushing a cart full of spear guns and dive equipment. Above him, flocks of bats and small black birds lost in the rafters fly lazy figure eights. The ammoniac smell of bird and bat excrement mixes with the sticky, steamy tropical air.

  A throng of reporters waits at the exit gate, cameras rolling. In the past few days, local media have painted Buyle as a kind of shark whisperer. Wearing a tight black T-shirt and sporting the shaved head and musclebound physique of Mr. Clean, Buyle is visibly annoyed by the reporters’ presence. He politely exchanges a few quick words with them in French, then pushes his way through the exit doors to Fabrice Schnöller’s silver pickup truck. “This is bullshit,” Buyle says in his resonant monotone. He hops into the passenger seat. “There’s no hero here. No quick solution. It’s just the beginning of a long process.”

  That evening, Buyle, Schnöller, and I take my bite-size rental car through Saint-Denis’s maze of narrow cobblestone streets and soot-covered colonial buildings. Before long, we arrive at a restaurant overlooking a beach with a perfect curling wave. It’s an eerie scene: a glassy, head-high wave on a tropical island at sunset with nobody surfing it. In fact, there’s nobody on the beach at all.

  “It’s illegal to be on the beach now. You swim in the water, they will put you in jail,” says Schnöller, taking a seat at the patio table. Schnöller used to own a lumber store down the road, but he sold it five years ago, after having a spiritual experience diving with sperm whales. He now spends his time running DareWin (short for Database Regional for Whales and Dolphins), a nonprofit organization focused on dolphin- and whale-communication research. With his uncombed swatch of short gray hair, oversize multicolored shorts, and wild gesticulations, he is the dervish to Buyle’s monk.

  Schnöller orders a beer and leans back in his chair. He mentions that travel agencies are now warning travelers away from Réunion—it’s too dangerous. “Nobody wants to be responsible, and the government bans [people from] the beaches to avoid paying costs of amputation, rehabilitation, whatever.” He sighs. “I mean, even the locals are scared of these sharks.”

  In September 2011, a surfer had his leg bitten off by a shark. A week later, a shark charged a kayak, hitting it from beneath the prow and sinking it. The kayaker was picked up by a passing boat and survived. Then a thirty-two-year-old former body-boarding champion was dragged from his board in a crowded line and half devoured in less than thirty seconds. His mutilated body washed up on the shore. Two months after that, a spearfisher wading in chest-high water was bitten on the ass.

  “It’s very crazy,” says Buyle. “Sharks don’t like to eat humans. That’s what was so weird. Something was frightening them maybe, bringing them close to shore. But what?”

  Schnöller takes out a pen and begins drawing on the back of a napkin. “This is how we will find out,” he explains, pointing at a boxy figure with some circles around it. It’s a picture of the shark-tracking system he’s invented, which he calls SharkFriendly. Six months earlier, when Schnöller first met Buyle at an underwater film festival in Paris, the two discussed working together on a shark-tagging project on Réunion. After the recent spate of shark attacks, Schnöller developed his first schematic for SharkFriendly. The two have been working out the details ever since.

  SharkFriendly is an acoustic system that follows a shark in real time. Most tagging systems work with satellite technology—a tiny computer built into a metal tube the size of a cigar, which adheres to the shark for six to nine months, then detaches, floats to the surface, and uploads collected data to a satellite. While accurate, satellite tags offer only backstory: what the shark did last year, last month, last week, but not what it is doing right now. “They provide incredible information, but it’s all history,” Schnöller says of existing systems. He believes Réunion’s surfers and swimmers need to know where the homicidal sharks are now, not where they were yesterday.

  SharkFriendly relies on a weave of acoustic systems, beacons, and satellites. On the napkin, Schnöller diagrams the particulars of his system, starting with a sketch of the coastline of Boucan Canot, the locus of the recent attacks. When a tagged shark gets about fifteen hundred feet from shore, beacons that Schnöller placed off the coast will recognize the tag’s high-frequency signal and relay an alert to a satellite, which in turn will signal a computer server that updates a website and mobile app to warn people that a shark is nearby.

  Schnöller tells me that nobody has tried to set up a system like this before. And nobody is paying him and Buyle to do it now. Schnöller crumples the napkin and throws it onto his plate. “But what else are we supposed to do?” he says. “Sit here and do nothing?”

  THREE DAYS LATER, SCHNÖLLER and I arrive at La Possession Marina for our third shark-tagging attempt. The past two days at sea were failures. Buyle dove for hours but never saw a single bull shark. Today, we’ll try again, in a marine sanctuary close to Boucan Canot, the beach where the body-boarder was eaten just two months earlier. Diving in this area is illegal, but Schnöller and Buyle will take the risk of arrest or injury in order to increase the chances of finding a shark. They’ve also brought in some backup.

  Waiting on the dock beside our motorboat is Markus Fix, a forty-four-year-old German computer programmer and the technical wizard behind SharkFriendly. Fix, who is wearing a T-shirt that says Science: It Works, Bitches, has created an underwater system that will broadcast the noise made by an injured fish. Sharks are opportunists, Schnöller tells me, and will never pass up an easy meal. Nothing sounds better to them than injured prey.

  Joining Fix is Guy Gazzo, a slender man with salt-and-pepper hair and anchorman good looks. Gazzo is one of the best freedivers in Réunion and can hold his breath underwater for more than five minutes. I’m shocked when Schnöller tells me he’s seventy-four. He looks twenty years younger. I say hello. Gazzo replies with bonjour. I learn later that Gazzo refuses to speak English because he’s still mad at the British for bombing the French navy in Toulon in 1942, when he was five.

  Next to Gazzo is William Winram, a Canadian freediver and Buyle’s longtime friend. Last year, Winram—who is six three and has a gargantuan frame that makes him look even bigger—set a national freediving record by pulling himself down a rope thirty-two stories deep. I shake his big hand, which feels like I’m gripping a bunch of hot dogs, and hop in the boat.

  We leave the harbor and head toward La Possession, a bull shark hotspot. With its rows of houses, beautiful sand beaches, and low-hanging trees, La Possession is
made even more scenic by a range of huge mountains that rise a few miles inland. Known as the Cirques, these mountains climb ten thousand feet in a distance of less than ten miles and are so out of proportion with the rest of the local geography that they look like a poorly balanced landscape painting.

  About a mile off the coast, Schnöller cuts the motor, and Buyle and Gazzo slip on neoprene gloves, boots, and two-piece wetsuits. They grab their goggles and spear guns and then descend into the diamond-clear water. I watch at the surface as they disappear for several minutes at a time, then return with fish wriggling on the ends of their spears. Winram sits on the back deck, squinting in the bright white morning sun, putting on his wetsuit more slowly. I ask if he’s going to join Buyle and Gazzo.

  “Yeah,” he says. “But I need to take a shit first.”

  He gets in the water, takes a few big gulps of air, and kicks down eighty feet to the seafloor, where he slips off his wetsuit pants, does his business, and kicks back to the surface. Because of the reverse pull past forty feet, Winram’s business will stay stuck to the seafloor instead of rising to float.

  Meanwhile, Buyle and Gazzo have returned and are sitting on the deck, slitting the heads of foot-long tarpon they’ve just speared. They spill the innards into a makeshift strainer that Schnöller constructed from a discarded washing-machine drum he found on the roadside. The strainer will broadcast the smell of fish blood to sharks hundreds of feet away.

  While the divers are busy baiting, Schnöller and Fix set up the underwater sound system. Schnöller tells me that sharks have keen hearing and, in the right currents, can home in on prey from eight hundred feet.

  “The recording is from 1966—it’s the only one I could find!” says Schnöller, pressing Play on a car stereo that Fix jerry-rigged inside a plastic box. The scream of a crippled kingfish blasts from the speaker, which sounds like someone crinkling a plastic water bottle. Schnöller says he knows an Australian who’s proved that sharks are attracted to the music of AC/DC, “You Shook Me All Night Long” in particular.