Deep

by James Nestor

  BY NOON, WE’RE BACK ONSHORE, sitting in a half circle along the breakwater. The ama have emptied their fishing nets on the concrete in front of us. They’ve each gathered a few dozen sea urchins, which they’ll sell for a pittance to nearby sushi restaurants. I gather my gear and thank the ama, then Takayan exchanges a few words of Japanese with Manusanke and the other women. They laugh, then wave goodbye, smiling.

  As Takayan and I walk back to our cars, I ask him what was so funny. He says that he asked Manusanke if the ama had any ancient freediving secrets they’d like to share with me.

  “And? What did she say?”

  “‘You just dive,’” Manusanke had told him. “‘You just get in the water!’”

  It was the same answer I got from Otto Rutten at Aquarius, the same answer Fred Buyle, Hanli Prinsloo, and the other divers in Greece had given me. There was no shortcut, no rulebook, no secret handshake, no specialized equipment or diet or pill that would get me there. The secret to going deep, they all seemed to be saying, was within each of us. We’re born with it.

  But unlocking that secret was trickier than I ever imagined.

  Illustration by John Ceazon

  Sperm whales produce clicking sounds that allow them to view their underwater world with echolocation, a form of sonar. DIY researcher Fabrice Schnöller believes these sounds may also contain a kind of coded language. He built this homemade contraption of surround-sound hydrophones and video cameras to better study sperm whale vocalizations and behavior.Fred Buyle/Nektos.net

  The eye of the whale: The sperm whale brain is six times the size of ours and in many ways more complex. It’s the largest brain ever known to have existed, and most researchers believe it allows sperm whales to engage in sophisticated communication. Schnöller and his team hope to be the first to decode what they’re saying.Fred Buyle/Nektos.net

  “It’s like being in outer space”: At underwater depths below forty feet, gravity reverses. Instead of floating up, you’re pulled down. Hanli Prinsloo, a champion freediver and ocean conservationist, tries out her deep-water high-wire act.Annelie Pompe/anneliepompe.com

  Prinsloo enters a shiver, or group, of blacktip sharks. When freediving researchers approach sharks “on their terms”—that is, deep below the ocean’s surface and without the disruptive gurgle of air bubbles from scuba equipment—the threat of attacks is often negated. The sharks become curious, even docile.Jean-Marie Ghislain/ghislainjm.com

  “They’re gentle giants”: Whale sharks are neither whales nor sharks, but the world’s largest fish. They can grow more than forty feet in length and weigh around 50,000 pounds. Prinsloo swims face-to-face with one as it feeds on plankton.Jean-Marie Ghislain/ghislainjm.com

  Dolphins “speak” both first names and last names when they approach other dolphins and, sometimes, human freedivers. They may also be able to send one another sonographic pictures, something researchers call “holographic communication.” Schnöller dives down to take a closer listen.Olivier Borde

  “Jane Goodall didn’t study apes from a plane”: Of the twenty or so sperm whale scientists who work in the field, none dive with their subjects. Schnöller (center right, with camera) finds this inconceivable. “How do you study sperm whale behavior without seeing them behave, without seeing them communicate?” With his immersive, freediving approach, in five years Schnöller has captured more audio and video footage of sperm whale interactions than anyone before.Fred Buyle/Nektos.net

  The key to getting close to whales and dolphins, Schnöller says, is to move in calmly and predictably. With a bit of luck, humpback whales (pictured here), normally very shy, get playful. Sometimes, they approach.Yann Oulia

  “They stayed with us for three hours”: A freediver approaches a blue shark in this image captured by Fred Buyle, one of the world’s most sought-after underwater photographers. Buyle aims to document the gentle side of what he calls “the most misunderstood animals on the planet.” An estimated twenty million blue sharks are killed every year for shark fin soup and fishmeal.Fred Buyle/Nektos.net

  The human body in its natural form (without weights or wetsuits) is the perfect buoyancy for deep-water diving. We’re able to float at the surface and yet can dive down to great depths while exerting little effort. From left, swimmer Peter Marshall, Hanli Prinsloo, and the author.Jean-Marie Ghislain/ghislainjm.com

  As on the moon’s surface, gravity on the seafloor still exists below forty feet but is greatly reduced. Strolling around, doing yoga, even underwater hiking are possible for as long as you can hold your breath. William Winram, a Canadian freediver, takes an amble.Fred Buyle/Nektos.net and williamwinram.com

  −1,000

  “IT WAS LIKE A NEAR-DEATH experience. Like being transported to some other place, some other plane,” says Fabrice Schnöller.

  Schnöller and I are sitting together at Planet Nature, a health-food restaurant he owns with his wife in downtown Saint-Denis, Réunion. Schnöller uses the second-floor seating area as his office, but it looks more like a storage room. USB cables and electrical cords cover a desk like ivy. Stacks of scientific papers teeter on the tables. Rows of dog-eared academic books cram corner shelves.

  It’s a few months after my meeting with the ama, and, against the complaints of my lower back, I’ve returned to Réunion. I’ve been lured here by Schnöller, who e-mailed me a few weeks ago and said he was on the cusp of a “big discovery.” It had something to do with whale and dolphin clicks, but he was short on specifics. He told me he’d invited a team of scientists, researchers, and freedivers from all over the world to come to Réunion for a weeklong conference to discuss it.

  “You should join the team,” he said. I accepted and flew thirty-two hours to reconnect with him and his crew. My plan was to stay ten days.

  Now, a few hours before the conference convenes, Schnöller sits me down and recounts how he sold his business and decided to dedicate his life to studying dolphin and whale click communication.

  “It started while I was sailing to Mauritius, about five years ago,” he says, taking a sip of Dodo beer. “That’s when everything changed.”

  SCHNÖLLER WAS CAPTAINING a sixty-foot sloop called the Annabelle that his friend Luke had just bought from Paloma Picasso, a daughter of Pablo Picasso (an original Picasso still hung in the hull). A few hours into the thirty-six-hour trip, Luke and the six other crew members were below deck incapacitated by seasickness. The onboard chores fell to Schnöller.

  Schnöller didn’t mind. He enjoyed captaining the Annabelle, mostly because he liked being alone at sea, especially in the dark. Around eleven on the first night, he leaned back in the captain’s chair and stared out across a gaping sky, glistening with stars. In his left hand, he held a thermos filled with coffee; with his right, he turned the oversize wheel of the ship to the northeast. He listened to the syncopated thump of waves crashing on the prow, and he imagined that the sound was coming from some large hand reaching up and tapping out a pattern on the ship’s bottom, like fingers on a bongo drum. Through his headphones, the spiraling bass line of the Doors’ classic “Riders on the Storm” faded in; the sound of canned winds and rain from the song mixed with the real wind and splatter of spindrift that blew salty water on his face and hair. Schnöller smiled, sailed on, and watched as the blackness of night drained out of the sky like water from a dirty sink, leaving only clear blue and orange in its wake. It was morning again.

  By 10:00 a.m., the winds had calmed and swells subsided. The crew members slowly emerged from the cabin with puffy eyes and swollen faces, exhausted. Captain Luke apologized for leaving Schnöller on watch all night. Schnöller nodded, took another sip of coffee, and swallowed the last bite of the sandwich Luke had packed for himself to eat later. He kept his eyes on the horizon. Luke noticed a column of mist at the side of the boat—it looked as if a grenade had detonated in the water. Then another little bomb went off, and another. Schnöller had heard from other sailors that there were whales in this stretch of the Indian Ocean. See
ing them at a distance was common, but having your ship surrounded by them was practically unheard of. Schnöller felt a strong urge to jump in and swim with them.

  He went below to grab his mask, fins, snorkel, and a waterproof camera. Luke met him at the back of the boat and begged him to stay on deck. Another crew member, Jean-Marc, joined Schnöller on the transom, and they both jumped in the water.

  The ocean is usually silent, but the waters here were thundering with an incessant click-click-click, as if a thousand stove lighters were being triggered over and over again. Schnöller figured the noise must be coming from some mechanism on the ship. He swam farther away from the boat, but the clicking only got louder. He’d never heard a sound like this before and had no idea where it was coming from. Then he looked down.

  A pod of whales, their bodies oriented vertically, like obelisks, surrounded him on all sides and stared up with wide eyes. They swam toward the surface, clicking louder and louder as they approached. They gathered around Schnöller and rubbed against him, face to face. Schnöller could feel the clicks penetrating his flesh and vibrating through his bones, his chest cavity.

  “I felt like I was contacting ET, you know, like this was communication from another planet,” says Schnöller. He and Jean-Marie spent two hours swimming with the whales that day. He’d known nothing about whales before the encounter. Afterward, they became his obsession.

  When Schnöller got home to Réunion, he Googled images of whales and compared the photographs he’d taken with those he found online. Sperm whales are the largest of the toothed whales, and, according to historical accounts, the most ferocious whale predators. Historical images that Schnöller found depicted them killing humans, crushing boats, gorging on giant squids. But in his brief experience with them, Schnöller saw the whales to be gentle, curious, and intelligent, making him wonder how accurate those old images were. With their eight-inch teeth, the whales could easily have killed him. But instead they approached in peace and welcomed him into their pod. Schnöller wanted to understand how history and reality could be so far apart. He looked around for the latest sperm whale–behavior studies. But there weren’t any.

  “I assumed the military, thousands of scientists around the world, were conducting studies on these animals,” he says. “I found nothing—no research, no videos, no photographs.”

  Schnöller realized the only way he could get his wife, the other crew members on the boat, or anyone else to understand the experience he had was to begin his own research program. Six months after the sperm whale encounter, he sold his lumber supply store and started the nonprofit DareWin. He enrolled in biology courses at the University of Réunion. He learned that dolphins, beluga whales, orcas, and other cetaceans (toothed marine mammals) also use the distinct clicking sounds he’d heard and felt swimming with sperm whales.

  Sperm whales rarely visit Réunion’s coast, but bottle-nosed dolphins, which can dive down to a thousand feet, are common. Schnöller focused on recording interactions between dolphins and analyzing their vocalizations, which include clicks, burst pulses, and whistles.

  Over the past five years, Schnöller and his small crew of volunteers recorded more than a hundred hours of wild dolphin behavior—the largest collection of its kind in the world.

  SCHNÖLLER GETS UP AND LEADS me to his desk. Behind a lump of papers is an oversize computer monitor with a spectrogram readout—a visual representation of an audio signal—showing some dolphin clicks and other vocalizations he had recorded months earlier. He starts a track, which he says contains rapid click patterns called burst pulses. The speakers blast what sounds like party whistles and machine-gun fire. “All those noises, they are all coming from one dolphin,” he says. “One dolphin.”

  Dolphins and other cetaceans use these clicking sounds as part of a sophisticated form of sonar called echolocation. They’re similar to the clicks sperm whales used to shake Schnöller’s body years ago, only weaker.

  To understand cetacean echolocation, Schnöller says, you first need to understand sonar.

  A simple sonar system, consisting of one speaker and one hydrophone (an underwater microphone), works by first sending out a pulse sound, or ping. That ping travels through water until it hits something, then echoes back. The hydrophone records the echo, and a processor calculates how long it took for the echo of the ping to return. This system can provide information on how far away an object is and the direction it is moving, but nothing more.

  A more complex sonar system includes dozens of hydrophones distributed over a wide area. When a ping is sent out, the echo that returns reaches each of these hydrophones at a slightly different time. With this extra information, the sonar system can determine not only the distance of an object, but its shape and depth. A rough picture emerges.

  Dolphins and some whales have the equivalent of thousands, even tens of thousands, of echo-collecting hydrophones built into their heads. When a cetacean sends out a click (its version of a sonar ping), it receives the echo information with a fatty sac located beneath the lower jaw, called a melon. Unlike ears, which provide only two directional sources to gather information, the melon provides the cetacean with thousands of data points. The animal can process these to gauge the distance, shape, depth, interior, and exterior of the objects and creatures around it.

  Dolphins can detect the shape, position, and size of larger objects from up to six miles away. Their echolocation is so powerful and sensitive that it can penetrate over a foot deep into sand; it can even “see” beneath skin. Dolphins can peer into the lungs, stomachs, and brains of the animals around them. With all this information, scientists believe dolphins can create the equivalent of an HD-quality rendering of objects nearby—not only where these objects are, but how they look from the inside out. In essence, dolphins and other cetaceans have x-ray vision.

  Echolocation isn’t just a curiosity; it’s essential for a cetacean’s survival. Ninety percent of the ocean is cloaked in permanent blackness, and even those areas near the surface are black at night. To adapt to this dim-lit environment, some animals evolved to have super-sensitive eyes; others create their own light with bioluminescence; rays and sharks use electro- and magnetoreception. Cetaceans evolved to have remarkable powers of echolocation.

  THIS “SENSE” IS NOT RESTRICTED to the ocean. Bats have used echolocation for fifty million years to thrive in complete darkness. Humans have echolocated for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

  French philosopher Denis Diderot noted instances of “blind sight” in the mid-1700s. Almost a century later, in the 1820s, a blind English adventurer named James Holman traveled around the world using a self-taught form of echolocation. The public was skeptical about Holman and other human echolocators. Most people believed they had partial vision or perhaps were using something called facial vision, the sensation of pressure increasing on one’s face as one moves closer to an object. In 1941, a Cornell University psychologist named Karl Dallenbach tested for it.

  He gathered a group of blind subjects and had them walk toward a wall. When they believed that they could perceive the wall, they were told to raise their left arms; when they thought they were about to collide with the wall, they were to raise their right arms. The blind subjects succeeded in perceiving the wall from dozens of feet away; they stopped mere inches before walking into it. Dallenbach then gathered a group of sighted subjects, blindfolded them, and repeated the experiment. The sighted people perceived the wall almost as accurately as the blind ones.

  Next, Dallenbach had the subjects walk on a carpeted path that an assistant blocked with a board at random intervals. After thirty trials, the blindfolded, sighted subjects could locate the board just as reliably as the blind subjects. Dallenbach then tested for facial vision by putting felt hoods over subjects’ heads, which would minimize any pressure sensations they could pick up from their surroundings. The hooded group easily perceived the board and wall as accurately as they had without the hoods. Dallenbach concluded, corr
ectly, that humans did not use facial vision; we too had a sixth sense of echolocation.

  A FEW WEEKS AFTER SCHNÖLLER introduced me to the otherworldly concept of echolocation, I’m walking down a street in suburban Los Angeles with Brian Bushway, one of the world’s most gifted human echolocators. As we stroll toward a restaurant he’s chosen for lunch, Bushway emits a sharp, short click from his mouth, then points out an empty driveway on our right, a van parked to our left, and rows of overgrown bushes on an upcoming corner. He clicks in the other direction and mentions that the house we just passed is small and covered in plaster, while the one across the street has large bay windows. The lawn in front of the apartment complex just ahead is in sore need of gardening. Bushway gets to the end of the sidewalk, pauses a moment, then leads me past two parked cars and up a curb to the sidewalk on the other side of the street. We take a right, he clicks again, and then he walks me through a crowded parking lot. He tells me the Cuban restaurant we’re going to is up this way. I follow him through the entrance and into a crowded dining room. A server walks us to a corner table and hands us menus. Bushway puts the menu down, without looking, and tells me to order for him. He can’t read the menu; he can’t even see it. He’s blind.

  I learn about Bushway through YouTube videos. I watched him dashing along a dirt trail on a mountain bike, nimbly dodging branches, bushes, and boulders, and then riding down a steep flight of stairs. Next, he was jogging across a river and through a thirty-foot-wide mud pit. Another video showed him walking through a park, approaching a tree, and climbing it.