by James Nestor
But there was also some good news. Bartlett and his team were regrouping and hoping to get back out to the hadal zone, probably to Sirena Deep, and probably back aboard the Super Emerald. “Maybe you can record our triumph during our next mission as part of your next book,” Bartlett wrote when he signed off. He’s saving a seat for me, the one on the cold steel floor by the cooler, across from the bathroom.
−10,000
Fabrice Schnöller’s “big and important” recording that he made off the side of the motorboat in Trincomalee may actually turn out to be big and important. Schnöller believes he captured a “gunshot”—the rarest and most confounding of sperm whale vocalizations.
The sound is connected, scientists think, to a sperm whale’s hunting technique. Unlike a baleen whale, which uses a hairlike substance to filter plankton from the water, a sperm whale has about forty teeth along its lower jaw. Whalers assumed sperm whales used these teeth to attack prey, but research suggests otherwise. Examinations of dead sperm whales’ stomachs (a sperm whale has four) show that they don’t chew their food. Giant squids, a primary food source for them, swim up to thirty-five miles per hour and grow more than sixty feet long. The sperm whale has a top speed of about twenty-five miles per hour. How could it catch, let alone kill, a giant squid without biting it as it passed by? And what good are teeth when you don’t chew your food?
Some researchers, including Schnöller, believe sperm whales use their teeth as little antennas to assist in echolocation, or even holographic communication. To hunt, sperm whales probably use super-powerful gunshot clicks to stun or kill prey before they consume them.
There have been only two recordings of sperm whale gunshots ever made: in 1987 and 1999, both in Sri Lanka, both by scientists. Schnöller believes the recording he made with his pasta strainer, broomstick, and homemade hydrophone rig is the third. “I know it’s a gunshot,” he wrote. “I’m now going to do proper scientific protocol to prove it.”
−2,500
Unknown to us at the time, the dive that Stan Kuczaj and I made in Idabel was the second-deepest Karl Stanley had ever attempted. Stanley’s submarine tours in Roatan remain precarious. He’s under constant pressure from local authorities to leave the island, and travel agencies are no longer promoting the sub rides for fear of being sued should something go wrong.
Nonetheless, as of August 2013, the Roatan Institute of Deepsea Exploration and the general public’s deepest diving submarine were still in operation.
−1,000
In September 2013, after spending five years and thousands of dollars building his own dolphin and whale recording devices, Fabrice Schnöller launched a new company called Click Research (www.click-research.net), which provides citizen-scientists affordable gear to do DIY oceanic research. Click Research’s products, which were developed with DareWin engineer Markus Fix, include a shark-monitoring device, a transmitter that sends live whale songs to your home stereo, and a dolphin vocalization analyzer that identifies dolphins by their signature whistles. Schnöller hopes to one day use a souped-up version of the dolphin analyzer to translate dolphin whistles into English. “In a couple years, possibly,” he told me. “But it is very complicated, you know.”
Schnöller and the rest of the DareWin crew plan to take this equipment—and the thirty-nine-speaker holographic-communication rig—on a two-week expedition to a deserted beach off the coast of the Arabian state of Oman in 2015. It will be the first field test of holographic communication ever attempted.
“You must come!” he yelled over the scratchy phone line. “It’s going to be insane!”
−800
A year after his failed world-record no-limits dive to eight hundred feet in Santorini, Greece, Austrian Herbert Nitsch is still suffering from neurological problems. Nitsch can’t remember names well; he has trouble talking and walking. His voice is shaky, and he has lost much of the mobility in his right arm. He continues to improve every day, he says, and is now working on his rehabilitation training with the same enthusiasm and determination he used to approach no-limits diving. He’s even begun freediving again, but only to a depth of about ten feet.
Nitsch now focuses much of his time on ocean conservation. He joined world champion surfer Kelly Slater and legendary freediver Enzo Maiorca as a member of Sea Shepherd’s Ocean Advocacy Advisory Board to help end the slaughter of wildlife and the destruction of the world’s seas.
When a reporter asked Nitsch what he considered to be the current world record in no-limits diving, Nitsch responded, “To tell the truth, I don’t care now.”
−650
In the wake of the success of the SharkFriendly pilot system in December 2011, local authorities began a tagging program of their own, and over the course of the next year they tagged acoustic transmitters on more than a hundred bull sharks along Réunion’s west coast. While the tagging system successfully tracked the movements of bull sharks, it did little to stop them from attacking swimmers. From January 2012 through August 2013, Réunion Island has suffered three more fatal shark attacks. The authorities closed off Réunion’s beaches and, at last report, were planning to kill off ninety bull sharks.
Fred Buyle predicts it will do little good and will most likely provoke even more attacks in the future. “Surfers know these are dangerous situations, but they go out anyway, then they blame the sharks,” he said. “People need to learn that when they are in the ocean they are swimming in nature. The only solution here is education: Don’t swim in cloudy water. Don’t swim after a big rain. Don’t swim near a river. But nobody listens.”
COINCIDENTALLY, THE SOLUTION FOR RÉUNION’S shark problem may come not from Buyle and Schnöller but from Jean-Marie Ghislain, the shark researcher I first met in Cape Town through Hanli Prinsloo. In September 2013, Ghislain visited me in San Francisco for three days and explained his proposal. He had been consulting with a Belgian company, AquaTek, to create a shark-deterrent system called Shark Repelling Technology (SRT). SRT would disrupt sharks’ electroreceptive sense by blasting the water with a magnetic field. In dozens of tests using both captive and wild sharks, it had a 100 percent success rate, often scaring sharks off from hundreds of feet away. The sharks, Ghislain said, suffer no ill effects, and because the system affects only animals with electroreception—sharks and rays—other sea life can pass through the SRT unharmed.
AquaTek is in negotiations with Réunion authorities to install the SRT at Boucan Canot, Saint-Gilles, and other beaches along Réunion’s west coast in 2014. “This could be a big paradigm shift in our approach to sharks,” said Ghislain. “It has a very good chance of saving them . . . and saving us.”
−300
Dave King, the British diver who went into cardiac arrest after he completed a monofin attempt to 335 feet at the world freediving championship in Kalamata, Greece, fared much better. He has suffered no ill effects from his blackout. “I am not a reckless diver,” he wrote a few months after the accident. He claims the blackout in Greece was his only one in ten years of freediving. He argued that his work schedule doesn’t allow him to train as much as other elite divers and that he had time for only three dives before the competition. “I got to 102 meters, equalizing easily,” he wrote. “I just had problems as I reached the surface.”
−60
In June 2011, a month after I visited the Aquarius Reef Base in Key Largo, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency that manages Aquarius, cut funding for the base and canceled all upcoming missions. Soon after, the world’s last underwater habitat was shuttered.
Then, in early 2013, Florida International University negotiated with NOAA to take over operations. In September 2013, Aquarius was reopened and aquanauts were back inside the habitat, sitting around half robed in the cold, wet kitchen, buzzed off nitrogen, eating flattened Oreos, and uncovering the secrets of the ocean and ourselves sixty feet below the surface.
Epilogue
FIVE DAYS BEFORE MY DEADLINE to deliv
er the final draft of this book, on November 17, 2013, I get an e-mail from Fred Buyle. “Remember the conversation we had, James, when I told you that someday we’ll see someone die in a freediving competition,” he wrote. “Today, it happened.”
At 1:45 p.m. local time, Nicholas Mevoli, a thirty-two-year-old from Brooklyn, died of complications from lung damage shortly after completing a 236-foot no-fins dive. The dive happened during Vertical Blue, an annual freediving competition hosted by William Trubridge at Dean’s Blue Hole in the Bahamas.
Mevoli was new to the sport. Just eighteen months earlier, in May 2012, he had made his competitive freediving debut with a monofin dive to three hundred feet—an unheard-of depth for a beginner. The following year he competed in dozens of competitions, attempting even greater depths. He often blacked out. He frequently resurfaced bleeding from his nose and mouth. He tore his lungs repeatedly, which caused him to spit up blood days after competitions. Mevoli brushed these warning signs aside. He kept diving. And he started breaking records.
On November 16 at Vertical Blue, Mevoli attempted a 314-foot dive, a U.S. national record in the discipline of free immersion. He made it down to 260 feet, then suddenly turned back. Safety divers had to pull his unconscious body to the surface. When Mevoli came to, blood dripped from his mouth. He thrashed in the water angrily and cursed at himself. “Numbers infected my head like a virus and the need to achieve became an obsession . . . Obsession can kill,” he had written in a blog months earlier. Unfortunately, Mevoli didn’t heed his own advice.
The next day, November 17, still reeling from the blackout, Mevoli announced that he would break another U.S. record, this time in the no-fins discipline, the most demanding in freediving. He was trying for a depth of 236 feet. At 12:30 p.m., he slipped on his goggles, took one last breath, and kicked his bare feet along the guide rope. Moments later, Mevoli disappeared in the shadows of the deep water.
A judge on deck followed his descent. Mevoli dove quickly, passing 50, 100, 150, 200 feet. Then, at 223 feet, just a dozen feet short of his target depth, he unexpectedly stopped. Moments passed, and Mevoli didn’t move. Some time later, he started his ascent, stopped again, turned around, and forced himself back down to the plate at the end of the rope. Fifteen divers, judges, and medics waiting on deck at the surface winced. They knew this was a reckless decision. Mevoli grabbed a ticket off the plate at 236 feet and scrambled back up the rope.
Somehow he was still conscious when he reached the surface. He flashed an okay sign and tried to complete surface protocol by saying, “I’m okay.” But the words never came. Seconds later, he blacked out. The medics lugged Mevoli’s unconscious body to the dive platform and began emergency resuscitation procedures. Blood poured from Mevoli’s mouth. His pulse fluttered. Fifteen minutes later, the pulse disappeared, and the medics cut off his wetsuit and began vigorously pumping his chest. They injected him with adrenaline. The resuscitation attempts went on for almost ninety minutes. They put him in a station wagon and drove him to a nearby hospital, where the paramedics continued to work on him and a local doctor pulled about a liter of fluid from his lungs. Soon after, Mevoli was pronounced dead.
IT WAS THE FIRST DEATH in twenty-one years of AIDA-sanctioned freediving competitions. Buyle was both sad and furious.
After the death, Buyle posted an open letter to Nektos.net, his website, describing how the new generation of competitors had become disconnected from the sea, themselves, and the true nature of freediving.
Buyle mentioned that it took him ten years of conditioning and constant diving to make it to the depths Mevoli was diving to after just a year and a half. The new divers were going far too deep, too fast, and they were skipping what Buyle called “the adaptation phase needed to survive a deep dive.” They were also putting themselves at grave risk. “At some point I started to be worried that a serious accident could happen,” Buyle wrote. These competitors, he said, were “looking deliberately for trouble.”
NICHOLAS MEVOLI’S DEATH MADE international headlines. Three days after I received Buyle’s e-mail, I was asked to comment on the tragedy for Al Jazeera television. The next day I appeared on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition. In the two years since I’d been introduced to freediving, I’d somehow become an authority on it. This was flattering, but it also seemed absurd to me. I’d attended all of two freediving events, but that was two more than most journalists. And I’d certainly seen enough to form an opinion. Above all, I wanted to set the record straight.
What I told NPR and Al Jazeera and the rest of the press, parents, friends, and recreational freedivers who called and wrote me that week—and what I’ve tried to very clearly explain in this book—was that competitive freediving was profoundly different from the kind of freediving I’d researched and trained to do.
Most competitive divers are blind, numb, and dumb to the ocean environment. They go against their bodies’ instincts, ignore their limits, and exploit their amphibious reflexes to the breaking point. They do this to dive deeper than the next guy. Sometimes they make their target depth; sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they resurface unconscious or paralyzed or worse.
The freediving I learned from Prinsloo, Buyle, Schnöller, Gazzo, and the ama was the opposite of this egocentric, numbers-driven approach. To this group, freediving was about connecting with the underwater environment, looking more keenly at your surroundings, focusing on your feelings and instincts, respecting your limits, and letting the ocean envelop you—never forcing yourself anywhere for any reason. This was a spiritual practice, a way of using the human body as a vessel to explore the wonders in the Earth’s inner space.
Freediving was also a tool. It gave my teachers access to the ocean that nobody else had. Using it, this group was helping to disprove many long-held assumptions about the ocean and its inhabitants. (Sperm whales don’t want to eat us; dolphins are trying to talk to us; sharks can become docile and playful when approached on their terms.) This group was also contributing to larger discoveries that could one day have a significant impact on the way we view life on Earth, and our place within it.
WHEN AND WHAT WILL WE know for sure? If history is any guide, Schnöller’s theory of click and holographic communication will take years, perhaps decades, to be proved or disproved. The big, paradigm-shifting scientific discoveries always do.
It wasn’t until the 1980s, some twenty years after Friedrich Merkel’s experiments with European robins, that scientists proved the existence of magnetoreception. Patent lawyer Günter Wächtershäuser toiled in obscurity for a decade until his iron-sulfur world theory was tested and gained scientific support and respect. And so on.
I realize that the idea of talking to a dolphin or exchanging three-dimensional images with sperm whales sounds mad. It certainly sounded crazy to me when I started this project, and I still want to pull out my notes whenever I’m chatting with a stranger about it, just so I’m fully armed with the facts.
But the reality is, we don’t have time to doubt Schnöller or the others plying the deep. The ocean is changing. The seas are rising. Coral is dying off and will probably disappear altogether in fifty years. Environmental hazards abound on the open sea—oil spills, trash, sound pollution, nuclear waste, and so on—and all or some of it is killing whales and dolphins and species we don’t even know about. One hundred million sharks are killed in the world’s oceans every year. These animals may be gone before we even have a chance to fully understand them.
And whatever we learn about them will lead us, undoubtedly, back to ourselves.
Over the past two years, it’s become clear to me that we don’t know what we are yet. And now the truth is like a bell constantly ringing in my ears.
I heard it for the first time, very clearly, in Sri Lanka.
IT WAS THE LAST DAY we were together on the beat-up motorboat; Schnöller and Prinsloo had been bickering since dawn, the temperature had spiked to 110 degrees, and signs of genteel mutiny were everywhere. We were floating in
the deep water of Trincomalee Canyon and had given ourselves until noon to see whales. Noon came and went. No whales. No sign of land either. Nothing but dead-calm water in all directions, and sun.
I suggested a swim. Cameras, itinerary, strategies, plans, and talk will be left on deck, I added. We’d just dive together, just this once, for no other reason than that it sounded like fun. Everyone agreed. We slipped on our gear and jumped in, one by one.
Within moments they were gone, through the doorway to the deep, and beyond.
I took a breath, grabbed my nose, upturned, and dove down to join them. I saw Guy Gazzo first. He was hovering in zero gravity, his fingers interlocked behind his head as if he were napping on an imaginary chaise longue. Schnöller stretched out fully beside him, spinning in lazy horizontal circles like a thrown baton. Below them, some seven stories from the surface, Prinsloo and her beau, Marshall, swam double helixes around each other until they all but faded away into the shadows.
What are we? I thought to myself. And with every breath I hold, I still wonder.