Swimming with the Great Whites

[Swordmaker]

To get inside the mind of the Great White shark, Fabien Cousteau is getting inside its body. Not such a strange endeavor, perhaps, for a third-generation oceanographer who was practically born with fins. “I did my first dive on my fourth birthday,” says Cousteau. “My father found me on the bottom of the pool buddy-breathing — a pretty advanced technique for sharing an oxygen tank — with a family friend.”

“The sub is an observational platform that lets me swim along at shark
speed,” says oceanographer Fabien Cousteau. “The whole point is to
fool them into thinking I’m a shark.”

Since then, Cousteau has hardly surfaced for air. Following in the wake of his famous grandfather Jacques and father Jean-Michel, Fabien has made the oceans his second home. “I went along on their expeditions during every school break,” he says. “I’d scrub the hulls, paint the rails, do whatever needed to be done — and dive. For me, that was vacation. I loved it.”

“When I was seven years old I read a Tintin story called ‘Rackham le Rouge,’ where he makes a sub in the shape of a shark and goes underwater. Since then I’ve always wanted to build a shark sub.”

After studying environmental economics in college, Cousteau did a brief stint at a Vermont-based manufacturer of green home products. But the siren call of the deep was too strong. “Business didn’t fulfill me the way exploring our planet does,” he says. “The most fun for me is experiencing the beauty of our planet firsthand. Of course that connects with my environmental interests, because when you’re out there you see the flip side — the damage people do.”

Audacious Experiments

Today, the Paris-born New York resident applies his wide-ranging curiosity, deep-water experience and passion for technology — including a boatload of Macs and Apple software used for everything from planning to postproduction — to design and execute his own experiments, which are among oceanography’s most audacious.

Take “Troy,” Cousteau’s nickname for the custom-designed sub he crawls inside to swim with the sharks. Meticulously designed by renowned Hollywood engineer Eddie Paul, Troy is enabling Cousteau to gain an unprecedented perspective on the planet’s largest predator: the warm-blooded, 21-foot-long, 2700-pound Great White shark.

“When I was seven years old I read a Tintin story called ‘Rackham le Rouge,’ where he makes a sub in the shape of a shark and goes underwater,” recalls Cousteau. “Since then I’ve always wanted to build a shark sub.” The idea has family precedent: in 1989 his father deployed a shark look-alike vehicle that was attacked by a large female Great White and completely destroyed. Fabien is undaunted; Troy, he points out, is an utterly different beast.

Sharkseye View

“Troy uses the latest-generation equipment,” says Cousteau, who assembled a team of crack engineers and scientists to advise the project. It’s an anatomically correct, 14-foot-long, 1000-pound, one-man “wet” sub (there’s water inside) that Cousteau operates in full diving gear. Troy’s experimental motors haul as fast as five knots. “The sub is an observational platform that lets me swim along at shark speed,” says Cousteau. “The whole point is to fool them into thinking I’m a shark.”

From his Trojan hideaway, Cousteau studies carefully chosen shark pods in Mexico and Australia. “Lots of sharks are baited for tourists nowadays,” he notes. “We looked for pods that have had the least possible human contact, so our data is as unbiased as possible.” He’s tracking preselected members of each pod and filming their responses as they’re introduced to a series of precisely designed and controlled situations.

Cousteau’s crew oversees the experiment via his shipboard command center — the topside boat that carries communications and support equipment. Inside Troy, Cousteau wears a full face mask with voice recording to talk to the support team. They include a marine biologist, sound engineer, topside cameraman, underwater cameraman, deckhand and video editor, as well as his sister Celine (“my lifeline”).

Producing a TV Special

Like his grandfather and father, Cousteau is driven not just to explore but to share what he learns. A key part of the project will be a TV documentary (working title: “Mind of a Demon”), through which Cousteau hopes to tear away ingrained assumptions about sharks.

That’s one reason why Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro are so important to the endeavor. The applications have helped Cousteau convey his ideas to team members and pitch them to prospective backers and TV executives. “We use Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro to edit proposals and treatments, make QuickTime movies and burn DVD demos and rough cuts,” he says.

Cousteau appreciates the powerful features included in Final Cut Pro. “It’s great to be able to do things like 24 frames per second editing without having to buy additional hardware or software, like you do with other programs,” he says.

Anatomy of a Fake Shark

“It’s great to be able to do things like 24 frames per second editing
without having to buy additional hardware or software, like
you do with other programs,” says Cousteau about Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro even go along on the topside support boat. A dual-processor 2GHz Power Mac G5 with a PCI card interface handles the processor-intensive video that’s uplinked live from the shark sub. “It’s the central nervous system and display system for the data I’m sending up from Troy — for the shark eyes facing outward as well as the cameras facing me, so the crew can see what I’m doing,” says Cousteau.

The Power Mac G5 captures Cousteau’s video and allows him to edit and produce daily rushes onboard. “With Final Cut Pro, we’re using the de facto industry standard for all our video from the field,” comments Cousteau. “And because a lot of the data is graphic, it makes sense for the acquiring machine and our editing equipment to be the same. We have our scientific experiments on the same system as the visuals we’re using for our video.”

“With documentaries, budgets are something you have to be really conscious of. So to find a whole package of pro apps that rival the best out there, for such a reasonable price — well, that in itself is a decision-making factor.”

Seamless — and Priceless

Cousteau is pitching his TV special to cable and network channels, and after it airs he’ll use DVD Studio Pro to author and replicate a DVD version. “DVD Studio Pro is a jewel of a program that allows us to create DVDs worthy of a Hollywood production,” he says.

“What makes it incredible is the way it and Final Cut Pro work together so seamlessly,” he says. “To be able to work in that intuitive, non-linear way is such a gift — they beat any competition hands-down.”

The applications deliver practical value the indie filmmaker couldn’t forgo. “Final Cut Pro comes with all these peripherals you’d normally have to pay extra for, like Live Type for beautiful titling, Soundtrack so you can create your own music and sound effects, and Cinema Tools and Compressor,” he notes.

Cost, of course, is a big issue. “With documentaries, budgets are something you have to be really conscious of,” says Cousteau. “So to find a whole package of pro apps that rival the best out there, for such a reasonable price — well, that in itself is a decision-making factor.”

Steel+SkinFlex+Pneumatic Propulsion System=Shark

Like a proud papa, Cousteau details the anatomical features of the sub that enables him to become a shark for hours at a stretch. “Troy uses a very high-tech patented pneumatic propulsion system with aircraft pistons — the same one that’s used by the Navy,” he explains. The pistons drive pressurized air into cylinders with cables that move the tail back and forth, an organic motion that mimics the smooth strokes of real sharks.

Rib-caged. “That body could support a tractor
driving over it,” says Cousteau about
the shark sub’s steel skeleton.

Troy’s body is as sophisticated as the engine. “The frame is a skeletal system with two-inch thick stainless steel ribs,” notes Cousteau. “It’s like the infrastructure of a skyscraper.” These ribs extend most of the length of the sub, hinged with a double spine made of flexible, bulletproof Lexan on the dorsal and ventral sides.

The skeleton is covered with SkinFlex, a soft, skin-like material that’s mixed with glass beads and sand to simulate the texture of sharkskin. “That’s for camouflage,” says Cousteau. “It’s not protective. A shark could easily bite through the skin.” But with the steel skeleton underneath, Cousteau feels plenty safe. “In my opinion, it’s overkill — that body could support a tractor driving over it.”

No Bubbles, Moving Eyes

Troy features a state-of-the-art, six-hour re-breather unit — the same silent-running, no-bubble SCUBA technology used by the military. Cousteau explains why that’s important. “Sharks breathe water, not air, so they don’t produce bubbles,” he says. “Bubbles make noise the sharks would feel and hear — it’s an artificial stimulus that could spook them or alter their behavior in some way.” The air would also sabotage the dive. “Any bubbles would accumulate inside the sub,” he adds, “and eventually cause it to float to the top.”

Inside, lying flat, Cousteau holds a joystick in each hand to control speed, left and right movement, and pitch, roll and yaw — “just like a fighter plane.” Most importantly, the sub lets Cousteau communicate with his fellow sharks. “We have the latest in onboard miniaturized watertight cameras, recording electronics and tracking equipment,” he says.

“The sub’s eyes are actually camera lenses that move, and the mouth moves too, so we can make specific gestures and study the sharks’ responses.” Troy even has two attached cameras concealed in 14-inch rubber remoras — the symbiotic suckerfish that hang around Great Whites — to track sharks swimming alongside and behind it, which the sub’s forward-positioned eyes can’t capture.

Soundings from the Deep

Take the plunge: Troy gets ready for a swim

With a couple of lengthy dive trips under his belt and several more to go, Cousteau is thrilled with what he’s discovering. “There are so many mysteries,” he says. “We stumbled onto something much bigger than we had anticipated. But the more we improve on our sub, and the longer we study the individual sharks we selected, the more Troy will teach us about their interactive behavior.”

So far, says Cousteau, “we’ve gotten a lot of interesting reactions and some good information about boundaries and territoriality. For one thing, even with all its brand new technology, our sub doesn’t behave exactly like real shark. When I pilot it, it acts as if it didn’t have a care in the world. Regardless of the warning signs from other sharks, it cruises around doing its own thing — like a big boss, if you were going to put a personality to it.”

”When I sit down and look at the rushes, seeing our shark sub in motion, I say, ‘Wow, that looks like a real shark!’ You just don’t normally get video of swimming along with Great Whites — it’s just awesome.”

Even so, Troy looks and behaves enough like a real shark that the latter don’t take notice. In one instance: “Troy was acting like the dominant female, in this nonchalant bossy kind of way, and the incoming sharks became subservient, taking positions low and behind the sub, which is a very defensive and safe position to be in. And one young adult female was a little more frisky than the others — she came in and investigated for a closer look, especially when our sub was immobile.”

Shark Enough

He concludes, “I won’t say that they buy it 100% that our sub is a real shark, but they’re obviously curious, and they don’t leave. They’re reacting to our presence, and they seem to think we could be one of them. These are positive signs. And there’s a whole battery of science we still need to do. But I’m satisfied we’ve proven that this type of vehicle and these kinds of experiments are a viable approach for studying sharks.”

And they’ve managed to get some footage “that will blow the doors off people’s minds,” he says. “You know, when you work on a project for two years you can get blasé, but when I sit down and look at the rushes, seeing our shark sub in motion, I say, ‘Wow, that looks like a real shark!’ You just don’t normally get video of swimming along with Great Whites — it’s just awesome.”

“I want to open our minds to the
shark’s way of understanding
its surroundings,” says Cousteau.

Changing Perceptions

Cousteau’s purpose in getting into the body of a shark is to shake up the way we view them. “People think of sharks as machines,” he reflects. “I see that as the biggest block to advancing our understanding of their behavioral biology. I want to show that they have cognitive brain power and that they can learn. I believe each shark has a personality that’s based on the sum of its experiences. It’s a killer, sure, but so are we. And when sharks kill, it’s to eat and survive in their own habitat.”

Ultimately, his goal is to help preserve the creatures that have long dominated his imagination. “I want to put to rest the Jaws-like images people have,” says Cousteau. “If I can document the learning ability of the shark, I may be able to help change our perception of them as villains. And if we understand them better, we will be better able to revere and protect them.”

The oceanographer rails against what he calls “species solipsistic theory” — the belief that it’s unnecessary to understand anything outside our own species. “I want to open our minds to the shark’s way of understanding its surroundings,” he says.

Bucking assumptions and hypotheses, Fabien Cousteau literally gets into his subject to gain the direct, experiential knowledge he craves. “When I crawl in the shark sub it’s pitch dark,” he says. “And it’s tight. I can just stretch out on my belly. I’m wearing my dry suit and my mask and these specially modified fins — they’re shorter, so they fit in the sub — in case I have to bail out. And I’m swimming along and looking out through my eye-cameras, and just hoping the sharks will see me as one of them.”

[Calpernia]

I will be trying that first chance I get!