by Edith Widder
The clearances were granted three days after the cutoff date, which clearly wasn’t as much of a line in the sand as I had been led to believe, because suddenly the expedition was on again. I had done exactly zero prep and now there were only one and a half weeks until castoff. Tammy Frank, who at this point was an assistant scientist in my lab at Harbor Branch, was also going to be part of this expedition. It seemed like the two of us had just finished unpacking and stowing all the equipment used on the Gulf of Maine expedition, only two months prior, when we had captured the glowing sucker octopus. It was going to be an insane scramble to assemble and calibrate all the gear we planned to take.
As he has done so many times throughout my career, David stepped in to save the day, assisting with the last-minute packing, loading the gear onto the ship, and helping to get everything up and running in my shipboard lab. It drizzled all day on December 4, a very un-Florida-like thing to do, and as our early-evening departure time approached, I was already feeling deeply homesick.
Over the years, David and I have had plenty of practice being apart, but we hadn’t been separated for Christmas since the first year we were married, when, six months after we said “I do,” the Navy shipped him off to Guantánamo Bay, of all places. As a newlywed bride who was, frankly, astonished by how much I was loving married life, I was devastated to have my husband ripped away from me for six months. That early separation prevented me from ever taking him for granted. David evinced a similar response, first to almost losing me during my back surgery and then to having to accommodate my seagoing existence. Never take each other for granted is the kind of marriage counsel best rooted in experience.
Now as we stood on the dock saying our goodbyes and facing a separation of thirty-seven days, including Christmas and New Year’s Eve, we fell back on a tried-and-true diversion: focusing on something fun in the future. We decided that since we had to be apart for our first and twenty-fifth Christmases as a married couple, with one and then the other of us in Cuba, we should plan to spend our fiftieth Christmas together in Cuba—with the hope that we’re still alive and ambulatory and the travel ban has been lifted.
The political isolation of the destination wasn’t the only thing that set this trip apart. There was also the fact that Discovery Channel was paying for everything. I had been involved with documentary productions in the past, but in those cases the filmographers had been guests of the scientists. This time it was the other way around, which was going to make for drastically different priorities.
Scientists are keenly aware that we need to find more and better ways to communicate the significance of our research to the public and that clearly television is a powerful means to that end, but most scientists distrust the medium. While hyperbole is used routinely for storytelling (think Babe the Blue Ox), it’s generally contrary to science (think excruciatingly esoteric research paper).
One of our greatest and most remarkable characteristics as a species is our ability to pass on knowledge from one generation to the next. With the invention of the written word and then the printing press, radio, television, the internet, and social media, that ability has grown exponentially, making it possible to learn from vast numbers of people you will never meet. But there is a potential downside to this gift, which is that misinformation and lies can be passed on just as easily as truth. So how do we know what is true? Science provides the best solution to date.
The whole basis of the scientific revolution was the realization that it is possible to test for truth. The core concept, known as the scientific method, is that when you have a question about the truth of an idea, you need to form a hypothesis—a plausible explanation for your observations that is testable. To be useful, a hypothesis must be disprovable. Ideally, what you want to do is form multiple alternative hypotheses that could explain the observations you are trying to understand, and then systematically go about trying to disprove each one. The one that you fail to disprove is the most likely explanation—at least until more and better information comes along.
That’s the key point: In science, you can never prove anything is permanently true. You need to always be open to alternative explanations should new information come to light. That means that, to be a good scientist, you must be comfortable with doubt, which makes speaking in absolutes difficult and giving yes-or-no answers to what seem like simple questions nearly impossible. But “It’s complicated,” followed by a long-winded explanation, heavily encumbered with qualifiers, is generally antithetical to good storytelling.
Just as the scientific method revolutionized how humans think about our world and our place in the universe, it can transform how we cope with the fire hose of misinformation being spewed at us in the so-called information age. But that requires that we do a much better job of teaching science as a way of discerning truth, which would be greatly expedited if scientists and television producers could find the right balance between science’s quest for truth and television’s demand for entertainment. That balance hinges on establishing trust between the players. Our Cuba expedition provided an object lesson in how not to do it.
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The problems began before we even left the dock. A meeting on the bridge of the 204-foot R/V Seward Johnson, the ship that would be carrying us all to Cuba, felt like the makings of a three-ring circus. In ring one was the ship and sub crew, a well-known, highly dependable group. In ring two we had the science team, which was top-heavy with senior-level scientists. The absence of technicians and graduate students, who are often critical members of a research team, was evidence that the focus was going to be on form over function. There were four Harbor Branch scientists, including the chief scientist for the expedition, Grant Gilmore, plus four non-HBOI scientists—two from the United States, who were riding down with us, and two from Cuba, who would meet us there. And in ring three we had the film crew. These folks fell into two camps: the above-water team, led by coproducer Jimmy Lipscomb, a tall, thin, thoughtful documentarian, and the underwater team, led by Al Giddings, a bull of a man in both stature and personality, who’d been involved in underwater cinematography for a long string of high-profile films, including The Deep, For Your Eyes Only, Never Cry Wolf, The Abyss, and Titanic.
As the meeting progressed, further evidence that science was going to be taking a back seat to staged adventure emerged as the discussion focused on potential wrecks we might dive on along the southern coast. Wreck diving is fun, sure, but it had no scientific value for any of the scientists on this expedition.
Also on board was a corporate producer from Discovery Channel, a nervous little man who, I was relieved to learn, would not be joining us for the expedition. The opposite of a seasoned explorer, he was stressing out about everything, including the working title for the production: Cuba: Forbidden Waters. Fearful of rabid anti-Castro sentiments from powerful and highly vocal Cuban exiles and desperate to avoid political controversy of any kind, he was advocating for the far more white-bread title Cuba: Enchanted Waters.
In this same vein, he was also promoting the bizarre notion that there should be no mention of Castro. Besides the fact that that would be like describing a zebra without mentioning its stripes, it was clearly at odds with the whole concept that Giddings and Lipscomb had used to conceive of and promote the documentary. Their focus on the opportunity to explore a place that had previously been verboten clearly didn’t fit corporate’s need for a controversy-free production.
Effectively sharing science with the public hinges on being able to spin a good tale. Clearly, we had the essential elements: fantastic underwater visuals captured by Giddings combined with Lipscomb’s erudite storytelling, revealing the thrill of exploring a heretofore inaccessible frontier. Lipscomb and Giddings had even taken the unusual step of including a political science scholar on the team. Richard Fagen, a professor of Latin American studies, recently retired from Stanford University, was introduce
d as someone who would be briefing us on the history and politics of places we would be visiting along the way.
A gifted storyteller in his own right, Fagen put the expedition on a whole new level for me. There’s an old joke among oceanographers: “Become an oceanographer and see the ocean,” the point being that although we often get to travel to some pretty exotic places for our research, it’s not as glamorous as it sounds, because from the deck of an oceanographic vessel, one patch of ocean looks pretty much like every other. However, in this case we were going to be allowed to go ashore at frequent intervals, in an attempt to link the onshore politics with the offshore ecosystems.
I started to appreciate the significance of that linkage with our first stop, Santiago Harbor. Located on the southeast coast of the island of Cuba, Santiago was once a bustling seaport, but since the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of trade with Russia, it had become a mere shadow of its former commercial self.
As we waited below the ramparts of the old Morro Castle for the harbor pilot who would guide us safely into port, we saw no other ships entering or leaving. In fact, the only vessels I spotted under power that day were the pilot’s boat and a small gunboat that served as our escort. Otherwise, except for a few human-powered rowboats and sculls, all vessels were tied up or in dry dock. As a consequence, unlike in any port I had ever seen, there was no oily sheen on the water and no smell of diesel in the air, but rather a rich floral scent wafting off the land, which was largely undeveloped and covered with dense vegetation, in many places blanketing steep slopes right down to the water’s edge.
As we approached the dock, we began to see people and traffic on the roads, but except for a rare bus, truck, or vintage car it was mostly bikes and a few horse-drawn carriages. As Fagen had explained in the briefing he gave the day before, the general lack of powered transportation was one of the hardships the Cubans had to contend with during this “special period,” as he termed it, since supplies of oil had largely dried up with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Once we were tied up at the dock, we were told that, before we could do anything else, we must lower our U.S. flag so that it would be below the Cuban flag we were also flying. Although that didn’t seem to bode well, all our subsequent interactions with the officials who came aboard to check our passports and stamp our papers went smoothly, and I was surprised to learn that we were free to go ashore and sightsee at will. We split up into small groups, with no clear plan beyond a desire to explore.
The small cohort I was with strolled around the waterfront and eventually wandered into a Cuban cigar factory. There was no machinery. It was just a large room, redolent with the sweet, woody smell of unburnt tobacco. Men and women sat at desklike workstations with little mounds of tobacco leaves that they were hand-rolling into cigars. A calico cat roamed among the stations, rubbing up against the workers’ legs. We were told that lectors took turns reading novels aloud in order to keep the workers’ minds occupied as they carried out their monotonous handiwork.
From there we strolled up to the nearby cathedral and central square, noting along the way how clean and uncrowded the city appeared. Although some of the buildings were crumbling, there were many splendid structures, with arches, columns, cornices, stained glass, and elaborate ironwork. There was also laundry hanging from many of the windows, balconies, and railings.
Eventually we ended up in a beautiful old hotel bar (Hotel Casa Granda) on the main square, where our crew had long since congregated. I saw Hector, a member of the sub crew who was fluent in Spanish, speaking with a number of the locals, and afterwards I asked him what he had learned. He said they were friendly, but very, very tired of the deprivation. They spoke of the animosities between our governments and made a clear distinction between their dislike of the American government and their fondness for the American people. Hector described how one of them said it had been thirty-six years since they had seen a ship flying an American flag in their harbor and they wanted to know if there would be more soon.
The contrast between what we saw on land and what we were observing underwater had the makings of a compelling story, if only Lipscomb and Giddings were allowed to tell it. The lack of industry, limited powered transportation, and a paucity of development along the shoreline made for some of the clearest, cleanest coastal waters I’ve ever seen. Nearshore seamounts, which are like undersea islands, were rich with healthy coral and sponges, but they were also devoid of big fish and covered with monofilament lines and anchors. Cubans’ need to put protein on the table made fishing essential, and although lip service was given to maintaining sustainable fisheries, the need was too great and the protections too few. It was a case study in the tragedy of the commons.
There were nonetheless abundant small tropical fish that made the fish biologists on our team gleeful. Soon after we left Santiago, one of the submersible dives returned with a little orange fish. It was a bottom dweller called Chaunax, a member of the sea toad family. Placed in the aquarium in the wet lab, it sat obligingly on the black gravel (chosen for maximum contrast), and Giddings went to work with his high-resolution cameras getting the perfect artistic shot while Lipscomb and his crew filmed Giddings filming the fish and the fish biologists gathered around acting as talking heads, waxing poetic about the hapless creature. There were so many people crammed into the space around the tank that there wasn’t room to move. Not wishing to add to the mayhem, I eased out the back of the lab and, in passing, overheard one of the crew members mumbling, “What’s the big deal? It looks like the goldfish I had when I was a kid.”
That fish encapsulated several of the storytelling challenges that documentarians face, which often boil down to striking the right balance between telling a good story and telling a true one. The first order of business for any successful nature documentary is vivid imagery. The adage that a picture is worth a thousand words has extra import in the deep sea, a realm so filled with bizarre and seemingly alien life-forms that they often defy imagination. These creatures not only are often fragile and singularly inaccessible but they live in the dark, which presents added difficulties if the goal is to film their natural behaviors.
It is hard to film animals unobtrusively, so that our presence doesn’t influence their behavior. Lighting is obviously a big problem when dealing with nocturnal or deep-sea animals. On land, infrared-sensitive cameras in combination with infrared lights that are invisible to most animals provide a solution, but in the deep sea this isn’t an option, because infrared light is absorbed so completely by water that it is rendered useless. Water also makes it impossible to use a telephoto lens to film animals from any great distance, as is so often done to observe skittish animals on land. The light-scattering properties of water make it necessary to be extremely close to your subject to get a clear shot. There are a few animals that will hold still long enough to permit a good close-up, but most won’t, and trying to line up a high-resolution camera attached to a thirteen-ton submersible is no mean feat, especially if the animal is moving even the slightest bit. When possible, it’s far better to capture the creature and hold it in a confined space.
Filming bottom-dwelling fish that are used to sitting on the seafloor, like Chaunax, is no great struggle, but taking footage of a captured midwater animal is much, much trickier. Creatures that have never encountered a surface at any time in their lives are prone to freaking out when they run into the side of the aquarium. The usual outcome involves the subject lying on its side or back on the bottom of the tank, in a decidedly unnatural pose. One way around this is to not even pretend that the close-up is happening in situ and instead show the aquarium and the scientists observing the animal, as Giddings and Lipscomb were doing. It’s the most honest approach, but it’s also kind of boring. Once or twice for a special animal is fine, but if that’s your entire story, you’ve lost your audience.
The other approach is to use various degrees of fakery. One trick is t
o film close-up shots of captured specimens in a tank and pretend they’re in their natural habitat. I saw a brilliant example of this for an Emmy Award–winning National Geographic production I was involved with, called Ocean Drifters. In order to show close-ups of a baby turtle encountering various forms of life in a floating sargassum seaweed mat, the crew used a 23,000-gallon tank with an optical-grade window. A wave generator was installed, then sargassum and animals collected from the Gulf Stream were introduced into the tank. The result was a unique floating world revealed through close-ups of a seahorse, a sea slug, a crab, and a sargassum fish, each perfectly camouflaged to match the sargassum they were floating among. It was amazing camera wizardry and a great way to share a wonderful bit of ocean life with the audience.
While the stated goal of natural history documentaries may be to educate the audience about the natural world, the commercial goal that makes it all possible relies on being able to entertain and engage the audience. That means the film needs to be more than just a string of natural history facts. You must tell a story. The baby turtle provided a clever way to narrate a tale about ocean drifters, the turtle serving as the connecting thread to introduce different open-ocean environments and inhabitants.
To build tension and add drama, they also included a scene where they introduced predators into the tank in the form of dolphinfish (a.k.a. mahi-mahi). Predators stalking prey is classic natural history theater, but it often requires some degree of fakery. In the case of Ocean Drifters, the dolphinfish were filmed swimming fast and attacking something near the edge of the weed line, and those scenes were intercut with close-ups of the baby turtle climbing up into the sargassum and tucking its hind flippers under its shell—in other words, looking scared. It was very endearing and made you root for the turtle, but those close-ups were filmed when the fish weren’t in the tank. This is considered a no-no according to BBC guidelines for natural history documentaries, which specifically state that it is “normally unacceptable to…inter-cut shots and sequences to suggest they were happening at the same time, if the resulting juxtaposition of material leads to a distorted and misleading impression of events.”
