by Edith Widder
Justin scored first, with money from the Australian Research Council as part of a push he had been leading for deep-sea exploration around Australia that he dubbed Deep Down Under. He raised enough to pay for Lee’s engineering design and the production of two Medusa platforms. That meant I only needed to cover the costs of building a third, which was about $60,000. I applied to NSF with the goal of getting the Medusa built in time to use on a National Geographic–sponsored seamount mission to Costa Rica that I had been invited to join. Unfortunately, due to some delays in production, the Medusa wasn’t ready in time.
As a result, its first deployment was on the site of the BP oil spill, on an expedition organized by Sylvia Earle*11 to survey the damage on the bottom, a few months after the gusher was capped. Bad weather plagued the expedition, and we managed only two deployments in shallow water, but they were critical to figuring out some problems and getting the Medusa fully operational. It was now all dressed up but with nowhere to go.
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I became a giant squid hunter as the direct result of a TED talk I gave in 2010. TED, which stands for “Technology, Entertainment and Design,” is a remarkable organization with a simple mission: to spread ideas. In 2010, TED held its first conference at sea, aboard the 293-foot luxury expedition vessel National Geographic Endeavour.
The conference, billed as the Mission Blue Voyage, was part of Sylvia Earle’s 2009 “TED Prize wish”—an award that the organization gives to “leaders with creative, bold wishes to spark global change.” In order to explore ways to address some of the big challenges facing the ocean, Mission Blue brought together policy makers and influencers, leading scientists, innovators, activists, philanthropists, musicians, and artists for a nearly weeklong expedition to the Galápagos Islands in April 2010. It was an awe-inspiring event that interspersed TED talks with scuba diving, nature walks, snorkeling, music making, and boat trips. The power of being able to bring people to this special place and help forge an emotional connection to the sea was made manifest when participants committed $17 million to ocean conservation initiatives like the creation of protected marine areas, what Sylvia termed ocean “Hope Spots.”
For my presentation, I spoke about the glories of bioluminescence, described the Eye-in-the-Sea, and showed some of the results we had been getting, using red light to be unobtrusive, in combination with the e-jelly as an optical lure. Another TED speaker was Mike deGruy,*12 one of the most exuberant advocates for the ocean it’s ever been my pleasure to know. The TED talk Mike gave was a rhapsodic ode to the ocean in which he used no slides but painted vibrant detailed imagery with words.
After my talk, Mike was practically vibrating when he tracked me down to ask, “Do you think your red-lights-and-optical-lure approach might work for filming a giant squid?” I hadn’t really thought about that, but okay, why not? “Sure,” I said. “I think those enormous eyes suggest we should be paying more attention to its visual ecology. At the very least, we should not be using bright white lights that scare it away. And if it’s an active predator, which I believe it is, then it might be attracted by an optical lure that imitates the bioluminescence it likely uses those eyes to see.” I then proceeded to describe the Medusa and how we could deploy it either on the bottom or as a drifter.
Mike told me he was involved with a hush-hush project to try to film a giant squid for television and asked if I’d be willing to present my approach and findings at a meeting in Silver Spring, Maryland, in August. Mike’s enthusiasm was indomitable and contagious, so, although the television connection gave me pause,*13 I agreed.
Dubbed “the Squid Summit,” this was a gathering of television people and squid experts, including Tsunemi Kubodera, the Japanese scientist who captured the first still images of a giant squid in the deep sea; Clyde Roper, a world-renowned squid biologist from the Smithsonian who had been on several giant-squid hunts in the past; and Roger Hanlon, an expert in cephalopod behavior from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. The rest of those attending were television folks from NHK and Discovery. I got the impression that among the television contingent there was some skepticism about why I was there, and I suspected that Mike may have had to exert some significant pressure to get me in the door.
I made a science-oriented presentation with data to support the merit of my approach. I gave statistics on animals gathering around bait viewed under red light, as opposed to white light, and showed the importance of using red cutoff filters and intensified cameras. I displayed pictures of the Medusa and diagrams of its different possible deployment configurations, then I showed the e-jelly, along with the bioluminescent display it replicated, and talked about the importance of using an optical lure to attract active predators rather than just scavengers. I saved the video of squid attacking the e-jelly for the end. When they saw that, several of the television people leaned forward in their chairs. As I finished, I looked over at Mike, who was smiling. He knew they were sold.
The expedition was to take place off Japan the following summer (2011). I had a lot of misgivings about the whole operation, which would be leasing a privately owned vessel called the Alucia, along with its own submersibles, a two-person Deep Rover and a three-person Triton. I had heard those were excellent subs, but knowing nothing about their crew was a source of consternation. There were only two reasons I hung in there: The expedition was going to afford me six weeks at sea, an unimaginable stretch of time under my current funding constraints, and Mike deGruy’s enthusiasm was infectious. I figured that with him there to do most of the on-camera work, I could fade into the background and not be subsumed by the television production.
Given the series of events leading up to that expedition, it seemed predestined for tragedy and failure. On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake measuring over 9.0 on the Richter scale, the fourth largest in recorded history, struck off the coast of Japan. Tsunami waves that reached heights of over 130 feet swept away whole communities and flooded the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, triggering three nuclear meltdowns. The tragedy was so massive and far-reaching that NHK was forced to postpone the expedition to the following summer, 2012. Then, on February 12, 2012, Mike deGruy was killed in a helicopter crash while filming a documentary in Australia.*14 His loss was devastating to everyone who knew him. At his memorial service, in Santa Barbara, Mike’s brother Frank described his brother’s life as being “one big human exclamation point!” A very bright light had been snuffed out.
Mike had brought me into this crazy project, and I had no appetite for carrying on without him. I wanted to bail on the whole thing—even more so when, around this same time, my technician, Brandy Nelson, who was the only person in my lab trained on the Medusa, informed me that she was pregnant and, since the expedition coincided with her due date, she wouldn’t be able to accompany me. In the end, I went through with it, because I felt that if I didn’t, it would be a betrayal of Mike. I reached out to Justin Marshall in Australia to see if any of his people who had been trained on the Medusa could join us on the mission. Luckily, he had a Ph.D. student, Wen-Sung Chung, who was not only an expert with the system but also a squid enthusiast and eager to participate.
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I did not have a good feeling about what might be in store as David drove me to the West Palm Beach airport on June 19, 2012. I had had little communication with anyone involved with the expedition. The emphasis on secrecy and the loss of Mike as a go-between had left me very much in the dark. I found it tough to put on a happy face as I kissed David goodbye and hugged our golden doodle, Yankee, who had insisted on coming along for the ride to the airport. At the other end of this flight, there would be no one I knew. Even Clyde Roper, who I thought would never pass up an opportunity to go after a giant squid, had bowed out. The chief scientist on the mission was Tsunemi Kubodera, whom I had met only once, at the Squid Summit, and the only other scientist was Ste
ve O’Shea, whom I had never met but knew by reputation to be somewhat eccentric.
Everything about the expedition was unconventional. Given my experiences with the Cuba mission, the emphasis on the needs of television production over the needs of scientific investigation was predictable, but some of the other anomalies turned out to be unexpected, in a good way.
For one thing, the Alucia was outrageous. A 182-foot luxury yacht with its own submersibles sounded like a James Bond fantasy when I first heard of it, but as soon as I saw her, she proved to be even more glamorous. Seen from the water, she looked impressive, with a large A-frame on the back for submersible launch and recovery*15 and a helicopter pad, which also served as the roof of her hangar, housing not just two, as I had originally been told, but three deep-diving submersibles—more than any other ship in the world. In fact, the owner of the ship, hedge fund manager and philanthropist Ray Dalio, actually owned four submersibles: the Triton, two double Deep Rovers (one of which was to be used for filming establishing shots of the Triton; the other was in refit), and a double DeepWorker that was on board for this mission as emergency backup.
The inside of the ship was even more extraordinary. Accommodations on research vessels can be a bit spartan. I have had to share rooms so small they could be mistaken for closets, with bunks so closely stacked that when I turned on my side, my shoulder hit the bottom of the bunk above me, so when they told me that I would be sharing a room with two other women, Discovery Channel producer/director Leslie Schwerin, and Steve O’Shea’s technician, Severine Hannam, I expected the usual tight quarters. But our room was positively palatial; instead of the usual portholes, it had panoramic picture windows looking directly onto the ocean; large, plush beds; scads of drawers and closet space with actual hangers;*16 a large desk; and an en suite bathroom that looked like something out of a Swedish sauna. Even more over-the-top was the news that the staff would be making up our bunks for us every day, doing our laundry, and serving us gourmet meals three times a day. Plus, it looked like I was going to get lots of time in the sub. Each day, the three-person Triton was to be launched for a seven-to-eight-hour dive, with a pilot, an NHK cameraman, and either Kubodera, O’Shea, or me as scientist observer. Six weeks of this was clearly not going to be a hardship.
On the other hand, I still had some safety concerns. The problem was that we were operating over very deep water. Submersibles deployed where the bottom exceeds their crush depths are supposed to be on a tether. My last experience with a tether was with Wasp, and it hadn’t made me a fan, but at least with Wasp, that was its normal operational mode. For both the Deep Rover and the Triton, this was a whole new shtick and required devising a way to make it work.
The plan was to use a polypropylene line on a hand-cranked drum; the Triton’s tether would be deployed from its usual tender vessel, the thirty-two-foot Northwind, while the Deep Rover’s tether would have to be deployed from a Zodiac. The Northwind had the technology needed to track the Triton underwater, but the only way to track the Deep Rover was from the Alucia, which was going to require careful coordination between the ship’s crew and the sub crew.
Of the forty-one people on board, eleven were Japanese, and most of them spoke little or no English. But since these were the folks footing most of the bill for this enormous endeavor, they were calling the shots. Discovery Channel was also involved and had three of its own people on board, but the level of the network’s financial contribution was such that it quickly became apparent what the pecking order was going to be.
Added to all of these logistical concerns was the whole Hollywood Science aspect, which turned out to be worse than I had imagined. There were actually two documentaries being produced: the NHK version and the Discovery Channel version. I had been harboring a couple of illusions that were shattered on day one. The first was that Kubodera would be the focus of the NHK version and the second was that O’Shea, who clearly loved being in front of the cameras, would take on the brunt of the Discovery Channel version, filling the role that Mike deGruy would have taken. I was disabused of both of these notions the first morning on board, when I was asked to do an on-camera interview in the wet lab for the Discovery team.
It was then that I learned that they planned to frame their program as a competition between the three scientists, since each of us was focusing on a different approach. Kubodera was going to be using a large bait squid, like the one he had used to garner those first still images of the giant squid. The bait squid was to be attached via a line to the sub, and he planned to sit in the dark, using the red lights and the low-light camera to observe unobtrusively. O’Shea was planning to use ground-up squid squirted from syringes as a chemical lure, and I would be depending on the e-jelly as an optical lure—used on both the sub and the Medusa. All three of us vigorously objected to this story line, insisting that we would prefer to be viewed as working cooperatively, but our protestations fell on deaf ears.
At least the NHK team seemed to be focused on doing a more traditional natural history documentary, but even though it would be in Japanese, I wasn’t off the hook because they wanted me to do on-camera interviews for them as well, which they would film in English and subtitle in Japanese. Although they weren’t being quite as blatant as the Discovery team about treating this as a competition, that vibe was coming through, and I could tell that in both camps I was considered the long shot.
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Our dive site was off the Ogasawara Archipelago, a chain of subtropical islands six hundred miles south of Tokyo. It was in these waters that Kubodera had captured his still images and where he believed sperm whales came to feed on giant squid every year. The thing that had brought him to this location in the first place was local longline fishermen’s reports of severed giant squid tentacles snagged on baited lures—in two cases, whole bodies—as well as descriptions of long squid tentacles dangling out of the jaws of breaching sperm whales. Shortly after we arrived, we spotted some of these toothed whales at the surface, easily identified by their lopsided bushy blow. It seemed we were in the right place.
Once we were onsite, we still had to test the tether mode, which was when I was fully expecting to see things go pear-shaped. To my great relief, I was wrong. It turned out there were several factors that made this a much smoother-running operation than I would have thought possible. The most important was the submersible team leader, Mark Taylor, a.k.a. Buck, a redheaded Brit with a mischievous grin. Buck’s background with submersibles was impressive, starting with training as a diver and submarine operator for the Royal Navy; working on the rescue team for the Russian submarine Kursk, which sank in the year 2000; running submersible pilot training programs for the military and the private sector; and, judging by his sea stories, possibly racking up more experience with submersibles in hairy situations than anyone I’ve ever met. He definitely had the required eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head awareness, and his sense of humor went a long way toward alleviating tensions among the various factions on board. The sub crew were equally talented, and although they didn’t all know one another initially, they soon were working together as though they had been doing so for years.
The day of the first science dive dawned clear and calm. Kubodera, as chief scientist, was first up. Talking with him and O’Shea over breakfast, I was surprised to discover that neither of them had been in a submersible before. O’Shea said he’d had opportunities but never wanted to go, his reason being “I’m a heavy smoker.” Kubodera, who suggested we call him Ku (probably to escape various mangled pronunciations of his first and last names), seemed a bit nervous, but definitely game.
I love talking to people before and after they make their first dive, especially scientists who’ve spent their whole lives studying the ocean. It’s fascinating to see how their perspective is altered by the experience. So I was looking forward to hearing Ku’s impressions when he returned after that first seven-hour dive. Oddly,
though, he didn’t have much to say. He mentioned seeing a blue shark and that he was surprised by how much sunlight was still visible, even below two thousand feet, but when I asked about bioluminescence, he said there wasn’t much. Seven hours of sitting in the dark while bobbing up and down on the end of a tether and he hadn’t seen much bioluminescence? That seemed weird. Maybe he was just somebody who didn’t show a lot of excitement, or maybe it was the language barrier. It was going to be a couple of days before I got to go myself. In the meantime, I was focused on prepping the Medusa for its first deployment.
Although I missed Brandy, it had quickly become apparent that Wen-Sung Chung knew his way around the Medusa. He had the camera system assembled and the float, weights, and lines ready to deploy with minimal assistance from me, but I was still so nervous anticipating our first deployment the day after Ku’s dive that I awoke at three a.m. and never managed to go back to sleep as I ran through checklists over and over in my head. Although Wen-Sung had deployed the Medusa in drift mode, I never had, and I kept thinking of all the ways it could go wrong.
The theory was simple enough. Compared with the original Eye-in-the-Sea, the Medusa was compact, approximately two feet square and three feet tall, and light enough, at three hundred pounds, that its launch and recovery should be easy. We planned to just launch it off the fantail using the A-frame. Once it was released from the Sea Catch,*17 it would drop toward the depths, paying out the 2,400 feet of line that attached it to a float with a satellite tracking beacon at the surface.
As soon as the Triton was in the water for its second dive,*18 we launched the Medusa. Once it was released, Wen-Sung and I piled into the Zodiac to follow the float so we could use the acoustic transducer to watch it drop through the water. This was mostly out of an abundance of caution, so that if it came off the line and was dropping toward its crush depth, we could send the signal that would cause it to drop its sacrificial weight and come back to the surface. As it dropped slowly through the water, we kept pinging it to check its depth, and when it approached 2,400 feet I held my breath. When the next ping gave a reading of 2,460 feet, I freaked. Seriously? Lost on the first deployment? But when I looked at Wen-Sung, he was smiling; he pointed out that we had drifted away from the float, so the distance we were measuring was not the depth (the distance between the Medusa and its surface float) but rather the hypotenuse of the triangle formed by the Medusa, its float, and our Zodiac. Obviously he had seen this before. We took a few more readings to make sure it was stable and then powered down the transducer.
