Sea Monsters: Search for the Giant Squid Page #4

that might be created

either by the squids themselves

or by the squids

swimming through the water

and creating a swirl of

bioluminescence.

"When they swim through the water

they disturb all the little organisms

that are in the water,

and these little organisms,

because they're disturbed,

set off a glowing or flashing.

"Perhaps the whales then key

on these strips of bioluminescence

or streaks of bioluminescence

and will be able to home in

on the squid in that way.

"So, it's a little difficult

to know exactly what it is

and that's just one more thing

we could see

if we could get down into the sea

with these giant whales."

To follow whales into the deep

has long been a favorite theme

of poets and a dream of engineers.

Now, with support from

the National Geographic Society,

one man has managed to do it.

He's Greg Marshall,

inventor of a system called crittercam.

It's a simple concept that has proven

very difficult to execute.

"I had the idea for the crittercam

Since then, basically,

every waking moment,

I've spent thinking about, developing,

working on making this thing happen."

In early experiment,

cameras were strapped

to the backs of sea turtles

before being risked in the wild.

"What motivates me is the,

the possibility of discovering

totally new phenomena of nature,

seeing things

we've never seem before."

The spirited fur seal

provided a greatest challenge.

A smaller, more rugged camera

needed to enter its frenetic world.

With sperm whales,

every step

from deployment to retrieval

has been fraught with difficulty.

"It's only through, you know,

really carefully engineering

and then some trial and error

and experience

the field that we've, that we've finally been able to succeed

in the way that we have."

After years of experimentation,

crittercam is finally ready for

serious field work in the Azores.

The scientists are hopeful that the

camera can survive a deep water dive,

and be located

and recovered afterwards.

"Um, underwater it weights nothing,

of course,

so that, uh, it just floats right back

after it's released from the animal.

Floats back at about

this orientation and,

uh, will stick out of the water

about this far."

The system must be able

to endure extreme pressure

and record picture

in almost total darkness.

The compact unit includes lights;

instruments to record depth,

temperature and sound;

acoustic and radio homing transmitters;

and a video camera able to

amplify light over 50,000 times.

"Greg! Come over!"

The first task is often the hardest

- getting close to the whales.

"You guys,

can direct us to where it is, okay?"

Scientists have used these techniques

to attach instruments to whales,

but no one has tried

to attach a camera before.

They are breaking new ground.

"It was a challenge to get close

to these whales,

an emotional challenge.

Uh. Clearly, we'd heard

all the stories of, of the, the havoc

that the sperm whales had wreaked

on ships in the past and so forth and,

you know, I, I didn't know,

what, uh, reaction of a,

of the whales might be to us.

So, when we first started approaching

the whales,

I was a bit nervous,

there's no question about it."

The camera can be attached

by a tag the size of a paper clip

- or with a large suction cup.

A successful deployment depends

entirely on the whims of the whales.

At the moment, they appear to want

a little time to themselves.

"We spend a lot of time on the water

trying to get close to the whales,

a lot of time on the water,

and you have to do that because

the whales are only at the surface

of a few minutes every hour.

Uh, so we have to be perfectly

in position,

anticipating where the whales

are coming up, uh,

in order to place ourselves

close enough

so that we can get to them

during and opportunity deploy."

"You've got whales, uh,

right ahead of you.

They'll be off you, uh, starboard bow,

about a hundred and fifty meters.

Uh, there's a whole gaggle of them,

they're a social group.

Three or four small ones

and a couple of large ones.

"What we've found,

for the most part,

is that the whales tend to be

quite curious about us.

If we're quiet in their environment,

we've found that,

as often as not, they tend to actually

come over and investigate us.

The system is launch-

and we are riding in a pod of whales.

The clicking noises are made

by the whales,

and for the first time

we can see exactly how their sounds

relate to their behavior.

It's a revelation

how close the whale are-

in their constant calling and

with their bodies touching one another.

Then, as dolphins join the array,

it's like an undersea dance.

They sometimes

ride the subsurface waves

generated by the forward thrust

of the whales

- these mountains of movement.

Crittercam is working well

near the surface.

Now comes the real test

as whales descend into the deep.

They will disappear for

more than 20 minutes.

The scientist are left alone

with their hopes and their fears.

"If we don't retrieve the system,

we get none of the data,

we get none of the images,

none of the audio, we learn nothing.

Unless we recover it, it's a bust."

A messenger form another world,

crittercam returns from the deep.

It has detached before

it should have,

but its homing signal is

loud and clear.

After eleven year of trial and error

and months on the high seas,

a moment of truth has arrived.

"Look at that, look at that,

what is that?

That's the... the blowhole

...look, puffs up there...

The camera is tethered about six feet

behind the blowhole and face forward

- we are with several whales

diving together.

On the right, a juvenile.

This could be a training dive.

Calves only gradually learn to dive

as deep as their mothers.

The clicking sounds appear to be

coming from more than one whale.

Some scientists believe that

each whale has its own signature coda.

Tapes like this one could help

support the theory.

It's darker and deeper now

and another whale

comes into view at the upper left.

Strange new sounds are heard

- growls, grunts-even squeals.

No one has conclusively identified

these sounds with sperm whales before.

Now the whales are over nine hundred

feet deep and a strange thing happens.

They almost stop and one moves back

as if inspecting crittercam...

it's head and eye are just

to the right off camera.

There is a long moment

of consideration and then,

apparently satisfied,

the whales speed up again,

going deeper still.

There's two,

there's two of them there.

This is the calf.

the pressure is enormous-

over five hundred pounds

per square inch.

Until the 1960's,

no conventional submarine

could descend this deep

without being crushed

like an eggshell.

How sperm whales survive

these depths is still not understood.

But they've been doing it

for million of year

- lured here by vast bounty of

large oceanic squid.

They will not find Architeuthis

this time,

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