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.”

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.”