Marine ecologist Kirsten Grorud-Colvert bonds with her diving buddy when they have an unexpected encounter with a hammerhead shark. 

Kirsten Grorud-Colvert is a marine ecologist at Oregon State University, where she has studied ocean organisms in the Oregon nearshore, the Florida Keys, and California’s Catalina Island, along with other marine systems from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. She uses data from different species and habitats to ask, What happens when you protect an area in the ocean? And what can we learn from those areas to design even better protection? She also directs the Science of Marine Reserves Project and loves learning from her creative colleagues in science, communication, and graphic design. Kirsten has always been obsessed with water—that’s what growing up in the 120 degrees Arizona desert will do to you!

This story originally aired February 9th, 2018 in an episode titled Heartbreak.

Story Transcript

So I've come to believe in big things.  When I was a grad student, my research took me to the coral reefs of the Florida Keys.  I live and work in Oregon now and Oregon is not that.  So I find myself often thinking about those crystal clear blue waters and what it felt like to be flying in our boat over that water out to the fringing reefs of the Florida Keys therein about thirty feet of water.  It was beautiful. 

And that’s what we were doing on this particular day.  We were heading out to those reefs because we were going to be taking some surveys of baby fish.  I work with baby fish.  Sometimes I kill baby fish, but don’t tell people.  We are going out to do these surveys and I was going out to do them with this group of people that I had really come to know and love. 

Most of us were in our early 20s.  It was a time of my life where my research meant that we were underwater more than we were above water each day.  We were all idealists.  We were going to save the ocean.  And for me, a bad day was I forgot my sunscreen or I lost the data sheet, even though losing a data sheet is still a bad thing.  Am I right?  Always. 

So most of us fit into that category except for one person on this day and that was Chris.  Chris would come out to volunteer with us.  He worked at the same university but he was a physicist.  He would come out so that he could keep his scientific diving certification current. 

I’m sure that Chris probably told me what he did but, honestly whenever I pictured Chris at work, I pictured him in this white lab coat, he's got his safety goggles on, it’s a dark room and he's shooting lasers.  Like Space Invaders-style lasers because, to me, why would you want to be a physicist if you weren’t shooting lasers, right? 

So Chris was with us and Chris was very different.  He was at least twenty years older than us, he had a family, a wife, he was raising kids, he had a job, a real job, and a lot of times I felt like maybe Chris was doing a little bit of an internal eye roll because we would be, you know, the drama of being a student.  It’s one drama of being a student.  We’re like talking about are we going to have time off this weekend to go to South Beach, you know.  So I always kind of wondered what he thought about that.

But as with any kind of fieldwork, you buddy up.  So on this day, Chris and I were buddies.  We grabbed our transect tape, our data sheets, holding on tight to those, and we strap on our scuba tank and we hit the water.  That feeling when you hit the water, it’s just like this weightless, the water is like a bathtub.  There's a little bit of sound from the reef but you just hear your breath and it’s so meditative and you're experiencing it all with another person.  You don’t talk to that person but you're there together. 

On this day, at this reef, like every other time we went to this reef, the first thing that I do is I look for my touchstone and I see it out amongst the sea of low lying gray-green algae that’s like the last redwood on the reef.  It’s this huge stand of Acropora coral, elkhorn coral.  It’s this rusty-gold apartment building and these little, tiny coral polyps and it’s the last one left on the reef.  The reason it’s the last one left on the reef is because of this gray-green algae that we’re there to study. 

And we’re there because the little fish really like that algae.  They live to hide in it.  So we lay out our transect tape and what it means is that we have to be shoulder to shoulder, one on each side of the transect tape, and we have to get way down in there.  We’ve got to put our fingers in and kind of riffle through that frilly algae because when we do these fish come out and they're like pop-pop-pop, these little guys.  You watch them and as soon as they come up you have to know what species they are and you write it down. 

So this is what we’re doing.  We’re like our noses to the reef looking for these baby fish. 

All of a sudden I get this prehistoric feeling, this feeling that something is coming, and the something is a very big thing.  So I look up and, honestly, it takes a moment for my mind to process what I’m seeing because this animal is so outlandish.  It doesn’t even seem like it could be real and swimming straight towards you, because it’s a hammerhead shark. 

This is like a National Geographic-worthy hammerhead shark.  I know that because the science part of my brain, and this is the part of my brain that spent hours, hours in swimming pools with these little floaty plastic fish training my mind like, “Okay, estimate that length.  Estimate that length.”  My science part of my brain says that this shark is at least twelve feet long and it’s swimming straight towards us.  Out of the blue, just swimming straight towards us. 

And I can feel that Chris sees it too.  He's still next to me and there's nothing we can do.  We can’t swim away.  We can’t stuff ourselves down into the reef.  This is a predator moment, right?  We understood what it meant to be prey.  That shark was swimming straight towards us and it kept coming. 

And it kept coming, and it was still coming until it was about four feet away and then it just turned.  It showed us this incredible power of its tailfin and then it just swam away back into the blue. 

My heart has never raced so much.  I tell you.  I have goose bumps right now because I’m remembering what it felt like to have that thing swimming straight towards us. 

So I look at Chris.  Our eyes are both like… they're big.  Our eyes are big.  And then I look down and I am holding Chris’ hand, and we did not have a hand-holding relationship. 

We were scientists first, though.  We finished the transect.  We did the next transect and then we went back to the boat.  And everyone else was done so they're just waiting for us like, “What’s up?” 

And we were like, “You will never guess.”

And they were like, “No.” 

We’re like, “You didn’t see it?” 

“No.” 

“We’re like twelve feet, yes.  Like two of me.” 

Everyone, well, it was a free-for-all. 

So in the middle of all that I just kind of nonchalantly sidled up to Chris like, “Chris did I hold your hand down there?” 

And he was like, “Um, yeah.” 

I still kind of blush when I think about it.  I was very embarrassed. 

So Chris and I, I always felt so different from Chris, but at that moment, man, those differences didn’t mean anything.  We had had this amazing experience together.  It was the end of the day, we were heading home and Chris was kind of quiet.  And I was kind of quiet and I was kind of wondering if he was thinking what I was thinking.  Because I was thinking about that shark and that shark is an ocean swimmer.  It visits so many reefs during its life just looking for the next meal and I wondered what that shark thought when it got to that reef.  There's just that one coral stand left, a couple of snappers in there, but that’s it.  That’s the only thing going. 

So a couple of months later, I was back in the same reef and Chris, he wasn’t really diving with us anymore.  He was back in the lab because the lasers called.  Like any other time, when I drop down on that reef I look for my touchstone.  And it wasn’t there. 

In a second, I could see what had happened because there was a pile of rubble on the reef and wrapped against one of those pieces, wrapped around, was a fishing line.  You could see really clearly the marks of a propeller on a boat on the chunks of coral.  I think you can imagine I cried.  I cried underwater and that’s really uncomfortable because the tears kind of run down and then to your nose and then you're clearing your mask.  I was devastated in that moment. 

I thought instantly of that shark and what that meant now.  That reef was dead to him.  There was nothing, nothing for him on that reef now. 

And I thought instantly of Chris, too, and how we had had that experience.  I honestly thought maybe I should call him up and tell him, but what would I say?  I felt what would I say?  So I never called him.  In fact, I never talked to him again.  We each went our separate ways.  It’s been a really long time now. 

But that moment, it cemented a passion in me because I lost something that day.  And really, we all lost something that day.  I found myself thinking what if that area had been protected?  Maybe those fishers would have moved on.  They wouldn’t have wrapped their fishing line, they wouldn’t have chopped up that coral.  I think about that a lot.  And because of that, a major focus of my research now is marine protected areas and what can they do, what can’t they do, how can we design them well, where would we put them, how many, how big? 

I also think about what if other people knew about that reef, if they knew what we had lost?  If other marine biologists, other physicists, our neighbors, grandparents if they knew what we lost, but that there's also a path forward to protection.  That would be a really big thing.  Thanks.