This week we present two stories from people who had encounters with ocean animals.

Part 1: Stuck in the lab with buckets of jellyfish, Shreya Yadav must rethink why she's studying what she's studying in the first place.

Shreya Yadav is a PhD candidate at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, at the University of Hawaii. She studies how corals recover from major climatic disturbances. She is also interested in marine historical ecology and the socio-cultural aspects of fishing.

Part 2: Underwater photographer Keith Ellenbogen comes face to face with an animal he wasn't expecting.

Keith Ellenbogen is a celebrated photographer working with conservation-based organizations to showcase the visual complexity of underwater environments. He is an Assistant Professor of Photography at SUNY/FIT; Visiting Artist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Sr. Fellow, International League of Conservation; Fellow, The Explorers Club; Affiliate Partner, Mission Blue - A Sylvia Earle Alliance; the recipient of Hollings Ocean Awareness Award and a TED Residency.
See Keith’s work at www.keithellenbogen.com

Episode Transcript

Part 1: Shreya Yadav

So here I am finally, on a small boat late at night on the Great Barrier Reef holding a thousand‑watt light underwater and watching box jellyfish swarm to the surface because of it. Except the jellyfish are the last things on my mind right now, because all I can really think about is the only other person on the boat with me, Chris, who I've been crushing on silently for months now. And here he is standing right next to me, helping me scoop jellyfish out of the water. Chris.

Let me tell you about Chris because I feel like you would be in love with him too if you were 21.

Australian, from Tasmania. Tall. Always, always in a tank top. Studies Chirnoex fleckeri, only the most venomous box jellyfish on the planet. Has been stung by one. Survives the sting.

A local newspaper once referred to him as the shark wrangler because every time there seems to be some trouble in the water, Chris is there to wrangle sharks off of people. But his most impressive features are really his arms. And this is not just me. Everyone in the university calls him arms with a capital ‘A’, because he just has these incredible, rippling, poetry‑inducing arms.

So when I walk into my Statistics class and I find that Chris and his biceps are teaching it, I decide that I'm going to study box jellyfish.

So, after a few months I'm in this lab. I've learned how to drive a boat. We're out on the water and I've set this up for myself really well, I think. Because we're surrounded by all these venomous jellyfish that he loves so much. He's sitting right next to me in his sleeveless t‑shirt.

Surely, this is the moment. The water is still. The stars are out. He's going to lean over and put his arm around me and we're going to travel the world studying box jellyfish for the rest of our lives.

Except of course that doesn't happen. Nothing happens. Hours pass on this boat and absolutely nothing happens. In fact, the only time I get to say the words, “Hey, Chris. Can you turn the lights off?” When I have to get into the water to pee. That's how my night ends.

Shreya Yadav shares her story with the Story Collider audience at the Wai Wai Collective in Honolulu, HI in November 2019. Photo by Taylor Asao.

I'm back in the wet lab. It's 1:00 a.m. Chris is at home. Suddenly, I realize I'm surrounded by buckets and buckets of box jellyfish and I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do because I didn't visualize myself in this room before. I visualized myself in Chris' room later that night.

So as I stand there under the bright, white light of this wet lab, sea water on the floor, box jellyfish everywhere, I begin to panic. I come into the lab the next day panicking some more. And the next day the panic is deeper because I've only been in Australia for a few months at this time. This is my first serious research project. I realized that I have been motivated by all the unscientific and unethical things you can think about and I have to construct a two‑meter tall cylinder of Plexiglas to put these jellyfish into because we want to mimic their natural depth range. I have chambers and tanks and flumes and I have no idea how to use power tools. I don't know where to start and the panic really just stuns me.

So I'm sitting in the lab one of these days when my supervisor walks in. I’m sitting in the corner, broken bits of Plexiglas around me and half-constructed chambers and jellyfish still in the buckets, not looking great at this point. And he says, “Shreya, what are you doing?”

And I say, “I don't know.”

And he says, “Well, you know these animals are only going to live for another three weeks in the lab. You have a master's thesis to write in four months. Why haven't you started doing these experiments?”

And I say, “I don't know.”

He says, “Okay, you need to speak to Chris because Chris has done some of this work before. He'll help you set this up and get you on track, yeah? So let's meet tomorrow.”

He leaves the room and I've been saying yes to him the whole time. But as soon as he leaves, I'm standing there and I think, “No, I'm not going to ask Chris for help this time.”

I walk out the lab suddenly very liberated by this decision that I've just made that I am not going to ask Chris to help me this time. I walk down the lab. I walk over to the person who's actually supposed to be helping us construct things in the wet labs and ask him if he has a few hours in the next few days, if he can help me put this together. And of course, he's free right then.

Within two hours, he's set up my tank and everything is fixed and everything is working and there's sea water flowing through the pipes. We've put red lights up in the room so I can watch these jellyfish at night because they're nocturnal.

I fill the tank up with water, I drop 10 jellyfish into the tank and I grab my Excel sheets and I think, “Okay, I'm doing science now and animal behavior, right? So they're going to now move through this two-meter water column on a 12-hour cycle, because that's what they do in their natural environment.”

Except that's not what my jellyfish do in the tank. They get tangled up in their own tentacles. One of them just drops to the bottom of the tank, head first, and sits there bobbing at the bottom not looking okay.

There's another that's kind of just incessantly hasn't left the surface of the water for hours. Like all it wants to do is leave this experimental setup. But it's okay because I've started. The animals are alive, and this has finally begun.

Over the next few days and then weeks, I realized that I can't stop watching these jellyfish because they've started doing really surprising things in the lab. They're swimming much faster than we thought they would swim. They are able to stick to the edges of tanks and cylinders because they have this little sticky surface on the top of their heads, which is unique and many other species don't have that.

And it's one of these nights that I'm sitting in the wet lab reading about these animals, waiting for my timer to go off so I can take my next 15-minute observation, and I notice something out of the corner of my eye, something happening in the tank. So I walk over slightly groggy and that's when I see it happen. The wedding dance.

The special thing about these jellyfish is that they do a wedding dance. They court each other. When a male is interested in a female, he approaches her. He wraps one of his tentacles around hers and then he spins her around in the water until they finally mate. Tonight, all the jellyfish in my tank are courting. And they're dropping through this romantic red light of the bulb above their tank, through the water column and rising back up it again. They just keep doing that the entire night.

I'm standing there and I suddenly realized that it doesn't really matter what got me here. What matters is that I'm here right now and I'm watching jellyfish dance. Thank you.

Part 2: Keith Ellenbogen

So it's 5:30 in the morning. It's dark outside. It's about 60 degrees. The air has this crisp kind of cool feeling to it. I spent the night in NOAA, which is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary's headquarters in Scituate, Massachusetts, just on the south shore of Boston.

I wake up. I go downstairs and I go collect my five cases of camera equipment. It includes two, large underwater housings, a 360 immersive, multi-camera system and a whole slew of cameras and lenses that I need for the day. I load it up into my car I drive down a dirt road to the boathouse.

At the boathouse, I meet up with the rest of the team. It's a team of about two captains, a bunch of naturalists and some scientists. We unload our gear and we walk it down to the boat. It's a long walk on the boardwalk, down a steep ramp until we get to the Auk.

On board this metal, aluminum catamaran, we all begin to have a conversation. The captain gives a briefing on board. Make sure of their safety. Make sure everyone's all okay.

Then I give a briefing that says what the assignment is. Now, just as a quick side note, this is a National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, Hollings Ocean Awareness Award to use the art of photography to capture awareness about Stellwagen Bank Sanctuary, a place that most of you probably have never heard of. Where there are humpback whales, sea turtles, seabirds, sharks, a whole slew of animals.

Keith Ellenbogen shares his story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in NYC in April 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.

And specifically on this dive, what I wanted to say to everyone is what we're looking for are basking shark. Now, for those of you that don't know, a basking shark is the world's second largest shark. It's about 20 to 25 feet. They feed on plankton so they’ve sort of no teeth and they're swimming actively in the water feeding on drifting, small, little animals.

We start to head out to sea. It's about 6:00 in the morning and you can see along the horizon this beautiful orange deep color of the sun starting to come up right now. The boat ride out is about an hour-and-a-half of a boat ride and we begin to set sail.

During this time, people do all sorts of different things. Sometimes they're talking. Sometimes they're sleeping. And in my case, I'm just preparing my gear and getting everything all organized.

We start to get out there and, all of a sudden, once we're in the sanctuary, we hear a sound. [makes sound]. You hear this sound and then you look and you can see the exhalation of a whale.

So we break off and we decide to go into two boats. There's a RIB, which is a rubber inflatable boat. It's about 14 feet. And at this point now, we're going to separate off from the mother ship, the main Auk. We go off into the boat with the captain, a naturalist, a scientist, me and all my camera equipment and we start to go out to start to photograph the humpback whale.

Then it does something really amazing when we're out there looking. We slowly start to approach and move forward, keeping a safe distance. All of a sudden, in the distance, the humpback whale thrusts all the way through the water and breaches. And when they do this, you can see the power of a huge animal coming all the way through in tremendous speed and then it just pauses and is frozen in a moment in time as it reaches the peak, and then falls to the ground and you hear this massive slap on the surface, and it does it and you can hear the sound. And then it does it again, and again.

Now, photographing a humpback wheel breaching is no easy thing. I don't know where it's going to breach, so how do I know where to look? But it did do it repeatedly and I was able to get some really amazing shots of this. It was spectacular.

Then all of a sudden over the radio, while this is happening, one of the people, the naturalist calls over and goes, “I see a fin on the surface.”

And I'm like, “Oh, this is fantastic.”

Now, this is one of those days I dream of. It's a day where the sea is totally flat, flat like being on a lake. Let me tell you of all the time I'm out there, maybe one day a year it's like this.

We see it start to move and we position the boat a little bit closer so we can observe what's happening. And it's moving and we start to think of it as a shark. Then it does something really amazing. It circles around and makes a real giant circle. This is a behavior that basking sharks do in which sometimes they're known to sort of aggregate in a few numbers and that they could be aggregating in a large circle underneath.

I'm thinking to myself this would be the moment of a lifetime here. Not only did I want one basking sharks, but two, three or four or five of them would be even better.

So we watch the behavior a little bit longer and then slowly, it breaks off from swimming in a circle and resumes a straight line, moving very slowly along the surface. So we think this is the perfect time.

We position the boat with the light, the angle, the movement and all that kind of stuff. I position myself and I slip into the water. I'm wearing a wetsuit, a mask, snorkel, a weight belt and I have my 360 camera, multi-camera system so that I can shoot video all around me in an immersive experience.

Now, slipping into the water isn't something I just did for the first time. No one ever believes me on these things but I practice over and over and over again, because stealth is what's important on these things. Quiet.

So I slip into the water and as I start to move into the water, the water is about 65 degrees, and I start to go through and I'm swimming. At this point, I can't see the shark anymore. I rely on the boat and the captain to point me in the right direction. I'm pretty far from the animal.

And they look back and then they point to me and I start swimming forward and I'm going in the direction towards it. When I get about 100 feet away, I begin to be able to have eyesight where I can see now the fin of the shark coming towards me.

In the water in Boston area, visibility in this area is about, on a good day, it's about 20 to 25 feet and the average visibility is about 10 to 15 feet in front of you. This was a great day. I had about 20 to 25 feet of visibility.

I'm swimming through. I'm now about 75 feet from the fin of the shark and I can see it in the distance when I look up. I begin to continue my movement forward. The ocean looks vast. And through the water is this beautiful emerald green color. And you can see pillars of light just descend straight through to the bottom and they almost look like they're dancing. And in this moment I'm starting to get myself into a pre-visualization of what I'm going to visualize, how I'm going to photograph this, how I'm going to move and dive along with this basking shark.

And we go through 50 feet. I can now see the fin even closer. I have locked in my position and our movement is swimming head-to-head on each other.

About 30 feet, I can start to make out now at 30 feet a little bit of a shadow in the distance just breaking through the water.

25 feet, I get my first glimpse of this animal. I can see a small, little, white underbelly. I see a pointed snout.

22 feet. I notice that now, I realize what I can see is no longer this beautiful basking shark, but this is an enormous great white shark coming straight towards me. I'm now 22 feet from this animal. Its teeth are moving. I can see its teeth. Its jaw is open.

20 feet. We are head to head facing each other moving straight on to one another. In most instances, animals sort of veer a little bit one way or the other. You don't walk into a pole with your phone. You sort of veer. This thing is swimming straight.

18 feet. The ocean is no longer a big place. The shark is becoming very large in the window here. I have positioned myself so… now, I'm a photographer. I've been doing this my whole life. I did the only thing that I know how to do, which is brace myself and position myself to get the shot that I want.

I keep moving 15 feet. I now have locked eyes with the shark. Now, this isn't like looking at a pigeon in the water. A pigeon and it just reacts to you. This thing actually makes strong eye contact. I don't know what it's thinking but it is not mistakeable that it is checking me out.

12 feet. I am swimming so head on I'm able to like ever so slightly drift my body to its left, my right, and go towards it.

10 feet. I can see every single tooth in its mouth. I can see all the scars.

At five feet now, I'm close. I have to pull the pole of the camera into me. I think my trajectory is such that I'm going to hit this thing.

We are now parallel to one another. It's eye to eye with me. If I reached out my hand, I would have hit the shark. At this moment, time had completely stopped for me. I remember its eyes just locked in. I remember the individual teeth. And we started to move past each other, and as we did, the girth of the shark was enormous. I could see every scar. I could see every scratch. I could see its enormous belly come through. There is nothing else that I could see.

At this moment, my trajectory was such that I actually thought I was going to hip-check the center of the shark. I had to push like this, some little bit of current on it, but to a shark that would be a tremendous feeling because it has a lateral line that would register the pressure sensor way in advance of any of this, so it would register that as well.

We then keep swimming past each other. I can see this. Its tail continues to go. I don't move the entire time. It swims past me. 17 seconds occur by the time that that encounter happened. As soon as it did and we finished, I see back the vast ocean. The shark never changed its position, never changed its course, didn't do anything different.

I raised my hand to the boat. The NOAA guys come. They pick me up. They take the camera. I had more strength than I've ever had in a day. Normally, I can hoist myself up but I think I just put my feet right on the boat kind of thing.

I'm up. We hugged each other. It was a moment of… there was incredible exhilaration from the boat’s perspective. They knew 15 seconds ahead of me that I was encountering a great white shark but there's nothing they could say or do. At that moment, they knew it's because of the angle of the way that you can see from the distance on top of the boat.

They said we were so close, to give you a sense of things, that my snorkel and its fin looked like they were one is how close we were.

Anyway, that was our day. We were very excited about that.

We go back to… as you can imagine. Thank you.

A few fun points. I am the first person to swim with a great white shark in the northeast that's not in a cage. I will say this. That when I came back to land, I immediately called a great colleague, Dr. Greg Skomal, a good friend who's the world expert on great white sharks. I called him up. I told him about my experience. I shared the image of the shark with him.

It turns out that this shark is a known shark. The shark is called Large Marge. It's one of the most famous of all the sharks in Massachusetts. It was first ID'd in 2012 by them. It was most famous because it was made Shark Week: Return of Jaws. And then since 2014, no one had seen the shark for four years. They hadn't seen it until my encounter.

After my encounter, we had estimated the size at about 16 feet long and about 3,000 pounds. When I asked about their encounter, they saw it a month later off the coast of Chatham, they estimated it at 17 feet, so I was off slightly. A shark that big is about 3,200 pounds, so that's about what we saw.

I'll just say this as an endnote, as a little caveat. I would have never dove with the shark had I known it was not the basking shark that I thought. There's no way mentally you can do this. I can't explain how large of an animal this is. But it also proves that one of the things is they're not just mindless animals that are just killing. They're apex predators. They're really beautiful animals out there. And they're to be feared because they are what they are, but they're not just mindless.

So when you think of them, I want you to think of them in the most beautiful and appreciative way. And I count myself lucky every day about this. Thank you very much.

If you would like to watch Keith’s footage of swimming with the great white shark, you can check it out here!
https://www.keithellenbogen.com/360vrwhiteshark