Face to Face with the Coelacanth: A Story Revealed by Laurent Ballesta & Alexis Chappuis - Blancpain

We have thousands of dreams, some of which are, we know, inaccessible. Sometimes, the opportunity allows us to make some of them come true. I want to bring back a knowledge, an image, a vision. For me, that's the meaning of adventure. These are long, expensive, risky dives. We pay the few minutes spent at the bottom, which are extremely expensive. For 18 to 20 minutes in the deep environment, You have to be good with yourself. But the underwater world cultivates the soul of an adventurer that all kids have. We are 100 meters from another world. The seal is such an emblematic species. No one can remain indifferent. When I worked on fossil seals, I didn't imagine at all that the adventure that would follow would be an animal that has no equivalent. It also carries this part of the adventure. We thought it was gone. In the end, it's not there, but it's still inaccessible. And we can lose our lives trying to find it. There's everything. It has everything in it. I had this dream of being the first to photograph a seal. But the first two times I went there, it was really a small team. There were four or five of us. I had very little money, barely enough to pay for plane tickets. Everyone was playing the game. And it worked. It worked right away. It was my first publication in National Geographic. I was so proud. But I was missing something. What did I bring in terms of knowledge to the seal? Did we know more about this mythical animal? It's considered the greatest zoological discovery of the 20th century. What did I bring in terms of knowledge? It doesn't cost much. Laurent came to the museum because he had done a first mission in 2010. He showed me extraordinary images and photographs. I think I almost cried. I had a little tear in the corner of my eye because it was a great emotion to see the seal actually living. It's a group that appeared 400 million years ago. It's not the same species today, which is 400 million years old, but the group is still there. Its current anatomy allows us to better understand the conditions of the output of water of vertebrates with legs and fingers who later went to the continents and are at the origin of amphibians, reptiles, reefs, mammals and therefore humans. Which means that today, if we go back a little and look at our genealogy, the seals are our closest marine cousins. Very early on, we agreed that it was important to be able to carry out a mission, in South Africa in particular, with the scuba divers, who would ultimately be the armed arm of science, and us scientists from the museum who were going to develop scientific protocols to respond to the most important questions of biology, behavior, habitat of the seals. Ok guys, on the word go. 1, 2, 3, go! The underwater world cultivates this soul of children, of adventure, of exploration, because there is really not much need. 100 meters down, it's not even two minutes, it's really nothing, we are two minutes from another world. You live something exceptional, you walk in a place where nobody walks. What I wanted was an indifferent animal in my presence, and that was the case. The fact that it is a rather nocturnal activity, that we go to see it when it is in a slightly lethargic phase, that it is not a real natural predator, in any case at an adult age it is unlikely. Well, all the impossible art was to be myself indifferent, in front of it, to succeed at that. This is the moment when we are perhaps the most in danger, because suddenly we no longer think that we are at 120 meters, we are with the seal. Nothing like the deep dive to measure how precious the time is and how much you have to enjoy the present moment, because really, these few minutes are going to cost a lot. Once we have spent 20, 25, 34 minutes once, and we leave it, and we see it disappear in the mist of the depths, and we start to go back, then there are other feelings that come. This is the moment when I may benefit the most from what I have just experienced intensely at the bottom, it is during this long and unnegotiable climb. It allows you to have this cessation of transition. At the bottom there was intensity, ecstasy, on the surface there will be tumult, the crowd, the obligations. Between the two, there is time to appreciate. I was waiting for hours, they themselves had 5-6 hours of decompression pallets, so on the boat I had the stress first of all to know if everything was going well for the deep divers, because they are divers who are very dangerous. Ah, everything is fine. And then, indeed, after these first thoughts, it was, what are they going to bring me? I was not even a diver at the time, I was just amazed to say, these guys are doing completely crazy things. I was every day in front of the episodes that came out at the end of the day, every day an episode. Hello, today we really did a great dive. There was a good seal at the rendezvous. What fascinated me was that they were able to go to places where no one had been and to bring completely amazing images, while opening the doors to the scientific world as well, to carry out experiments, to better understand the world in which we live. And then it stayed in a corner of my head until I arrived in Indonesia. I went to a site where the seal had been seen. For me, it was the first day, the first dive, the first second at the bottom, the seal is there. Alexis, it's three years of expedition before finding it. I think the emotion is not the same. In 2022, it's not because we didn't see the seal that we didn't do science. We took pictures of certain species of fish that had never been illustrated before. We discovered new species for Indonesia. Anyway, I hadn't told our partners, I hadn't told Blanpin, we're going to find the seal. I told them, we're going to explore the potential habitats of the seal. And in these habitats, there are so many other species, there are so many, it's a lot of life. It was in the south of the Moluccas, and in 2024 we had the opportunity to go to the north of the Moluccas. The Indonesian seal had never been seen by a diver. There were images that had been shot by Japanese scientists who used ROVs, which are underwater robots, but in the north of the Selebs, on an island called Sulawesi, and in Papua New Guinea. The meeting with the seal took place after a week of the beginning of the expedition. The idea of ​​the dive was just to go down to 150 meters, check that it was an interesting habitat, that there was a potential, etc. And just go back right away, we had a few pictures to take on the way back. And so we go down to 150 meters, incredible habitat, and there is a huge rock. And my partner goes to the right, I go to the left, and there I hear him screaming. I said to myself, making jokes 140 meters deep is not the time. Still, by conscience, I said to myself, I was going to go for a ride, so I went around the rock, but I ended up with the debt. We hallucinated, we were like in a dream. But in a dream where you only have a few minutes. It's an animal of extraordinary tranquility, it hardly moves. It gives us a bit of a slap. It's hard to be violent and say, you have to go up. I think that a large part of the passion and wonder it holds in the fact that it's not trivial, that it's not free, that it's not easy, and that it's ephemeral. It's ephemeral. It's an animal, we think we know it, and in fact, we discover that there are 15,000 additional questions that come to us. It always surprised us. We thought it was unique to the Union des Comores for a very long time, a single population. We now discover that it is still spread along the Indian Ocean. We thought they couldn't make more than six or seven babies. We found females with 26 babies. So the scientists are constantly wrong. To see these riddles, it's like a game, and at the same time frustrating because we know that a whole career will not be enough to solve all the questions we ask ourselves about elephants. We are on fundamental science, and it becomes very complicated today to find reliable partners who support this kind of project. These are very expensive missions to the other side of the world, in a deep environment, and being able to be accompanied by certain companies like that, who are aware of the environment, of the adventure, of the technical and scientific challenges, it's huge because we are in total confidence. Blanpin has been following me on all my expeditions for 12 years. I have been offering them projects for 12 years. They have never refused a project and they have never guided me. They ask me to do what I know how to do. You have to put yourself in their shoes, in the shoes of our partners, of Blanpin. You trust people who say, no, but I'm sure there are elephants there. You have to go. The probability of meeting is very low. So if you don't have this support from these partners, you can't lead this project. As long as you have some passionate people ready to make some sacrifices to go and look in a shadow where you can't see this animal a little bit pale. So yes, I tell myself everything is not lost. I would like the Selacanth to become the flag of marine species conservation, which are really in great danger of extinction. Talking about it is essential to protect them, but also to raise awareness of the general public about marine conservation. How to convince people is to try to reconnect them to the natural world. To remind them that our way of life is not necessarily the one that has been adopted by all the species that have passed through the ages. There are species that have done, like the Selacanth, the bet of slowness and have survived.