(Video) (Orcas' sounds)
(Applause)
Orcas are magnificent creatures.
They don't deserve the nickname of "killer whales".
First of all, they are not whales, they belong to the dolphin family.
And second, they've never attacked any humans,
in their natural habitat, that is.
The first thing you feel when you dive next to orcas
is an intense joy, the joy of being accepted into their social space
and be able to observe for a few dozen of minutes
their underwater life.
Occasionally, they get curious and come close, very close.
In this gaze, you can spot a vast intelligence.
You feel scanned, analyzed, scrutinized,
as if they had the power to access our deepest emotions.
But above all, you don't feel the fear,
you don't feel the tiredness, you don't feel the cold.
You just feel a wave of emotions and energy that overwhelms you
and thrills you from head to toes.
I feel it more and more each year.
Today, I know why, and I'm going to share it with you.
My first encounter with orcas goes back to 1997.
It was two days before an underwater fishing competition.
This encounter changed the course of my life.
It was like an irresistible call.
Two days later, I win this competition,
and thanks to my sponsor's incentive, I'm able to finance my first trip
to go dive with orcas in the north of Norway a year later.
This first expedition in 1998 was followed by a long series of others,
21 seasons without interruption during which I accumulated
more than 6,000 underwater encounters closest to orcas.
This experience has enabled me to design a method
to approach and interact with them respectfully that is a reference today.
I've dedicated most of my time
to the study of orcas' social behavior and body language.
This presentation refers to "singing orcas"
but I made my first underwater recording only in 2016.
It was near Tromsø in Kaldfjord,
and it was a magical moment.
During the day just before the test, we observed dozen of humpback whales
and several hundreds orcas that moved in the middle of the fjord
close to our anchoring.
At nightfall, we took our aluminium craft
and we went to the site.
The atmosphere was a bit special.
There was no wind which it's pretty rare.
The fjord's surface resembled a mirror,
and we could see on each side of this narrow fjord,
the snow on the mountains.
It was a rather breathtaking moment.
So we stopped the engine and I immersed my hydrophone
in the most absolute silence at a dozen meters deep.
A hydrophone is an underwater microphone
that allows you to record sounds while listening to them.
I connected the speaker, and then ...
Well, come with me on the boat.
(Songs of orcas and humpback whales)
A startling and perfectly orchestrated melody rised from the dephts.
I was overwhelmed by the beauty of these songs.
Our boat was at the interface between two worlds,
the orcas' world and their secrets under the surface,
and the sky and the stars above us.
In the magic of the moment, I imagined these two worlds connected
and what connected these spaces was the songs coming from the depths.
The northern lights started just above our heads.
The singing increased in intensity and harmony.
(Songs of orcas and whales)
Each orca, each humpback whale was playing its own partition
in what I called later "The abyss's symphony".
But above all, what was happening was going far beyond this.
It was not just an harmonious melody pleasant to the ear,
I felt enveloped, permeated by those songs.
I felt a wave of energy,
the same energy that flows when I dive in the vicinity of orcas.
While I dedicated all these years to the sole study of orcas' body language,
I missed something important.
I realized that evening of December 2016
that sounds are of vital importance in orcas' lives,
and that that was where we needed to direct our research.
A few weeks after the end of the season in March 2017,
I went to Guadeloupe to meet Pierre Lavagne de Castellan.
Pierre is a bioacoustician and he's the benchmark,
Mister "Song of whales and sperm whales".
He's been in that field for more than 30 years.
During our meetings, Pierre used to say,
"The message is in the song."
He'd hammer it like a leitmotiv,
and I was hanging on his words, saying to myself,
"But what is this message? What are they saying to each other?
What are they trying to tell us?"
I left Guadeloupe with more questions than answers.
I went back to France and I started to do research on the internet
to try to understand these concepts.
I had no knowledge about sound. So I googled "what is a sound?"
A sound is a wave. Okay. What is a wave?
A wave is an oscillation through a transfer of energy.
Okay.
It's defined by its amplitude, its frequency.
It can be visualized by a graph.
There are electromagnetic waves, mechanical waves,
stationary waves ...
All of this didn't really speak to me. I didn't see how I could use it.
But one day, as I am searching about stationary waves,
I stumble upon the work of Ernst Friedrich Chladni.
Ernst Friedrich Chladni is an engineer, physicist and musician
who discovered how to visualize sounds.
He had the idea to use a copper plate,
attached to a stand,
on which he put a thin layer of sand,
and on the periphery of which he used his violoin bow.
Look at the result, it's surprising.
(Video) (Grindings of violin bow)
In this experiment, we can observe
that the sand moves on the surface of the plate
and forms a geometrical figure.
These geometric patterns are called "Chladni's figures" or "Chladni’s plate".
Chladni made a whole catalog of several thousands of them
because what's interesting
is that each frequency produces a specific image.
Now where it gets truly exciting
is when Alexander Lauterwasser,
who is a German researcher and nature photographer,
discovered recently that the shape of some living species
was the exact copy of Chladni's plates.
On this picture from his book "Water Sound Images,"
we can see a flower with its corresponding Chladni's figure.
It can also be the back of a turtle,
or this picture taken under a microscope of the Diatom Arachnoidiscus
that is the exact copy of the Chladni's figure
corresponding to 5,000 Hertz frequency.
From his discovery Alexander Lauterwasser theorizes
"the shape of living beings originates from sound vibrations."
The shape of living beings originates from sound vibrations.
A few years before him, Hans Jenny, the Swiss scientist,
worked on the effects of sound on matter, especially on liquids and semi-liquids.
Here's one of his experiments.
We can see that under the effect of a sound vibration,
this semi-liquid paste that usually sits at the bottom of the speaker
rises up, sets itself up despite the gravitational force
and follows specific movements.
According to Hans Jenny, these movements are not chaotic nor random,
they are perfectly organized and reproducible.
When I saw this experiment, I immediately made a connection
with old pictures that I took of my first expeditions.
They show a thin liquid film
that is thrown forward from the orcas' lower jaw while they swim.
Initially, I paid no attention to these pictures,
but now I could see a link with Hans Jenny's experiments.
There is no reason for this phenomenon.
I asked a hydrodynamic engineer specialized in fluid dynamics.
According to him,
these shapes can't exist in the absence of an outside force.
Could orcas be creating this phenomenon?
Could orcas be producing this frequency
that enables them to produce these ephemeral artistic shapes?
I've been studying orcas since 1998.
These creatures belong to the cetacean family.
They have a bigger brain
that is potentially more powerful,
more efficient than that of humans.
They're conscious of themselves and of their surroundings.
I saw them solve complex problems,
especially by adapting their hunting strategy depending on circumstances
in an extremely reactive way.
They are organized in society,
in family groups that are led by the oldest female, the matriarch.
Orcas possess acoustic organs.
They pass on their knowledge, their culture, their language,
from generation to generation for millions of years.
Our civilization is 5,000 years old.
Our technology has not reached 200 years of age yet.
We, humans,
are dominating the world.
We control almost all of the living.
We think we know everything, but there's still so much to discover.
Pierre Lavagne de Castellan, him again, has observed multiple times
humpback whales getting together in groups
and giving acoustic massages to each other.
These recent observations show
that whales but also dolphins and orcas
have developed throughout evolution know-hows that enable them to use sounds
for something other than simple communication.
I pursue my research with the hope, maybe a bit foolish,
of understanding these phenomenons
because what I feel when I dive close to orcas,
this well-being that I feel,
is due, in my opinion, to the sounds they produce.
Our oceans are endangered because of human activities:
the consequences of climate change,
noise pollution, chemical pollution,
overfishing, sea traffic, plastic ...
It's time to change our habits to reduce these threats.
Let's save our oceans while we still can.
Let's protect orcas, this luminous oceanic civilization.
Let's uncover the secrets of their language.
We will gain access to their knowledge
and then, yes,
we shall be able to heal ourselves with the songs of orcas.
Thank you.
(Applause)