In 2004, Fred Buyle moved from a celebrated career in competitive freediving to underwater photography. He has since gone on to collaborate with a number of marine conservation organisations, using his freediving expertise to help with field work, and has been published in the likes of National Geographic, The New York Times and The Telegraph. Nine years ago, together with Fabrice Schnöller, he initiated the Darewin Project, which aims to develop tools to study the language of cetaceans. In Issue 10, his photography illustrates the story of one of their more recent expeditions.

Oceanographic Magazine (OM): When did you first connect with the ocean?

Fred Buyle (FB): When I was a little kid my parents always had a sailboat, so I was always sailing with them. They didn’t dive, but I always wanted to go underwater. That’s something that always attracted me. When I was seven or eight I could start snorkelling and exploring and that’s how the whole thing started.

OM: Why did you move from a career in freediving to one in photography?

FB: I stopped competitive freediving in 2004 simply because I’d done nine years of being a professional athlete. Back in the day we were lucky, I had sponsorship. I didn’t make a fortune but could make my living just by competing and with a few sponsors. Freediving is a very young sport. At that age I was building a personality and trying to understand how I really function. I think it was a good way to meet people – even though we were competitors we were all friends. Sometimes we would spend three months training together for a competition, we would be helping each other and then on the day we were competitors. It was a nice sport for that. But it’s a lot of work. Every year you know you’re going to train for nine months for one dive. At some point you’ve done it and it’s enough.

OM: Is freediving a key element of your work?

FB: Freediving is simply the most natural way to go underwater. I think you better understand the whole ecosystem when you freedive because you become a part of that environment, more so than when scuba or rebreather diving. You make less noise; you can cover more distance and you can spend more time in the water. Your dives are shorter, but you can spend all day in the water, covering a much wider area so I think it’s a very good way to understand how a particular area or ecosystem works. The animals are less afraid of you so it’s much easier to get close to them. Usually they get curious and they come to you to examine you. When you’re freediving, you can really hear that the ocean is not a silent world, far from it, which is another sensory experience. Also, I think freediving makes sense for me because it uses less resources – every scuba dive you fill a tank it uses 1.5kw of energy. It doesn’t sound like much but it’s a lot.

OM: Is it important to you that your work aids conservation in some way?

FB: Of course! It evolved towards that over the years. I was always interested in conservation, but it was a little later, after I stopped freediving competitively and really started focusing on the underwater photography that I moved into that world. In fact, I started photography just two years before I stopped competing in freediving and I never thought it would be a new career. When you start taking pictures you start looking for stories and marine scientists always have interesting stories. That’s how I got involved.

In 2005 I started taking pictures for a team of scientists in Colombia for the Malpelo Foundation. We were tagging hammerhead sharks to see the movement of the species in the Eastern Pacific and their movement between Malpelo, Galapagos and Cocos Island. The data from that study helped that site get assigned as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. I started to become more aware of the different problems the marine environment faces so I became more interested in these issues. I have been working in this field for 15 years now, and I can see how the new generation of marine biologists communicate more with each other and the general public. The new generation, they share everything and work together. It’s a good sign.

OM: What drew you to Fabrice Schnöller?

FB: I met Fabrice on Reunion Island nearly ten years ago now and I really liked his approach to his work. He’s an engineer and he has that engineering way of looking at things – I think it’s a very good approach for whale communication. He doesn’t seem to have the barriers that marine biologists have, because they are often a lot more focused on protocols and have specific ideas about how things should be done. So, I started to help him go a bit further with his freediving, which he picked up very quickly, and off we went. I think it’s important nowadays to try to cross disciplines – gathering all the various components together, from scientific data to underwater imagery, is a big plus for everyone. The idea with Darewin is that everything is open source, so people can use the recordings for their own research if they want. I think that’s the key. I don’t understand why a lot of scientific papers are not available to the public – I find it totally crazy that often you need to spend money to access and article online. Everything should be open source.

OM: What is your experience of blending the scientific side of your work with Darewin with the emotional side?

FB: Every time you have a true interaction with a marine animal, when both the human and the animal are willing to meet, you feel those two elements collide. Often, when we go into the water it’s not necessarily a true encounter – we see fish or a whale just passing by, but when you have an encounter when both parties want to share a moment and try to understand each other, it goes to another level. But it takes time. With Darewin, in ten years we’ve spent around 400 days at sea getting in the water with these animals and in only 2% of that time we’ve had a true encounter. It’s a long process but it’s very rewarding when it happens. Fabrice works with a pod of dolphins in the Reunion Islands, some of which he can recognise year after year, and they seem to recognise him too. Even with sharks it’s possible to have that kind of experience. If you return to the same dive site over the years, you’re likely to bump into the same sharks. Animals in the same species do share certain behaviours, but each individual will also have its own preferences, moods and behaviours. One day a shark who is usually playful and interactive simply won’t be. They’re like us, they’re changeable. Some animals will be curious, some won’t.

There was an occasion when I was at home in the Azores when a group of us were freediving. We bumped into a group of around 25 sperm whales and we saw a mother give birth. That was very very special. My first reaction was to be very careful because you would think that when a mother gives birth she and the other whales would be very protective. But we were accepted straight away by the group. The mother was helping the little guy to swim and breath and after 15 minutes she was pushing it to all the other sperm whales. Then she pushed it towards me, literally pushed the calf near me. It was a really humbling experience – she understood that we were not a threat and that we were just there to observe. It was a very powerful moment.

OM: What have you been working on recently with Fabrice?

FB: The latest expedition we did was in Norway. We came across the famous Beluga whale, Hvaldimir. Over the course of two or three weeks we spent several days in the water with him – he’s a very interesting animal. It’s clear that he’s been trained by humans, but he’s also able to function in nature. It’s a shame because he doesn’t have any fellow belugas to interact with and they are highly social animals. That’s why he seeks human contact. It’s a common thing with certain marine animals who find themselves on their own, they look for human contact. It’s a sad story – it shows how we always end up corrupting things. Hvaldimir is a very good candidate for Darewin, to test sounds, to send him sounds and see how he reacts, and record his responses. The idea behind Darewin is to match the behaviour and sound, so it’s a big plus to be able to film an animal in the water while recording them.

The first time we got in the water with him he was quite shy – he hung around on the edge of our vision. But after around 10 minutes he came a little closer and started to interact. He was trying to touch us all the time and was very playful. Every time we left it was very difficult, because you could see he didn’t want us to leave. He kept moving between us and the boat. Every time we left it was difficult for him and for us. He’s healthy, he’s feeding, which is good. But it was a very different experience from what we had had with other animals.