Laurent Ballesta began free diving with a speargun in the Mediterranean as an eight-year-old. By 12 he had his open-water diving licence.
"I was fascinated by Jacques Cousteau documentaries, so I was playing Cousteau," he says. "I think that's what I'm still doing."
Seven thousand dives later, Ballesta, now 40, is an underwater photographer and marine biologist leading expeditions to Antarctica and French Polynesia with support from Swiss watch company Blancpain, which since 2009 has spent more than €1 million ($1.4 million) on ocean conservation projects.
What began in 2014 as a study of camouflage grouper reproduction habits in French Polynesia has morphed into ground-breaking discoveries about grey reef shark behaviour.
"Twenty thousand groupers aggregate in an area smaller than a soccer field to mate for one hour, once a year," says Ballesta. "I did a 24-hour, non-stop dive to study the groupers and suddenly during the night a huge aggregation of grey reef sharks arrived. We estimated there were 700 and it was a massacre. Sometimes there were 200 sharks jumping on a fish of only two kilograms."
Ballesta and his team spent 200 hours underwater in June this year to further observe the phenomenon. In 2017 they'll return to tag the sharks and record their movements. "I plan to show there is some pattern to the sharks' behaviour - it's not completely chaotic," he says.
As to how it feels to be in the midst of a shark feeding frenzy: "I feel alive - it's very exciting. Grey reef sharks are two metres long and they're focused on their much smaller prey, so it's wrong to imagine they will bite anything that's around."
Good to know.
