Eventually she took him on hunting expeditions. It took six months for the female cephalopod to trust him in her predator-dense environment. Sometimes you watch incredible behaviour, but you don’t know it’s amazing because you don’t know what it is! And then the different things start to speak to you.” “And then I started noticing little signs and little tracks. “In the first two years I found almost nothing,” Foster said. It took three years to develop his underwater tracking skills and system, with the help of Griffiths and Landschoff. By 2017 when he spoke with UCT News, he had been freediving in the sea below his home for six years. He learned to freedive to connect with something greater than himself: the underwater world. Photo Jannes Landschoff.įoster had turned to the sea after suffering a burnout. Naturalist, freediver and film-maker Craig Foster (right) with Emer Prof Charles Griffiths after a dive off Miller’s Point. The San also taught him that there were no shortcuts to deep connection. “But I wasn’t able to speak that science language very well and Charles kindly offered to let me join him and Jannes,” he said.Īnd with Griffiths’s 50 years of scholarship and big-picture thinking, this was immersion of a different kind. Because their hearing is phenomenal and they speak the languages of animals, birds and insects, I felt I was in a silent world and they were in a world of gigantic symphony.
“They track with sound, so they can find animals kilometres away.
In an interview with UCT News in 2017, Foster recounted how his job as a wildlife film-maker and advocate for the oceans came from his ability to communicate science in “pictures and stories”.īut it was while he was living and hunting with the San that he realised his access to the ecosystem and its biology was very limited. Some years before Foster encountered his octopus co-star, he’d learned how to track and understand marine life in False Bay’s rich intertidal region in the company of the scientists.īut I wasn’t able to speak that science language very well and Charles kindly offered to let me join him and Jannes.įoster is involved in the Sea Change Project, a not-for-profit organisation with a mandate to conserve the oceans and human origin heritage. They are friend and fellow seashore explorer Charles Griffiths, now an emeritus professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, and UCT alumnus Dr Jannes Landschoff, who is listed as scientific advisor on My Octopus Teacher.
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