Greg Turns Dream Of An Idea Into Dream Job

By Britton Jacob-Schram

It’s hard to imagine, but Greg Marshall’s preliminary sketches for the Crittercam were scoffed at when first introduced to the scientific community.

Yet after about 20 years of developing one of the National Geographic Society’s most innovative research tools, you can be sure such skeptics are choking on their knee-jerk chuckles.

“Today it seems pretty logical we would do something like this,” smiles Marshall, fresh from a dive off Playa Flamingo, last week.

“But in the beginning people thought it was crazy. They didn’t think it would work. They didn’t think it would be interesting science. They thought it would be pretty pictures,” he laughs.

“And that was the quote that I often got: ‘Oh, it’d be pretty pictures — not good science.’ ”
Ironically, however, the opening shot of his story is quite a pretty one.

© National Geographic

SINGLE FILE FILMING: Emperor penguins at Penguin Ranch, Antarctica.

Marshall, scuba diving off the coast of Belize, circa 1986, comes face to face with a shark and makes a split-second manifestation which alters the course of his life.

The shark quickly swims away, yet the marine biologist catches a glimpse of a remora, or suckerfish, attached to its streamlined body. It was the right place, at the right time, with the right epiphany: Marshall had already been working on an underwater housing system.

“I thought: Wow, I could take this camera that I built, make it smaller, squeeze it, trim it… make it look like the remora,” says Marshall, whose cinematography and sound has won him two Emmy awards, one for National Geographic’s Great White Sharks (1995), another for Sea Monsters: Search for the Giant Squid (1999).

“I immediately felt — it was a gut feeling — I really felt this would be a very powerful research tool and it would have broad applications.”

The first prototype was actually called the remora, but people didn’t know what it was, he laughs.
“I would say that we haven’t nearly achieved what I felt at the time that we could. That’s not a bad thing — that’s a good thing. It’s okay, in that there’s still lots more to do.

© National Geographic

COYLY DEPLOYED: Greg Marshall, the mastermind behind the Crittercam, which offers visual and audio from an animal’s perspective.

“One of the interesting things about doing this kind research is the more we do, the more we realize there’s a lot more to discover out there.

“There’s kind of an ever-growing list of animals to work with, and an ever-growing list of places we haven’t been and we need to be to find out what’s going on to conserve these species,” explains Marshall, who last week was scouting potential biodiversity hotspots in Costa Rica for stationary “wildcams”, remote-controlled cameras operated from Marshall’s Remote Imaging office in Washington DC.

“There is no tool like this — to be able to study an animal without affecting the animal’s behavior, without being there as an observer and affecting it by your presence,” he says of the Crittercam system, of which the smallest versions, he says pointing to a nearby table, “are about the size of that beer bottle”.

To date Crittercam has been deployed — whether by strap-like harness or suction cup adhesion — on nearly 40 different species, including great white sharks, sperm whales, and leatherback sea turtles.

Deploying the camera on leatherbacks at Playa Grande in the early ‘90s was actually one of the turning points of his career.

© National Geographic

WEAR AND TEAR: Conservationists working with the Crittercam in Africa thought the camera wouldn't last five minutes. The first lioness to receive a terrestrial Crittercam filmed for about a week.

“I failed miserably,” admits Marshall. “I failed after having spent a lot of effort, a lot of time, and a lot of money trying to work by myself. I went back to Washington DC disappointed — almost ready to give up, but not quite.”

Marshall saw the obvious potential and value in his idea and, as he says, “got lucky in a way”.

“It was right after coming back from Costa Rica that I made a critical connection at National Geographic. I’d gained enough experience and insight, even though I’d failed. And that was enough to convince Nat Geo I was enough to be taking a chance on.”

“It’s a dream to have the job I have. I created my job. It didn’t exist at National Geographic; the department I run didn’t exist.

“I created it,” he smiles.