Fabien Cousteau

Fabien Cousteau (born 2 October 1967) is an aquanaut, ocean conservationist, and documentary filmmaker. As the first grandson of Jacques Cousteau, Fabien spent his early years aboard his grandfather's ships Calypso and Alcyone, and learned how to scuba dive on his fourth birthday. From 2000 to 2002, he was explorer-at-large for National Geographic and collaborated on a television special aimed at changing public attitudes about sharks called "Attack of the Mystery Shark". From 2003 to 2006, he produced the documentary Shark: Mind of a Demon that aired on CBS. With the help of a large crew, he created a 14-foot, 1,200-pound, lifelike shark submarine called Troy that enabled him to immerse himself inside the shark world.

For the next four years (2006–2010), Cousteau was part of a multi-hour series for PBS called Ocean Adventures with his father, Jean-Michel Cousteau, and sister, Céline, which was inspired by his grandfather's 1978 PBS series, Ocean Adventures.

In early 2009, Cousteau began working with local communities and children worldwide to help restore local water ecosystems. He continues to pursue these initiatives through the Fabien Cousteau Ocean Learning Center his non-profit 501(c)(3) founded in early 2016 dedicated to the restoration of the world's water bodies through active community engagement and education.

Early life and education Fabien Cousteau is the grandson of oceanographic explorer Jacques Cousteau, and son of Jean-Michel Cousteau who assisted Jacques on most of his expeditions. Fabien was born and raised in France, although he has lived in the United States for most of his life.

Fabien's first scuba dive was at age four when Jacques strapped a custom-made scuba tank to his back and sent the boy off into the Mediterranean Sea. His interest in sharks began at a young age, about 6 or 7, and was piqued when he sneaked into a showing of the film Jaws. The film perplexed him – "It went against everything I had ever learned about sharks ... Great white sharks don't go around chopping up boats," he explained – and started him on a mission to clear up "the gross misconceptions we have about sharks".

At age seven, Cousteau accompanied his grandfather and father on the first of many sea trips aboard the Calypso and Alcyone, the ships that transported the explorers to their dive locations. He officially joined the crew at age twelve; his first job was to remove barnacles from Jacques's boats. and graduated from Boston University with a bachelor's degree in environmental economics. He then spent time as a diving and underwater product tester while looking for a company to appoint him "explorer-in-residence". The episode, which debuted on 4 August 2002, investigated a recent rise of bull shark attacks and an incident in 1916 he found a shark never seen before , two of them upstream in Matawan Creek. A second shark documentary followed shortly thereafter. In Red Rackham's Treasure, Tintin explores the ocean while on a treasure hunt using a shark-shaped submarine.

In order to make his vision a reality, he contracted with Hollywood engineer and family friend Eddie Paul. The resulting documentary, entitled Shark: Mind of a Demon, aired on CBS in 2006. In total, he filmed 170 hours of footage which were made available for scientific study. One night, while operating Troy, he lost contact with his support vehicles. "I ended up anchoring Troy and swimming in absolute darkness to Isla de Guadalupe", he recalled. "That was the fastest I've ever swam." On another occasion, Troy broke and got pinned at the bottom of the sea. After some tense moments, his dive team was eventually able to free Cousteau and bring him to the surface. After the project was complete, he declared "I'm done with sharks for now. There are so many [other] things I want to explore". The footage was turned into a two-part episode of Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures called "America's Underwater Treasures." Among other things, the team captured footage of goliath groupers, humpback whales, a rare giant Pacific octopus, and spawning coral. They also visited various shipwrecks including a sunken Civil War battleship, and talked to ecologists. Cousteau said the goal of the show was to "make these special places real for viewers everywhere". The Cousteau family's PBS series "Jean-Michel Cousteau Ocean Adventures" continued on through 2009, with its expeditions spanning from the Arctic to Papua New Guinea and the Amazon and covering topics from climate change to indigenous cultures.

Mission 31

Originally scheduled for November 2013, Mission 31 was postponed to June 2014 due to a US federal government shutdown. He got the idea for Mission 31 when visiting the undersea laboratory Aquarius during a fundraiser aiming to keep it operating in the wake of federal budget cuts. It was his first saturation dive.

Proteus Proteus is the project Fabien Cousteau is planning for a construction of a community of ocean flooring analysis stations, situated off Curaçao at a depth of about 20 m in a marine-protected area. Aquanauts could reside and work in these underwater habitats. Front-end engineering starts in 2022, with the habitat put on the sea bottom in 2025.