Nan Hauser

And it's funny, I was so curious about it that I wanted to know what they did when you didn't see them.

What were they doing underwater?

And that drove me into this curiosity that I had all my life.

After I had had three children, I said, you know, I really want to live out my dream.

I'm going to study whales and dolphins underwater and see what they're doing.

I bought an underwater digital video camera and started filming myself and then seeing things that no one else had ever seen before.

And everyone kept saying, write it up, write it up.

You know, this is science.

Write a paper.

Keep track of everything.

And my curiosity just kept getting stronger and more intense and stronger.

So even though I had children and I was a little tired of academia, I just dove right back into it and I'm still doing it since.

Behavior is what fascinated me the most.

And although I studied genetics and acoustics and population identity and abundance and so many other things, migratory pathways, I study all that.

It's the behavior that really fascinates me.

I realized that by having a research organization and a conservation organization, that it was more than standing up and down screaming and shouting, which there's a place definitely for activism.

I'm all for it, but I wanted to get the evidence.

I wanted to get the scientific data to show why we needed to protect whales.

The director said, I think we really need more footage of you underwater with the whales.

And I said, okay, no problem.