How a Tiny Dog Saved a National Geographic Expedition | Expedition Raw

Meet Scuba. This little gal might not look like a blood hound, but she helped out National Geographic in a huge way. My name is Alan Turchik, and I build cameras for National Geographic. My job takes me all over the world, deploying these camera systems.

Probably one of the most devastating losses of a camera was with a system that we call the Drift Cam. We spent about a year developing these two cameras, and we took them to Miami to deploy them for the first time in the ocean. We went out in the middle of this crazy storm, and we put them into the water. They went below the surface, let it down, down. When they came back to the surface, they were caught in one of the fastest ocean currents on Earth. Basically, they were just ripped out to sea and taken further than what was safe for us to follow them, and at that point, they were lost.

So, how does this little gal become our hero? It's three years later, and we've just been contacted by this French guy who is sailing across the Atlantic, and he's found one of our cameras literally in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. We're talking thousands and thousands of miles away from where we originally deployed them. It was a very good day, small wind, and my dog began to bark. We saw this ball that was lighting with the sun, so we decided to change our way and approach it.

We saw it was full of electronics. We thought it was effectively a camera, but we knew we were not sure. And then we saw this way it was coming from National Geographic. Getting the camera back was incredible! I mean, it survived for three years floating on the ocean, which I don't know, says pretty good things about the design in general. But not only that, there was footage on the camera that can actually be used for research.

Our scientist, Dr. Neil Hammerlog, he's going to review this footage to get an understanding of the organisms that live at those depths in the ocean. It's not every day a dog with sea legs gets to help National Geographic study the oceans. I can't think of a better ending to this story. Not only did we find a puppy, but we found arguably one of the cutest puppies in the world. He had been abandoned.