Would this be the same book where they massacre sharks, and dynamite a reef in order to make a census of marine "life"?
Point being, it's a great read but things have changed a little since then
Tortuga68. . . Times changes and memories fade. Is this blowing up the reef, the one near blue hole? Aircraft pilots described to him a blue hole in the ocean near Belize. There were shallow corals with fish, that Cousteau's Calypso crew used dynamite to clear a passage so they and other divers could approach and study this one of a kind geological feature. I'm sure they killed hundreds if not thousands of fish to open this area for study. . . there's a dancer fleet ad for it, that is playing next to this message. Cousteau and his team were pioneering Oceanography, and feeding themselves from the ocean.
Please don't take this wrong, I respect his doing things that had never been done before, and doing it with very little money. Could a modern research vessel with government backing come in and take a year to clip and transplant all the coral and fish undisturbed, of course.
Pioneers often accomplish great things, but destroy in doing so. Darwin killed the animals in his study. . . Audobon's books were drawings from birds he had shot. . .
Cousteau ate lots of fish and lobster, but he helped us know what areas were suffering losses because of our behavior. Are pioneers perfect? No, but we learn from them so we don't go out and blow up a reef, or kill rare species.
Talking about Jacque Cousteau, even here, informs the young divers, that don't care about history, to know some things have been done before. If they read of Cousteau counting fish by dynamiting first. . . they can learn of live fish counts in underwater parks, like Cozumel's. . . and take part in the next one in six months.