Callum Mireault

It was a Tuesday morning when I received that email. I must have misunderstood… It just can’t be right.


Since I started to work in underwater acoustics, I have had the privilege to work with many smart and friendly people. People that influenced not only my career but also my personal life. Callum is one of them. I have met him at the Canadian Healthy Oceans Network conference in Ottawa back in 2017. He was presenting some of the work he was doing for his M.Sc. at Memorial University in Newfoundland. His project was quite interesting. He put together a high definition cinema-grade camera system towed on the seabed to map benthic communities off New Brunswick. He was specifically interested in how the distribution of sea potatoes (Boltenia ovifera) was related to the physical properties of the ocean. If sea potatoes are not your thing, believe me, talk to Callum and he will make them be your new favorite animal! His enthusiasm and passion were contagious. We connected right away. When I explained to him the camera system I was trying to put together I could see sparkles in his eyes. Since that day we started to work together. He brought to me his technical expertise and a wealth of experience on camera systems, and I helped him out with some programming he needed to process his images. He is the one who pointed me towards the 110-degrees camera lens I am using now. He is also the one who introduced me to the Trident ROV. In May 2018, we met again in Montreal for the World Conference on Marine Biodiversity. We even shared a room to keep the travel costs down. He was about to finish his M.Sc., just found a dream job in Newfoundland and was moving soon with his girlfriend.

When I received the email that Tuesday morning with the subject line “Callum Mireault”, I immediately thought that Callum wanted to chat about a script I had just sent him. Then, I read more carefully and realized that the message was not from Callum but from Paul Snelgrove, a professor at Memorial University working with him. I kept reading and re-reading the email trying to find the part that I misunderstood. But no, unfortunately, I understood correctly... Paul was announcing that Callum had a heart attack and passed away. He was not even 30.

Still to this day, I have a very hard time wrapping my head around the loss of Callum. This project would not be where it is now without him. He would certainly have been excited to be part of this expedition.