Shark Week features annually on the Discovery Channel. It’s been condemned for taking a sensationalist approach to sharks and shark attacks, but Tony and I loved the Air Jaws episodes produced by our own Chris Fallows of Cape Town. This two-DVD set is season 4 of Shark Week screened in 2005 (the 30th anniversary of the release of Jaws), and features a range of programs all about sharks.
I reviewed the first disc of this special in this post. Here are brief reviews of the features on Disc 2 of the DVD set.
Mythbusters: Jaws Special
I actually hadn’t watched Mythbusters until this particular show, so I was pleasantly surprised and amused. It’s basically two grown men (one with seriously foppish fashion sense) and sundry irritating hangers-on, blowing things up, building contraptions and using large machinery for inappropriate projects. The hosts are special effects designers so they have a huge workshop with every imaginable gadget at their disposal.
In this episode, they investigate some aspects of the movie Jaws, including the incidents concerning the strength of the shark (towing a boat backwards, submerging air-filled plastic barrels for hours on end, and blasting through a shark cage and then – later – through the side of a boat). They also investigate whether sharks are deterred by punches (slightly, as our own experience attests) and what happens to a scuba cylinder when you fire a gun at it.
If you don’t want to know the results of these experiments, stop reading now.
They found that while a shark could conceivably pull three plastic barrels underwater briefly, it couldn’t hold them there. It also could not tow the boat backwards fast enough to cause waves to break over the stern. It is possible, however, for a great white shark to break a shark cage, and also to make a (small) hole in the side of a (flimsy) wooden boat.
Sharks don’t like to be punched, particularly in the soft parts (gills and eyes), but, as the Mythbusters pointed out, if you’re being munched and your fists are your only weapon, then you’re going to want to use them regardless of how effective they’ll be.
Tony’s and my primary interest was in the exploding scuba cylinder (in the movie, this is how the shark is finally vanquished). After multiple layers of safety precautions, they fire a rifle point-blank into first an empty cylinder, to see whether the bullet can penetrate 2 inches of aluminium (it can), and then into a fully charged one. The entire experiment was done inside a shipping container, with the gun remotely operated.
The results were interesting: the pressurised cylinder did not explode, but took off like a rocket as the air was released through the small hole. It whizzed about inside the shipping container, denting the walls, until the air pressure inside the cylinder was equal to the air pressure outside. We could see how a cylinder having its pillar valve knocked off while in transit could turn it into a lethal weapon. The compressed air has considerable explosive power.
Shark After Dark
One has incredibly mixed feelings watching these Shark Week specials. The narration and music are all testosterone-filled, fear-inducing and press the same buttons that Jaws the movie pushes. The resources – time, camera equipment, and so on – that gets thrown at the subject, however, is awe-inspiring and one can only hope that some of the footage obtained is of value to science.
The first half of Sharks After Dark features our homeboy Chris Fallows, of Apex Predators and Air Jaws fame. He guides a film crew as they spend time on a boat off Seal Island at night, hoping to determine how active white sharks are at night. I spent the first few minutes rolling my eyes vigorously – lots of loud and vacuous American speculation in sweeping terms with no reference to the available scientific knowledge on shark sensory organs – but the eye rolling ceased when the team actually obtained footage (and Chris Fallows some incredible still photos) of white sharks breaching after seals while it was still dark. My curiosity about the water around Seal Island was also satisfied when Fallows and a cameraman got into the shallow water (about 1.5 metres deep) around the island where the seals congregate, and dived with them for a while. Let’s just say that the water clarity confirmed one’s suspicions that all that seal poop has to go somewhere!
The second section of the program dealt with bluntnose sixgill sharks – which strongly resemble “our” broadnose sevengill cowsharks here in the Cape (and are in fact also found along the Kwazulu-Natal and West Coast of South Africa, but not in Cape waters), in Puget Sound south of Seattle in the USA. These sharks live at great depths (more than 100 metres), but come into shallower water (20 metres or less) at night, in order to feed. They are dark coloured like basking sharks or the Greenland shark, and the divers and cameraman descended into a cage at 20 metres, above a fairly featureless sandy bottom. The sharks are quite sluggish, like their sevengill cousins, but can put on a burst of speed when it is required.
The final section of the program deals with sand tiger sharks (grey nurse sharks) at the North Carolina Aquarium. These sharks resemble the ragged tooth sharks on display at the Two Ocean Aquarium in Cape Town, and this may be no coincidence. Raggies were chosen for the aquarium here because of their placid natures and “sharky” appearance, which challenges one’s preconceptions of sharks when viewing them swimming calmly around their tank. The aquarists feed the sand tigers at night, in order to see whether they will eat at night (they will), and then the camera crew climb into the tank with lights on, and then with the lights off. The sharks’ behaviour was the same.
A sunken coastguard cutter serves as home to sand tiger sharks in the open ocean off North Carolina (what beautiful visibility!) and the team visits the wreck, which lies at about 30 metres’ depth, to see the sharks in the wild. Noticeably more twitchy than the sharks in the aquarium setting, the sharks come close (and closer at night) but turn on a dime and swim away very fast when they’ve come close enough. It is during a night dive on the wreck that the divers observe the sand tigers feeding.
During the preceding few sections the narrator goes a bit quiet and one can forget the stupid Shark Week tabloid tone that pervades so many of these shows. The final section of the program, unfortunately, brings back the sleaze with a vengeance, taking the crew to dive with FIFTY (can you IMAGINE! OMG!) lemon sharks, and attempting to hand feed these “bad tempered predators” that have been implicated in many “attacks on humans”. The eye rolling resumed when one of the dewy-eyed camera-toting token chicks whimpered “I didn’t know if they were going to tear me apart!” That evening, with the “water churning with teeth and fins”, the team attempts to hand feed the lemon sharks (and a tiger shark) once again.
The show concludes (mercifully) with the presenter commenting that it doesn’t seem that humans are on the menu, and that sharks are pretty good at reading the menu whether it’s day or night time.
Shark Bite Summer
This bit of fluff describes the “summer of the shark” in 2001, along the west coast of the USA. Replete with staged attack footage, seas awash with blood, and prurient narration, this is shark attack porn of the worst kind. I confess I couldn’t finish watching it, but suffice it to say that a large quantity of red corn syrup went into the making of this program. It is this kind of trash that unfortunately undoes any good that comes of showing sharks in their natural habitat. Alas.
You can get the DVD here.
