'Cocaine Sharks': Shark Week special investigates what happens when illegal drugs and ocean predators mix

Move over, Cocaine Bear. It’s time for Cocaine Sharks!

One of the most-anticipated hours of Discovery’s 2023 Shark Week (kicking off July 23 and also streaming on Max) sends British marine biologist Tom "the Blowfish" Hird to the Florida Keys to investigate whether sharks may be in need of an intervention. It’s not as crazy as it sounds: Drug smugglers are known to drop cocaine bales overboard and out of planes when they run into trouble. Sharks decide whether an object is food by biting it. Local fishermen report seeing bales washed up on shore missing chunks.

What did Hird think when the idea for the special was pitched to him? “This is mad but also incredibly relevant,” he tells Yahoo Entertainment. “It’s not just you throw out a wet nappy and it makes its way to the sea; it’s everything we take into our bodies, from caffeine to birth control, antidepressants and illegal drugs. They go through us and through our wastewater systems that aren’t built to manage those kind of chemicals, and then they’re making their way down river. Once they get to the ocean, who knows what they could be affecting.” Or even how: Early in his career, Hird studied the different effects the same metal would have on various fish. As for the limited research involving cocaine, most of it has been done on tiny zebrafish, who stored cocaine in their eyes, didn’t exhibit symptoms until after it was removed and “managed to take a dose that was 1,000 times stronger than what would kill a human,” he says.

For Cocaine Sharks (July 26 at 10 p.m.), Hird joins forces with local environmental scientist Tracy Fanara to not only observe abnormal swimming behavior, but also to conduct experiments like testing whether lemon sharks show more interest in inflatable swans (which stand in for sleeping pelicans, a known prey item) or floating bales. They watch how lemons, nurse sharks, reef sharks and a hammerhead react when a bale — filled with dry fish powder to simulate the dopamine rush that a shark who has encountered a cocaine bale before may be anticipating — is cut open. Their grand finale is a Hird-estimated 50 bales of the “fish cocaine” raining down from a plane, which draws lemons, reefs, nurses and tiger sharks.

“Bit of a spectacle. We didn't need to drop them out of a plane,” Hird admits with a laugh, “but actually, there is science there: We found when they were hitting the water, they were making a much bigger slap than we thought. Those kind of noises are attractants. So you could be getting sharks brought into an area thinking, ‘Oh, there are wounded fish here,’ and actually it’s dissolving bales of cocaine. So they're almost getting hooked into it without even knowing.”

Hird originally planned to take blood or tissue samples from sharks, but “unforeseen circumstances let us down at the eleventh hour,” he says. So, toxicology reports will have to wait for a potential sequel (“Cocaine Sharks: The Second Nostril,” he jokes).

'I could see literally right down the entire mouth of the shark'

If you’re wondering how Shark Week 2023 tops that, just tune in for Belly of the Beast: Feeding Frenzy (July 23 at 8 p.m.), the 35th annual event’s opening special. In South Africa, large great whites have been spooked and displaced from the coastline by shark-killing orcas named Port and Starboard. To find those elusive giants, Austin Gallagher taps into his own research about bigger white sharks feeding on whale carcasses — and places himself inside the clear plastic stomach of a 22-foot juvenile humpback whale decoy. The goal is to both draw out an 18-foot-plus white shark and see up close from the belly dive pod how it strategically launches its attack and to then stand up in the decoy’s top entry hatch and spear a satellite tag onto a behemoth so that its location can be tracked.

Using controls inside the decoy, which is named EARL (Elasmobranch Aquatic Research Lure), Gallagher can release 200 pounds of chum from a refillable “meat locker.” In Struisbaai, EARL attracts multiple smaller great whites. The footage of him at the literal center of a feeding frenzy is dramatic, but just wait.

“The final sequence really plays out kind of like a movie,” Gallagher says. The team moves locations to Aliwal Shoal upon hearing a female shark measuring more than 18 feet has been spotted there. After Gallagher chums to no avail, free divers approach EARL to place a helmet on its head that Gallagher can use to release more than 50 gallons of blood. This mimics how a real whale carcass ruptures following a few days of gas building up in the sun. To everyone’s surprise, however, the massive white shark arrives early — while the divers are still in the water. She knocks into EARL and causes the helmet to malfunction, releasing the blood and forcing the divers to use EARL as a shield while she circles between them and the crew’s inflatable boats.

Once they’re back aboard, the amped-up shark finally attacks one of EARL’s pectoral fins. “At one point, the shark's behavior changed very quickly, and it started swimming different root patterns at me, at like a 45-degree angle, and it would investigate which side was weaker, trying to figure out where it wanted to do its full attack,” Gallagher says. “It finally did its full attack, and I was standing right there. It came up, ate the pec fin, and I could see literally right down the entire mouth of the shark. I probably blacked out. I actually was dry-heaving involuntarily because of all the adrenaline. If you had done an MRI with me after that, the fear center of my brain would have just been lighting up like a Christmas tree. It was the most raw experience I've ever had with sharks and probably the most memorable moment of my life.”

After that, the sequence does turn into a scene from Jaws: The shark grabs an anchor buoy that links the inflatable rafts, and EARL and pulls them through the water. Gallagher eventually gets the opportunity to tag her, which moves team leader Alison Towner to happy, cathartic tears. In the end, the shark was with the crew for about five hours that day. You’ve never heard so many “holy s***s” in a Shark Week special.

“Usually I'm trying to not swear on shows because it's not really my brand,” Gallagher says. “I always try to lead with the science, and you can still be excited without cursing. But with this interaction, we're just back to basics here. This is primal s***. There's nothing else you could do. I mean, I'm doing it right now!”

'There's a reason we don't tell Discovery everything'

Port and Starboard are also the catalyst for Alien Sharks: Strange New Worlds (July 24 at 10 p.m.), the latest installment of the popular Alien Sharks franchise. The orcas have been targeting South Africa’s broadnose sevengill sharks as well, which inspired wildlife biologist Forrest Galante to go in search of their hiding spot. You’ll see him question whether free diving at False Bay’s Seal Island — a location where sevengills, great whites and orcas are known to hunt prey — is the dumbest thing he’s ever done. His verdict? “Um, it was very stupid,” Galante says, having survived. “[Discovery] is going to get mad when they hear this, but there's a reason we don't tell Discovery everything we're doing before we do it. Because if you said, ‘We're going to go free dive at Seal Island,’ where literally every single other Shark Week show says, ‘Nobody should free dive here’ and they're in a giant cage. …”

In Galante’s defense, he knew Port and Seaboard had been in the area recently, which means the odds of encountering a great white or sevengill were extremely low. “It might not have been the smartest thing, but I didn't feel as nervous as some of the other even dumber things that we've done in the name of wildlife science and television in the past,” he says. Still, it’s a nerve-racking sequence — especially when a cameraman on the boat spots Port and Starboard en route in the distance.

What the special doesn’t show is that Galante and his team dove Seal Island twice. The first attempt, the visibility was so awful the footage was unusable. “We were diving in this murk, and you're just out over this drop-off with all these seals floating around, at this place where the only thing you can play back in your head is those [classic clips of] white sharks breaching, right?” he says. “And you're like, ‘Oh, God, I don't like this. I don't like this.’ So we ended up going back the next day when things had cleared up, and you see all that beautiful footage in the show. And that's when Port and Starboard came through. Thank goodness they didn't come through the day before in five-foot visibility, because that could have ended poorly.”

Galante didn’t swim with Port and Starboard, but he’s quick to note that orcas have never killed a human being in the wild and that he has swum with other orcas previously. “Never before in my life have I seen wild orcas and thought, ‘Hey, screw you, guys.’ Because typically, it's such a wonderful thing,” he says. “But these two brothers … I don't know that they're jerks, but they have absolutely annihilated the white shark and sevengill populations in that part of the world. It’s a weird thing to feel resentment for two animals that are doing what animals do. But orcas are so, so intelligent, they know exactly what they're doing. These guys are like the jerks in high school that are rolling around bullying everybody.”

The search for sevengills ends in success, thanks to an eerie dive in one of False Bay’s litter-filled harbors. While that experience was “magical,” Galante’s absolute favorite part of the special is something else the team manages to capture elsewhere, for what he believes is the first time on film: striped pyjama sharks mating. “It’s sort of a perfect storm of events that leads to it,” he explains. “We're diving, making a lot of noise, talking, blowing bubbles, which probably got the sharks excited and stimulated. They're pack hunters, so we caught the very tail end of them ripping up this crayfish, and now there's all this food in the water. Then the sharks are coming into me, nuzzling me. There’s one by my neck, another one under my arm, and I’m like this shark masseuse. Moments later, they start mating. It was amazing.”

What other wild moments will Shark Week 2023 give us? Here’s a quick look at a few other specials that sound prime for mayhem…

• ANYTHING SET IN NEW ZEALAND! Shark Week fans know the great whites there are particularly feisty, so we have high hopes for Great White Fight Club (July 24 at 8 p.m.), which finds Hird assisting zoologist Michelle Jewell while she collects what Discovery calls “groundbreaking evidence” that proves female white sharks rule the Kiwi waters. “I don't want to go into too much detail, because there's a particular moment that took us all by surprise,” Hird says. “But at one point, I was diving in a cage known as the Black Widow, which has made a Shark Week appearance before. However, I believe that inside it had been some kind of hobbit or maybe a dwarf from the Mines of Moria, because when I got into it, I was hunched over like Richard III.”

The iconic Air Jaws franchise makes its return to New Zealand in Air Jaws: Final Frontier (July 26 at 8 p.m.), with Andy Casagrande and Jeff Kurr searching for, as the network puts it, “the second-ever breaching great white in these waters to uncover history-making secrets.” And Riley Elliott and his wife, Amber Jones, team up for Jaws in the Shallows (July 27 at 8 p.m.), a personal quest to uncover why great whites are now terrorizing their country’s beaches.

• RISE OF THE MEGA MAKOS! Their speed and jagged teeth have always made makos a sight to behold, but when the sharks are double the size they normally are — that’s thrilling. Two new hours dive into the rise of super makos off the coast of Los Angeles, where they compete with great whites for seals and sea lions. Mako Mania: Battle for California (July 25 at 8 p.m.) has Craig O'Connell, Fo Zayed and Kendyl Berna going high tech to study the mega makos’ dominance. Meanwhile, Monster Mako: Fresh Blood (July 27 at 9 p.m.) combines some ingenuity — free diver Andre Musgrove’s acrylic diving bell known as the Shark Dome is back! — with some buoy fishing in order to nab tissue samples that could confirm these large makos’ diet. Gallagher leads the Shark Dome team topside while colleague Kesley Banks heads the crew that ultimately reels in a 12-foot mako, which makes some truly spectacular breaches. “The excitement that you see on all of our faces is exactly what the audience is going to feel,” says Gallagher.

• FAN FAVORITES SHOW NO FEAR! No one is more daring than shark wrangler Dickie Chivell, which makes us excited to see the lengths he and Matt Dicken go to in their quest to find a colossal great white named Dutchess, who vanished from Gansbaai, South Africa years ago, in Raiders of the Lost Shark (July 25 at 9 p.m.). Conservationist Paul de Gelder, a shark attack survivor, suits up for Florida Shark: Blood in the Water (July 26 at 9 p.m.) and conducts experiments that reveal why the state is the Shark Attack Capital of the World and what tactics could mitigate the risk to humans. He also ventures to Brazil to help marine biologist Danni Washington study tiger sharks, which are suspected of causing a spike in deadly attacks in South America since 1990 in Deadly Sharks of Paradise (July 28 at 9 p.m.). And Galante has, of course, proved he’s willing to take calculated risks, so we look forward to watching how he may push the envelope in Shark vs. Snake: Battle of the Bites (July 27 at 10 p.m.), which lets him explore his theory that venomous sea snakes are to blame for tiger sharks washing up dead on the beaches of Western Australia with no visible injuries.

• GREAT WHITES ON THE MOVE! It’s always fascinating when experts get the chance to study white sharks in a new territory. They never know how great whites may adapt their behavior and predatory tactics to thrive. In Tropic Jaws (July 28 at 8 p.m.), O'Connell and Madison Stewart head to Indonesia after a 16-foot white shark is spotted off Bali. Their mission: to find out why the great white has left its usual cold-water environment for warmer waters and what it could mean for local wildlife, residents and tourists.