Cannibalism to lost love: 5 fun facts we learned on Shark Week Tuesday night

Sure, sharks are dangerous and scary, but they're entertaining, too.

Steve Root
Updated ·3 min read
It's Shark Week on Discovery.
(Photo: Discovery)
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Discovery's Jason Momoa-hosted Shark Week continued its cavalcade of carnage as the network devotes a week's worth of programming to all things toothy. Here's what we learned from Tuesday night's shows.

1. Shark researchers yell. A lot. Whether that surface-to-diver dialogue is real or added in post-production is up for debate, but one thing is certain: Every last one of them is either highly excitable, hearing impaired or both. So if you don’t like screaming, you won’t like Shark Week.

There's a whole lotta radio yelling going on in Shark Week programs.
There's a whole lotta radio yelling going on in Shark Week programs. (Photo: Discovery)

2. According to Mako Mania: Battle for California, Mako sharks are among the fastest, most aggressive in the sea and don't hesitate to eat other sharks. Lucky for them, because they’re not going to win “most attractive” with those incredibly bad teeth, some of the gnarliest in the animal kingdom. Invisalign, we smell a cross-promotional opportunity here.

Makos are quick and agile but not all that cute.
Makos are quick and agile but not all that cute. (Photo: Discovery)

3. When you’re a shark, it’s sometimes better to be small and nimble than big and badass. That’s the conclusion of Jaws vs. the Meg researchers who try to work out how the great white evolutionarily outmaneuvered its gargantuan nemesis, the long-extinct megalodon. Answer: speed, baby, and agility. Using something called science, they determined GWs can do a 180-degree change of direction in 3.7 seconds, busting a move they estimated would take the massive megalodon as long as 30 seconds to perform. And that sets them up for a David vs. Goliath-style kill. The takeaway? Why be a Mack truck when you can be a Maserati?

Great whites ultimately outmatched the much larger and now extinct megalodon with speed and agility.
Great whites ultimately outmatched the much larger and now-extinct megalodon with speed and agility. (Photo: Discovery)

4. The stars of Monster Hammerheads: Killer Instinct are way more brave — or crazy — than the rest of us. Who else would scuba dive in an inky-black, 10,000-foot-deep nighttime ocean hoping to encounter a creature that has receptors in its hammer-shaped head that can detect electrical currents in things like human heartbeats? In other words, the divers can’t see the sharks, but the sharks can find the divers. And that’s just, well, nuts.

Hammerhead sharks can sense electrical pulses like human heartbeats.
Hammerhead sharks can sense electrical pulses like human heartbeats. (Photo: Discovery)

5. You never forget your first love, especially when it's a great white, and in Raiders of the Lost Shark, Australian diver Dickie Chivell pines for a long-lost beast he's dubbed Duchess who he was smitten by but hasn’t seen in ages. Are they eventually reunited? What, like we’d tell you if Joaquin Phoenix ends up together with his computer’s operating system in Her or Ryan Gosling stays with his blow-up doll in Lars and the Real Girl. This is Shark Week, people, and we're not going to just spoon-feed you the chum.

Duchess, one diver's muse, in 'Raiders of the Lost Shark'
Duchess, one diver's muse, in Raiders of the Lost Shark. (Photo: Discovery)

Shark Week airs this week on Discovery.