Shark Week Preview: A Dangerous Dive at ‘Tiger Beach’ and Uncharted Territories in ‘Isle of Jaws’
Shark Week begins Sunday night on Discovery, and as you can see from the sneak peek above from the first of three specials premiering that night, even in its 29th year, it’s as exciting as ever.
In Tiger Beach (8 p.m.), we head to a shallow area off the Bahamas with Neil Hammerschlag, PhD, who’s trying to find out where tiger sharks mate, where the pregnant females gestate, and where they give birth so the areas can be protected. In the clip above, a routine dive to clean acoustic receivers that help track tagged sharks takes a dramatic turn when he, his cameraman, and his safety diver end up outnumbered by bold, inquisitive tigers.
“The thing about tiger sharks is they’re not really scared of you, and they’re very curious. They come in very close and very deliberately investigate you. That’s not only thrilling, but it’s just inspiring, because you have here this big animal that if it wanted to hurt you, it could, but it’s actually quite tolerant of you,” Hammerschlag tells Yahoo TV. “In that specific situation, I wasn’t comfortable. When you have five or more sharks coming in very close at the point where you have to push them away, they’re coming from all angles, it got a little too intense. So it was just safer to exit the water at that point.”
Related: See the Full ‘Shark Week’ Schedule
One of the things that may surprise viewers is that when Hammerschlag’s team does an ultrasound on a pregnant tiger, she’s carrying at least 20 pups. “It varies a lot across species — in fact, some sharks do have a lot of pups and some don’t. But in the case of tiger sharks, they can actually have over 50 pups. They can have just a few, 10 to 50, or more,” he says.
What’s important to know is that while that sounds like a lot, it’s not. “Tiger sharks, like many other sharks, reach sexual maturity relatively late in life, when they’re about teenagers, and they also don’t reproduce every single year. That’s what makes sharks, including tiger sharks, vulnerable to exploitation, like overfishing, because they just can’t reproduce quick enough to sustain high levels of fishing intensity because it’s actually slow reproduction,” he says. “Whereas other fishes, as in snappers and groupers, might be sexually mature in a year — and have millions of eggs, and millions of sperm, and millions of larvae every time they go out and reproduce — for a tiger shark, it’s nine or 10 years [until they’re sexually mature], and sometimes they get caught before they even reproduce. When they reproduce, they have a gestation of over a year — maybe a year and a half. Also, not a lot of those [pups] make it through the first years of life.”
That’s why Hammerschlag wants to protect both the nursery grounds and the area where the adults mate and go to gestate. “It’s important to protect the small ones, the babies and juveniles that are in critical habitats where they need to grow up to be adults, but you also need to protect the adults, the ones that are reproducing and sustaining the population,” he says.
Conservation is also the end game of Isle of Jaws (10 p.m.). After Shark Week favorite Andy Casagrande got a call from a friend saying he hadn’t seen a great white for weeks at the Neptunes, islands that are home to Australia’s largest colony of fur seals, Casagrande went to investigate. “Every once in a while, at great white shark hot spots, all the sharks will just vanish — completely disappear at the height of the hunting season when they’re most likely to be there in action. We’ve seen it at the Neptunes previously, when orca pods come through and they kill a great white shark, often the sharks will leave the area. We’re not sure how they’re communicating or if it’s the scent of the dead shark or some pheromone, but bizarrely, they all just leave,” Casagrande says.
A fisherman who likes to work in remote locations had a tip: He was accidentally catching baby white sharks in a cluster of 100 islands off western Australia. "Initially, we went looking for this pupping ground, but because it was such rough conditions and so far out in the middle of nowhere, we weren’t able to really get there. The skipper of our boat was very nervous because these waters were literally uncharted, which is something I’ve never encountered. There were islands and different rocks out there that weren’t on the map. The captain was like, ‘I can’t take this $5 million vessel into uncharted territory and potentially run aground and sink the ship.’ We said, ‘Yeah, well, we’re definitely concerned about that too,’” Casagrande says.
The fisherman had a second suggestion, an island that was a bit closer, where he’d been seeing large great whites. “He brought us to a new location where, sure enough, within the first week we had identified over a dozen different sharks, and it was an area that I had never heard of and many people had never been,” Casagrande says. “This new hot spot has amazing visibility, amazing sharks. They were very inquisitive, as if they hadn’t encountered many humans before. It was a huge honor to be part of a team that put this new hot spot on the map and help, obviously, get legislation passed to protect the area, because white sharks are a protected species in Australia.”
What’s also noteworthy about that spot: The team was only seeing male great whites. “It seems like sexual segregation in sharks is actually quite common, where the males seem to prefer this time of year in this location and the females seem to prefer that location at a different time of year. At certain times of year, they coincide and collide with each other, so to speak, to mate and to socialize,” Casagrande says. “Out at [Mexico’s] Guadalupe Island, we see a similar thing, where, at the beginning of the season, in July and August and even into September, it’s almost all male white sharks. It’s not until later in the season, like in October, when the big females start to arrive. I kept saying, ‘Maybe we’re here at a certain time of year, like in Mexico, where it’s predominately males. I bet if we come back here in a month, or two months’ time, we will see some big females and see what’s going on. Fingers crossed, if our show rates well, Discovery does seem to be interested in us going back to find big females and potentially attempt another shot at getting to the pupping ground, now that we know what we’re up against.”
This all bodes well for Shark Week 2017 and beyond. ”White sharks are one of the most charismatic filmed predators and one of the most famous wildlife creatures out there, and so you figure as humans we’d kind of know all their spots and locations at this point,” Casagrande says. “But it just goes to show it’s a massive planet out there, and there are uncharted territories and uncharted waters where big predators and these apex white sharks still exist without us even knowing it, which is pretty cool.”
Tiger Beach premieres June 26 at 8 p.m., followed by Return of Monster Mako at 9 p.m., and Isle of Jaws at 10 p.m., on Discovery.
