IT’S TIME to get serious about sharks.
And sorry, fin fans, that doesn’t mean watching “Sharknado 3,” which will be arriving soon enough — July 22 on Syfy to be precise.
It doesn’t mean rewatching “Jaws,” which in its 40th anniversary summer seems to be showing everywhere except maybe the Home Shopping Network.
No, this is shark week for two networks that insist they look at sharks the way scientists see them — not as monolithic evil eating machines that prowl beachfront property looking for human hors d’oeuvres, but as apex predators who have evolved over millions of years as a critical part of the oceanic ecosystem.
That’s the mission statement both for the Discovery Channel, whose 28th annual “Shark Week” kicks off Sunday night at 8 with “Shark Trek,” tracking the migration of sharks from Massachusetts to Florida, and for Nat Geo Wild, whose “SharkFest” week also launches Sunday at 8 with “Shark Alley,” which tracks the world’s largest shark migration off a shore of Africa.
If that all sounds ominously academic, these networks are not delusional. They know viewers don’t want a marine biology lecture series, which is why even the most straightforward shows have titles like “Bride of Jaws” and “Return of the Great White Serial Killer,” “Alien Sharks” and “Hawaiian Terror.”
“We always want to be entertaining,” says Howard Swartz, vice president of documentaries and specials at Discovery. “We want to bring people into the tent. And once we get them there, we hope we can also educate them on the importance of sharks.”
There’s an extent, of course, to which the mere word “shark” sells itself, and not always for scientifically informed reasons.
“‘Jaws’ cast a long, long shadow,” says George Burgess, the lead expert for Nat Geo Wild’s “United Sharks of America.”
“There are people of that generation who haven’t stepped in the water since,” says Burgess, who is director of the International Shark Attack File, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, and coordinator of museum operations at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
That default response of pure fear generates viewers for TV networks. It creates challenges for a scientist like Burgess, who notes that contrary to the shark’s reputation, it’s not a species that racks up a high human body count.
“Last year exactly three people were killed by sharks in the entire world,” he notes. “There are many things that are more likely to kill you than sharks.”
The others just don’t look like sharks, or have the shark’s image as a silent stealth killer.
That’s why a handful of recent shark attacks in North Carolina made national headlines, and why they might well increase shark-week viewership.
“It probably will make more people watch,” allows Swartz, and he says that’s a good thing, because if they really watch, they won’t come away thinking sharks just troll for swimmers.
“What happened in North Carolina is the natural result of more people using the water for recreation,” says Burgess. “North Carolina will see more of these incidents as the human population grows.
“Shark attacks are always big news in areas where they haven’t been common before. If these attacks had occurred in Florida, where we get 15-20 bites a year, it wouldn’t have gotten that much attention.”
Like many scientists, Burgess finds mainstream media portrayal of sharks can be problematic.
“I don’t mean something like ‘Sharknado’,” he says. “Only a moron wouldn’t understand that’s a farce. I’m more concerned about distortions on programs that purport to be providing information.
“I know television has to provide entertainment, but those distortions hurt the effort to educate people.”
For the record, Burgess says he did watch some of the first “Sharknado,” so he could be conversant with it. He didn’t, he confesses, make it all the way through.
Back to serious science, Swartz and Burgess both say that while research on sharks has increased in recent years, we’re just beginning to understand their lives and behavior.
“When you send scientists out to do a documentary on sharks,” says Swartz, “they don’t always know what the sharks are doing.
“There’s still so much we don’t know. You hear people say that we’ve only explored something like 5% of the oceans around the world, so we’re learning more all the time as we get the tools that enable us to do that exploration.
“The good news is that the technology is improving rapidly. Just in the last 10 years we’ve found 200 new shark species that we didn’t know existed.”
One big problem, Burgess says, is that most of the finite resources available for ocean research “have gone for the study of commercial species, which sharks generally are not.”
Sharks are, however, victims of human taste.
“A few years ago,” Burgess recalls, “Hawaiian Monk Seals, which are endangered, were getting chomped by sharks. So the immediate response was that we had to killing sharks. Monk Seals will win that showdown every time, because they have fur and big brown eyes.”
That is to say, they look cuddly. Sharks look menacing.
Of course, that’s also why there are weeks of shark programming, and Burgess says he understands.
“National Geographic attempts to produce documentaries that are accurate,” says Burgess. “I know they also must provide enough entertainment to make people watch. It’s capitalism.”
Ideally, both Swartz and Burgess say, the collective impact from a week of shark programming is that viewers will better understand what scientists know about sharks and appreciate what needs to be done to ensure their continued health and survival.
“I think there’s a growing understanding among nations what sort of management techniques we need,” says Burgess. “The problem, more for other countries than for the U.S., is enforcement. But there are some signs of progress.”
“Some of these species have been around for millions of years in exactly the form we see them today,” says Swartz. “That’s a pretty amazing story all by itself.”
