Shark Week!!!

During the past year I have come to have a somewhat disparaging view of both the Discovery and History channel. Their names for me have long been a strong ethos appeal, and I have, perhaps foolishly, never really questioned their credibility.

No longer. This year, I have watched some of their shows that left me feeling they are only pandering to our need for the sensational and have a greater fidelity to ratings than to accuracy. Coupled with intriguing accounts of the final days of WWII or ancient Egyptian burial rituals are shows detailing the history (and possible existence? they not-so-subtly imply) of the Loch Ness monster, shows describing UFO sightings, and shows exploring the possibility of Michael Jackson being a reincarnated Jesus (okay, that one was made up).

However, this is redemption week, at least for the Discovery Channel. It's Shark Week. I have only watched a couple of hours, but so far it has been fascinating. I watched a man swim with sharks in the ocean and test them by caressing them as they swim by. He states that he is looking for their personality type, based on their reaction. In particular, he is looking for a "player," a shark that are curious and want to interact with him. He was swimming with two of them and touched them and sort of played with them almost like they were dolphins. Then, the two sharks fled as a larger great white approached, who was more aggressive. The swimmer then had to display signs of aggression in order keep the shark from attacking. The end result: great television.

He found that close to the snout sharks have these sensors that sharks respond to greatly when touched. One shark even went into tonic immobility, which is a coma-like trance, that sharks often go into when turned upside down. It is the strangest thing; they can stay in this trance for about 15 minutes, and scientists often insert trackers into their skin (thus cutting them open), and the sharks don't respond at all. It is still unclear why sharks do this, but scientists on the show posited that it could be for females a way to ensure that her eggs get fertilized due to the limited movement. Still, this doesn't completely explain the mystery, since male sharks also experience tonic immobility, though often to a lesser degree.

Another delightful tidbit! Hammerhead sharks: are their bizarrely shaped heads a freak mistake of nature, or a masterpiece of evolution? It turns out that they are particularly well-formed for attacking their prey, which hides beneath the surface of the sand. Each end of the head has an eye and a nostril, which allows the hammerhead to triangulate the source of its prey. Moreover, it has these pores that ooze out a conductive material that allows the shark to sense the bioelectricity of its buried prey, which is carried beyond its body by the conductive salt water. That, is really freaking cool. Bioelectricity sensors! It's even possible that these sensors are what give sharks the navigation abilities to make their transocean yearly migrations.

One of the most dangerous sharks for humans is the Bull shark. A reason for this is this shark's ability to pass freely from salt to fresh waters. It can thrive in both, so it can pass from the ocean waters to swim inland, into waters that look benign and attrack human swimmers.

These are just a few examples of how interesting sharks are. But seriously, the main reason I'm interested in them is because they are clearly the baller-est animals on earth. Great Whites breaching off the coast of South Africa and tearing into a minuscule-seeming seal offers probably the best evidence that these are the greatest predators on earth. Perhaps you are thinking that this is yet another instance of the Discovery Channel's addiction to spectacle. But, oh! What a spectacle it is!