By the third night Shark Week gives you a mix of shows. This is when the shark attack shows usually start. The night started out light with Guy Fieri’s Feeding Frenzy and got heavy quickly with Laws of Jaws and Air Jaws: The Hunted.
Lets jump into the deep end:
Guy Fieri’s Feeding Frenzy
Guy Fieri is a chef best known for his shows on the Food Network. In this episode he and his son Hunter are doing a celebrity shark dive. He watches other people feed sharks in different places in the Bahamas. I wonder if sharks can taste the hair bleach? He interacts with the narrator more than he does with the sharks.
A show with Guy Fieri can’t go for long without you having to watch him eat something, so they abandon the sharks completely to go to a local restaurant and eat… I suppose it was better than him cooking and eating a shark.
The narrator giving you tidbits of shark trivia was the only saving grace for this episode. I admit I hate a little too much on Guy because he has my dream job, but this one really was a waste of time.
Laws of Jaws
Before the start of this episode, Discovery Channel displayed a disclaimer warning people to never try any of what they were about to see. These researchers were re-enacting five different shark attack scenarios to determine if the encounters were brought about by shark behavior or human behavior and to see if by changing the human behavior, maybe the outcome can be changed.
Liz Parkinson, Nick LeBeouf are shark experts and are joined by Mike Dornellous, and Andy Casagrande, shark cameramen. This show reminded me very much of the Bear Grylls episode with one glaring difference, these people were showing a healthy level of fear for their lives, whereas Bear Grylls was brazenly ignorant. These people put themselves in extremely dangerous situations. I know finding out behaviors to save yourself from being eaten and discovering an effective shark deterrent is kinda important but this was just foolish.
The encounters they had were so nerve wracking even though I know Discovery Channel would never televise an actual attack. The fact that these scientists risked their lives to test theories that may very possibly save many more lives is amazing. Hopefully their efforts pay off for everyone.
Air Jaws: The Hunted
I saw the title for this episode and audibly sighed expecting it to be yet another hour of Chris Fallows tricking great white sharks into using up their precious energy to breach the surface of the water to eat a fake seal again, just like last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that. Great white sharks are my favorite and I could watch shows about them all day long but not the same thing over and over. This one however, was not what I thought it would be. This episode was very hard for me to watch honestly. Something is hunting and killing the great white sharks of South Africa.
Alison Towner is a shark biologist and she teams up with Chris Fallows who is a shark expert, and Ingrid Visser who is an orca expert. In February of 2017, great white shark carcasses began washing up on the shores of South Africa in the areas where Fallows used to film the breaching great white sharks. After this, the sharks just disappear, even the satellite tags have completely stopped.
Two drooped dorsal fin orcas named Port and Starboard have been seen in the areas prior to each shark carcass washing up. Drooped dorsal fins are common in captive orcas, but in wild orcas it is a sign that something is wrong with the animal. The experts follow the path of these two orcas along the coast of South Africa and the death they leave in their wake is heartbreaking. Orcas in general are bullies to their prey but these two are mutilating only great whites just to eat their livers. Orcas vs. great whites is common enough but the sharks have never completely abandoned their home in South Africa before. After eight months the experts found some great whites in an area they had never been seen before but the orcas were already on their way. Fortunately other orcas have driven off the two serial killers from the waters of South Africa before they got to the new hiding spot. Since the killings began in 2017, only one great white shark has been seen in False bay where they used to breach the waters to hunt seals on a daily basis. Fallows and Parkinson are convincingly worried about their sharks through the entire episode. I said in my intro to Shark Week that sharks are the oceans’ greatest predator, make that second greatest.
Day three of Shark Week was a mix of humor and horror. I have said before the celebrity shark dives are not my bag but are necessary for attention. Knowing that not just humans are slaughtering sharks is not a good thing. Much was learned tonight but it ended on a low note for a shark lover like me. Day three is ended and I am going to snuggle with my Build A Bear great white shark exit buddy and wait to see what Shark Week does to us next.
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Sylvia Papineau is an Arcade resident and self-proclaimed Shark Week ‘finatic.’ Watch All WNY News all week for her take on Shark Week 2018 specials.
