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Shark Week: Inside 'Shark Trek,' 'Island of the Mega Shark,' 'Monster Mako'

Discovery’s 28th annual Shark Week begins Sunday, July 5 with three new specials: Shark Trek (8 p.m.), which has Dr. Greg Skomal investigating why the Florida coast is the new great white winter hotspot; Island of the Mega Shark (9 p.m.), in which Jeff Kurr, Andy Casagrande, and Dickie Chivell head to Mexico’s Guadalupe Island to film some of the largest great whites ever recorded and test out Kurr’s new “ghost cage”; and Monster Mako (10 p.m.), which finds two teams in the Gulf of Mexico trying to determine how fast the fastest shark species can swim and if it really breaches, like its great white cousin, to ambush prey. Here’s a closer look.

Related: Shark Week: Ranking The Titles of This Year’s 14 New Specials

Let’s start with Island of the Mega Shark, which, as you see in the clip above, culminates in Casagrande filming what turns out to be a massive, 20-foot pregnant female off Guadalupe. Fun fact: Females grow larger than males, and their skin is tougher so they can withstand the biting necessary to hold them together during mating. 

Evidence suggests that Guadalupe is a mating ground. The fact that males and females, who aren’t typically seen together, all circle the Plexiglas ghost cage when Chivelll enters it trying to lure larger, more cautious great whites up from the deep by looking like prey, is a good sign. Not good in the clip above: the door to the cage won’t stay closed in the water, and Chivell has to hold it shut as the sharks keep coming.

Great whites are also the subject of Shark Trek. Skomal tracks great whites he’s tagged off Cape Cod down to Florida. Without the same amount of seals and dead whales floating in the water to feed on, what’s drawing them there? As seen in the clip above, it could be that massive aggregations of black tip sharks are a food source.

Other memorable sequences include Skomal having to cut one dive without a cage short because of dangerous bull sharks, and Skomal standing in a small boat trying to tag a 16-foot great white so he can deploy the SharkCam, which would latch on to the tag’s signal, follow the shark, and perhaps show why it likes the Jacksonville area (is it the dolphins? right whale calfs?).

“When I’m in the moment, I’m poised and ready to go, and I felt OK at the time, but when that shark showed up, it was really just a shadow, and that was the eeriest look I’d had at a white shark in a long time,” Skomal tells Yahoo TV. “Even tagging off of Cape Cod, where we balance ourselves on the side of boats or up on vessel pulpits, you can see the shark much better than we did in Florida. When I’m laying in bed at night, I tend to reflect on what I’ve done over the course of the day, and I thought how frightening it would have been had I fallen into that soupy, coffee-colored water where I could barely make out the image of this shark, and that kinda spooks me.”

Along for that trip is 10-year-old shark advocate Sean Lesniak. “Sean is a great ball of energy, and he reminds me of perhaps, in many ways, a young Greg Skomal, who was untainted by the politics, the fundraising, and the mechanics — all the things that you accumulate in life that take the shine off what you do, to some degree. Sean is innocent and committed to what he loves. And I am too, still,” Skomal says with a laugh. “But the older you get, the more baggage you pick up in terms of, ‘OK, well, if I want to do this, I gotta do that, and that’s gotta happen, and we gotta do this.’ He just thinks, ‘I love sharks, and I want to save them,’ and that’s great. That innocence is welcoming, and his commitment and his passion and his raw enthusiasm is very attractive.”

In the end, Skomal didn’t get to deploy SharkCam (”Shark wins,” he says in the special. “Yep, shark wins.”) “Making this show is really remarkably similar to conducting the science in the sense that you typically have a budget, you have X amount of time to achieve it, and you have a lot of variables and a lot of factors that need to line up, and a lot of things that could go wrong,” he says. “I’ve spent a lot of time on the ocean over the last thirtysomething years failing miserably at a project, and it wasn’t necessarily being filmed. It was just that things didn’t line up. You’re studying an elusive animal in a big ocean, and you need good weather, you need all your equipment to work, and you need to draw an animal in that’s not really easy to find. My initial thoughts on this project was finding a white shark in Florida was going to be extremely challenging and really analogous to a needle in a haystack — in a moving haystack. I knew it would be difficult. But I think what the film shows is that while we don’t always achieve what we set out to do, we learn something along the way. I’m happy with what we achieved. We’ve learned from it, and we’ll try again.”

Related: Shark Week: Eli Roth On His After Show, Kissing a Shark, Prepping for ‘Meg’

The Monster Mako breach team did score the shot they were after — the first ever of an elusive mako propelling itself out of the water not to free itself from a fisherman’s line but to attack.

To put the feat in context, shark expert/filmmaker Joe Romeiro reminds us that great whites breach right off shore in South Africa, and it took filmmakers until Air Jaws to capture it. “It happens right off shore, and nobody ever saw it before. Now we’re gonna go 100-plus miles out into the ocean, it’s gonna be a lot more difficult to witness,” he tells Yahoo TV. “Especially when you’re not really sure exactly what their prey items are. … With mako sharks, 90 percent of their diet consists of what they individually choose as a predator. They’ll pick out a certain type of fish, and that’ll be 90 percent of their diet, and if that fish fell off the face of the planet, they wouldn’t be able to rebound because they don’t know how to hunt the other fish as well.”

Once they figured out what mako sharks in the Gulf of Mexico prefer, it was still a waiting game. “I remember the guys being there, like, ‘We never have to put this much time into white sharks.’ I think we were all expecting it, but we were all still very surprised at how long it took. We were all sitting on the deck filming in different directions trying to catch a breach. We would sit there for hours with a camera on our shoulders, and it would just be drilling us into the ground,” Romeiro says. He believes his colleague Devon Massyn had it the worst. “I think it beat up Devon the most because Devon had the heaviest camera, so watching him kneel on the deck and doing all these things just looked painful to me. It took a long time to get it. It happened so many times in front of us, where we would just turn at the wrong second and miss it. During my interview, one jumped behind me twice.”

Romeiro’s crew got a good look at the speed of a mako when they were towing bait to encourage a breach, but it was another team who was charged with catching and tagging a mako to get a reading of its top speed (bursts of 40 mph, in this case). They had to worry about a mako jumping into their boat as it tried to free itself from the lines. “Lines are super dangerous in the water, and this is a very, very strong shark,” Romeiro says. “We were approaching their boat to put me into it, and I’m like, ‘Guys, you’re gonna have to slow the boat down because I can’t keep up with you. I can’t catch up to the boat,’ and they’re like, ‘We’re not moving the boat. That’s the shark pulling us.’ And it turned out to be the largest mako they ever caught.”

Both teams had their challenges with the elusive mako, but in the end, they each succeeded. “That’s so rare in wildlife filmmaking where you can make a goal — and these goals are really far out there, these goals are like the unicorn of goals — and achieve it. When it happens, it’s one of those satisfying moments,” Romeiro says. “And there’s still so much more we could do and see and know about the mako,” he adds. 

Maybe for Shark Week 2016? Romeiro is certainly a fan. “I’ve been to Iowa and had men and little kids sit there and talk to me about great white sharks and know all these different things about them. How do they learn it? They watch Shark Week.”

Shark Week 2015 comes to a close on Sunday with the premiere of the special Shark Island (8 p.m. on Discovery). Like this year’s Return of the Great White Serial Killer, which explored the occurrence of attacks every two years at California’s Surf Beach since 2008, Shark Island investigates a deadly mystery: Why are bull sharks drawn to Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, producing 17 attacks in four years — seven of them fatal?

The danger is so high that swimming and surfing on most beaches is now illegal. As you see in the clip above, eight “Shark Watchers” will patrol the waters so that surfers can spend a couple of hours on their boards. That’s how strong the call of the ocean is to those who live there. As tensions mount and graffiti around the island calls for culling — particularly after the April 2015 death of promising surfer 13-year-old Elio Canestri, who was training with others without the Watchers — Dr. Craig O’Connell is trying to find a way for man and shark to coexist before it’s too late. He spoke to Yahoo TV about the situation in Reunion Island, and whether the shark repellent technology he’s developing is necessary in a place like North Carolina, the site of multiple shark bites this summer (presumably from bull sharks as well). 

Related: Shark Week: Sevengills Hunt in Packs, Great Whites Form Clans?

How long has this been a passion for you? It’s something that’s been my passion since I was about 10 years old. I watched Shark Week as a kid. People would call during an episode, and I’d tell my mom to tell them I was busy, ‘cause my eyes were glued to the TV. I can remember one particular episode where there was an image of a shark entangled with a net, and that shark soon perished. I remember at that particular time I said to myself, “That’s wrong. Why are people doing this to these animals?” From that very moment on, I wanted to dedicate my life to finding a solution to allow for people and sharks to peacefully coexist. That led to the development of a new technology that we can deploy along the coastline to simply deter sharks, but not kill sharks, so that surfers and swimmers can utilize areas and not have to worry about the threat of these animals swimming around.

That’s the Sharksafe Barrier you helped develop. How long have you been working on that? The research started about 10 years ago. I did some of the very preliminary work, where I wanted to see if one of the components of the barrier, the magnets, could in fact deter sharks. So I tested it on a wide range of species — bull sharks, tiger sharks, great whites, hammerheads — and it was very, very successful. Then about six years ago, I traveled to South Africa and teamed up with a local university and we came up with the Sharksafe system, and we’ve been testing it for over six years now and it’s been extraordinarily effective.

And it’s magnets linked together to look like dense kelp? Yes. One of my colleagues down in South Africa, Michael Rutzen, for several decades he’s been going spearfishing in the white shark capitol of the world, Gansbaai, and he’d spear fish, the white shark would come in for the fish, but he would simply bring the fish in to the really dense kelp areas and the sharks wouldn’t follow. So that’s when we kind of merged our ideas together and said, “Why don’t we just develop a very dense, artificial kelp forest, put magnets in it, and there you go. That’s the Sharksafe Barrier.’”

Related: Shark Week: ‘Shark Planet’ Highlights

Is it being used at Reunion Island? It’s being considered. We spoke to the local government officials, we made them aware of the technology — maybe in the future it’s something that they could implement. We are finishing up our final trials, as we speak, in South Africa, and these are looking at the exclusion capabilities of the barrier on great white sharks, and so far it’s been very, very promising. The sharks aren’t going through the barrier to get to the bait. So it is working.

We’ve engineered it in a way that it can withstand high-energy coastlines, like you see in South Africa. Because it’s cost effective, you can actually utilize it over a pretty large area. The inspiration for the barrier is to use it to replace the detrimental beach nets and drum lines that are used in South Africa and Australia to minimize shark populations. So if we were to use our system, we wouldn’t be killing the sharks like these drum lines and beach nets do, we’d simply be excluding them from a region.

Is the Sharksafe Barrier something that could be used in North Carolina? It’s something that could be used, but my take on the situation there is it’s very temporary. Right now, the conditions along the North Carolina coast are perfect for these sharks to be inshore. And also, you have a bunch of people who are utilizing water because it’s the start of the summer, so you have an increased probability of an encounter with these sharks. But these conditions aren’t always going to stay exactly the same, so eventually, this is gonna move on. I don’t necessarily think that there’s a continual year-long threat in North Carolina, so I don’t necessarily know if the Sharksafe Barrier is necessary for that region. I just think the best thing that people can do is to look at the conditions and say, “Well, all right, if there’s prey in the area, maybe it’s not the best time to go swimming, or maybe don’t swim at dawn or dusk when these sharks feed more frequently.”

Related: 'Air Jaws’ Makes Triumphant Return in Discovery’s August Shweekend

The conditions in North Carolina that have been cited are warmer water, a lack of rain to dilute the salt water, and people swimming near fishing piers. On Reunion Island, it’s increased development making the water murky with pollution and decreased fish population? Yeah. I think one major contributor to the situation there is how we’ve modified the environment. You’re gonna start seeing this in other places: If we modify the environment, if we fish out the sharks’ prey, if we continue to develop and pollute the waters, these sharks are gonna move to other locations, and unfortunately, they may have moved to an area where there’s more people utilizing the water. We’re not necessarily sure if those are the two main contributing factors, but they could very well be factors that are causing these attacks.

What’s your take on Reunion Island’s Shark Watchers? I think the Shark Watchers is a very beautiful system. I was actually disappointed that I never mentioned them during my interviews for the documentary because I met the people, they’re passionate. And for a lot of these people [on Reunion Island], surfing is their life. The fact that they can’t utilize the resource — they’re actually being fined, they come back in and the police write them a ticket. So these shark spotters are an excellent way to minimize the risk of these interactions with sharks. It gives these kids the ability to get back into the water. If they don’t have those Shark Watchers right now, these kids won’t be allowed in the water. Essentially what that means for these kids is that there’s something really deadly lurking underneath the waves, and it makes them fearful of the ocean. So they need to get in there and experience the ocean and understand that it is a beautiful place. There’s a lot of beautiful things there. So it kind of helps reenforce the beauty of the ocean for these kids. It’s a very important system so they can get in the water right now.

Related: Shark Week: Inside the First Trip to Cuba

Anything else you’d like to add? There’s one thing that I would like to say. I think it’s imperative that these governments think in terms of the long term. That they don’t have these short-sided, knee-jerk reactions where they have to go out and kill the sharks that they think are responsible for the attacks. We’ve seen it in Western Australia, they considered it in North Carolina. I think people need to recognize that the second we step into the ocean, we’re stepping into the sharks’ environment. The fact that the governments think they could simply fish these sharks out to make it more convenient for us is deeply saddening and disrespectful. I hope that people do take a step back and think in terms of the long term. It’s these short-term reactions that will have long-term negative consequences on the ocean.

Shark Week: Preview 'Super Predator' and 'Ninja Sharks'

If you’re the type of Shark Week fan who likes to go beyond the great whites, Wednesday’s Ninja Sharks (premiering July 8 at 10 p.m. on Discovery) is for you.

Related: Shark Week: Inside ‘Bride of Jaws,’ the Search for Joan of Shark

The hour focuses on six sharks that have developed adaptations to help them become effective predators: There’s the hammerhead, whose unique head shape allows for more of the receptors that give all sharks the ability to detect electric currents generated by living things; the mako, whose bullet shape and ultra hydrodynamic skin make it the fastest shark species in the ocean; the thresher shark, which uses its elongated sword-like tail as a 50-mph whip to stun and kill small fish swimming in bait balls for safety in numbers; the bull shark, which can change its body chemistry to swim in either salt or fresh water; and the oceanic whitetip, which has large paddle-like pectoral fins that let it conserve energy and coast through long migrations without food (before feeding in a frenzy when it spots some, like the men lost in the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis).

Our favorite “ninja shark,” however, is the one in the clip above — the salmon shark, a close relative of the great white. It’s developed a superheated core that can keep its body temperature at 60 degrees while it feeds on salmon in Alaskan waters that hover just above freezing. Not much is known about the salmon shark, because few people have gone there to study it. That’s what makes it so exciting — and eerie — when brave souls, including Shark Week favorite Chris Fallows, dive in upon seeing a dorsal fin in this beautiful, unexpected location.

Wednesday’s other new special does involve a great white. In Super Predator (premiering July 8 at 9 p.m.), wildlife filmmaker Dave Riggs continues his search for the animal that killed a 9-foot female white shark he tagged in 2003. The last readings on her tag reveal that the great white rapidly dove to a depth of 1,900 feet in the Bremer Canyon in Australia’s Southern Ocean — and that the temperature reading jumped from the surrounding water’s 46 degrees to 78 degrees in a matter of seconds. Experts studied the data: “They’d all come back with the same conclusion,” Riggs says in the special. “It looks like she was pursued, and she ended up in the belly of something.” But what? 

Related: Shark Week: Inside the First Trip to Cuba

We won’t spoil it for you, but we will say Riggs’s attempts to lure it out are some of Shark Week’s most entertaining sequences, whether it’s him deploying a homemade 15-foot replica of a giant squid or his “Flying Machine.” The latter is a vehicle that allows two professional divers to be mobile but protected while they’re investigating beneath the water’s surface. In the clip below, Riggs tests its buoyancy and propulsion system — as well as, it turns out, how it stands up against an attack from a persistent 15-foot great white.

Me wearing a Shark-Week tee about to fall off the railing.