Dive deep into Shark Week 2024 with plenty of new specials that will get your heart racing! Marine biologist Tom “The Blowfish” Hird and wildlife biologist Forrest Galante teased their underwater adventures to PopCulture.com ahead of the Sunday, July 7 kick-off of Discovery’s annual week-long celebration of some of the world’s greatest predators.
Galante found himself searching for the “ghost of the sea” on Alien Sharks: Ghosts of Japan, which premieres Wednesday, July 10. Diving deep into the waters of Japan’s diverse waters, the explorer and biologist teamed up with deep-sea marine scientist Christina de Silva and deep-water surveyors to track down and study the critically endangered Japanese Angel Shark – as well as 17 different and unique species they found along their journey.
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“The Japanese Angel Shark is known as the Yokai in Japan, which means ‘ghost of the sea,’” Galante told PopCulture. “The reason being, it can appear and disappear. It can bury itself into the sand. It has perfect camouflage. It just checks all the boxes for being elusive and difficult to find. In addition to that, because it’s a sit-and-wait predator, it has a relatively small distribution globally, [so] it’s pretty easy to knock them out completely for fishermen.”
With the Angel Shark “driven to the point of the edge of existence,” finding and tagging one in order to create a protected area for the species was a “big mission,” one that took six years to put together in the freezing and stormy waters off Japan. “It was always going to be challenging, and I love doing that,” Galante said. “I love the challenge of looking for something that’s really rare, that’s hard to find that other people have failed at, and really just giving so much attention and focus on a species and then being able to showcase all of the unique other creatures along the way like we did in Alien Sharks.“
6000 Lb. Shark on Shark Week 2024
Meanwhile, in 6000 Lb. Shark, premiering Tuesday, July 9, Hird teams up with fellow marine biologist Leigh de Necker on a search for the fattest great white sharks off the coast of New Zealand in an attempt to obtain their poop and study what they are eating. Hird told PopCulture that finding a way to accurately weigh a great white shark ended up being the biggest challenge along the way.
“That is the million-dollar question. Forget the 6,000-pound question. That’s the million-dollar one,” he explained. “That was always going to be the trickiest thing because there’s very little equipment in the whole world … that actually has the ability to weigh a live great white, and even then, you can’t weigh it in the water.”
“So we were going for something that my old chemistry teacher used to refer to as ‘weighing the cat,’” Hird continued. “If you try and put a cat on a kitchen scale, the cat will say, ‘No chance, Sunshine,’ scratch your face off and run away. But if you and the cat climb on the kitchen scale and then you let go of the cat, the difference is the weight of the cat. So we were coming at it from that point of view.”
The team got creative using everything from “fairly basic technology” like pipes with measurements to an “incredible 3-D camera” to track down the truth” and create a beginning framework for researchers who don’t have access to a massive vessel that can lift up sharks and weigh them. “It was tricky, but it was fun,” he told PopCulture, adding that the whole investigation is “a really key part of a bigger understanding of the basics of shark biology, and hopefully can be applied across the whole realm, from the big to the small.”
Shark Week 2024 kicks off on Discovery Sunday, July 7 at 8 p.m. ET. 6000 Lb. Shark premieres Tuesday, July 9 at 9 p.m. ET, and Alien Sharks: Ghosts of Japan premieres Wednesday, July 10 at 10 p.m. ET. Check out the full Shark Week schedule here.
