chomp chomp chomp.

...i love shark week

07.19.05

I love Shark Week.

And yes, I know I just said that.

And I know that I have been quoted in the past as saying that I was disappointed by Shark Week because all they talked about was sharks. Not shark attacks, or anything super cool. Just, "This is a Great White shark. It lives in these places. It eats these things. It sometimes bites people. This is a Whale shark. It lives in these places. It eats plankton, and is harmless to people. Shark data, shark data, shark data ad nauseum."

The "Summer of the Shark," in 2001, was a time of great literary achievement in the area of entertaining Kristen with morbid accounts of sharks picking people off, or people narrowly escaping their demise, shark anecdotes, shark information, and the like.

But now, Shark Week seems to largely revolve around human interactions with sharks. Note the show I am watching now, Shark Attack: Predator in the Panhandle.

And the non-human interaction shows are super cool, like Air Jaws, the show about great whites that predate the "Ring of Death" around Seal Island, a couple of miles off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. Because of the depth of the water around the island in this ring, and the clarity of the water above from below, these sharks are able to zoom up from the bottom of the ocean, building momentum, and then strike the seal from below with such force, that it is flung up into the air, where the great white completely breaches the water, snatches the seal out of the air, and then disappears beneath the waves. We're talking 1.5-ton fish hurling themselves up out of the water, nose in the air, tail a foot above the water, before turning and diving back down in to the water, nose first. It's like freaking dolphins.

And I was watching American Shark, which travels around the coast of the U.S., discussing shark life in all environments possible, from the deepest ocean depths, to popular beaches. It also shares why some species deserve fear, and reveals others that are rare, or just rarely seen.

I also learned that blue sharks have been observed eating krill, which is something whales do.

I seriously learned about a few kinds of sharks that I'd never even heard of before, much less seen. Salmon sharks? Megamouth sharks? Greenland sharks aka sleeper sharks? New to me!

I had not only never heard of Greenland sharks, but I surprised to learn that they are nearly blind because they have parasites called copepods that attach to their eyeballs and obscure the surface of the retina. They copepods also dangle unattractively from the eyeballs, making the sharks look much less sexy.

People always assume that I hate sharks, but they are wrong.

I don't hate sharks, because they are doing what they were built to do, millions of years ago. They can't help it if squishy, moderately tasty, and easily caught potential food sources are roaming around in their territory, getting all up in their spaces.

They aren't fucking with us, we're fucking with them. And we're invading their territory in larger masses, in places we've never hung out before. Of course we get nibbled.

For the most part, I have a healthy respect for them. And while I am equal parts fascinated and horrified by their existence, I can't help but admire them for being efficient enough to stick around for millions of years, mostly unchanged.

There is a beach in the Venice, Florida, where an insane amount of shark teeth wash up -- most of them prehistoric. Apparently, in a ten year period, one average healthy Tiger shark can shed 24,000 teeth. Multiply that by a bunch of sharks over millions of years, and your're talking lots of fucking teeth to spare.

I guess that just scares the fuck out of me, like most prehistoric yet-still-living things do.

Sharks are okay, I just don't want to be in any sort of proximity to them, unless there is a viewing window and a tank involved.

I was actually happy to hear that the juvenile female Great White that the Monterrey Bay Aquarium had on display was finally released back into the wild.

Over the nearly-200 days they had her, they did a pretty good job taking care of her. They fed her in a way that mimicked how she would get food in the wild, so that her hunting instincts wouldn't dull. And she lived in a million-gallon tank, but a tank can't replicate the open sea.

She started attacking her smaller tank mates, because that's what large predators do, biting and killing two soupfin sharks, and stalking other breeds of sharks in the tank with her. She also regularly kept bashing her nose against a certain section of the tank, apparently attracted to almost infintessimal amounts of electromagnetic activity in the area, causing the end of her snout to be continuously raw and abraded, exacerbating a wound that she sustained while being caught.

So, they let her go after fitting her with tracking devices, and recently collected data about her life post-aquarium.

My new favorite shark factoid, courtesy of Shark Week: Apparently, adolescent bull sharks hang around in estuaries and similar places to avoid being gobbled by larger sharks. While they are there, living and growing until they are big enough to fend for themselves in deeper and wider waters, they feed on fish, smaller sharks, turtles, and human refuse.

That's right, they eat POO.

People poo, at that.

I can't adequately explain why that tickles me so.

It just does.