Alas, one other 12 months of Shark Week motion is coming to an finish on Discovery after celebrating its thirty fifth anniversary in 2023 with Aquaman’s Jason Momoa as host. As standard, I tuned in to as a lot of the shark programming as potential over the seven days, and was even capable of converse with consultants together with Dr. Austin Gallagher, Forrest Gallante, and Tom “Blowfish” Hird throughout a Discovery press occasion. As a lifelong Shark Week fan, it was all I might have requested for… particularly since I used to be lastly capable of pose a query that I’ve had for fairly a while, and I received the reply I hoped for.
Dr. Austin Gallagher led the group on two standout specials of Shark Week 2023, together with the “Stomach of the Beast” manufacturing that started off the seven days of documentaries (and delivered a downright cinematic finale) in addition to “Monster Mako: Contemporary Blood” that made the argument for which species of shark is strongest. The particular that centered on mako sharks concerned Gallagher occurring a daring dive down into an underwater kelp forest, with visibility low and odds of encountering a shark excessive. The sequence jogged my memory of one thing I’ve questioned for a few years of watching Shark Week: how precisely are the divers having completely clear conversations with one another whereas underwater in dive gear?
Now, might I’ve Googled to seek out the reply to this query throughout a earlier Shark Week? Positive, however there’s nothing like getting a solution straight from the supply, and Dr. Austin Gallagher was completely satisfied to elucidate the kelp forest sequence and the way he remained in communication together with his fellow diver. He defined:
I used to be on that dive with Liv Dixon, who’s the marine biologist at my group Beneath the Waves, and we had been utilizing these underwater communication masks. We mainly put these masks over our head and there is a speaker in our ear, after which we are able to additionally talk to one another and to topside on the boat. So that you mainly push slightly button, and then you definitely speak to talk, after which you may hear one another.
The main target throughout Shark Week is in fact on the sharks, so the specials typically don’t spend a ton of time specializing in the gear of the divers when there are decoys and domes and cages to point out off. After all, these sorts of masks weren’t precisely accessible within the early days of the Discovery occasion, which I wasn’t even alive to observe 35 years in the past! Dr. Gallagher continued to elucidate the masks for communication:
It is a fairly good vary, a pair 100 ft underwater. It is a tremendous technique to do most of these scenes the place you could be in good communication, speaking about the place you are going. Clearly, it is a actually cool look to see the entire face of anyone underwater, and you can even educate the viewers as to what’s taking place.
Dr. Gallagher famous that he labored with fellow diver Liv Dixon for the kelp forest sequence in “Monster Mako,” who he additionally works with for the Beneath the Waves non-profit that promotes ocean well being, defending threatened species, and dealing in direction of local weather change options. Defending sharks and spreading consciousness in regards to the ocean is at all times a operating theme all through Shark Week’s seven days of aquatic motion, even when the specials themselves may be very totally different.
Although Forrest Galante and the “Alien Sharks” crew encountering the world’s most well-known shark-hunting orcas might hardly be extra totally different from Tom Hird’s “Cocaine Sharks” present that created particular shark cocaine, they’d the message of the significance of conservation in frequent. On the entire, Shark Week 2023 was a fairly enjoyable week of productions that leaves me able to pencil the 2024 occasion into my calendar as quickly as Discovery proclaims the dates.
If you happen to missed any of Shark Week and/or simply wish to try a number of the specials that I’ve talked about, you could find them streaming now with a Max subscription.
