[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Lulu.

LATIF NASSER: Latif.

LULU: Radiolab.

LATIF: Day five of our week of sharks.

LULU: Back with our lead reporter/lifeguard Rachael Cusick.

RACHAEL CUSICK: Hello, hello!

LULU: Wait, Rach, is this, like, our—this is our end of week of shark?

RACHAEL: This is the end of the week of shark. The final day.

LATIF: Yeah.

RACHAEL: The final business day. [laughs]

LATIF: Final business day of shark.

RACHAEL: You might have some sharks in your weekend, but we won't be responsible for them.

LATIF: Right. Right.

RACHAEL: So today I want to end the week by circling back to the very beginning, which is to say baby sharks.

LATIF: You can't even say the word without a ...

LULU: Without a doo-doo-doo.

RACHAEL: Yeah, I know. I wanted to know, like, you two both have little humans. Do you hate that song? Do you, like, listen to it daily? What's—what's your relationship to that song?

LATIF: When did the song come out?

RACHAEL: 2015, the Korean one came out. The—yeah.

LATIF: Okay. So we had kids after that. And by that point I knew that this was sort of weapons-grade song, so we kept it out of the house.

LULU: That's smart.

RACHAEL: Wow. It's like a zombie apocalypse. You're like, "Don't open the doors!"

LATIF: That's right. That's right.

RACHAEL: "Baby sharks coming!"

LATIF: We'd seen other people go through it. And we're like, "It's not gonna happen here."

RACHAEL: I don't have children but, you know, it, like, seeps into you, just being in the world.

LULU: It does. It swept the world.

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: It's everywhere.

RACHAEL: Yeah, so everyone has the same feeling about it. But then I was, like, "Wait, what are baby sharks like? Like, what—how do baby sharks get born?"

LATIF: How do baby sharks get born?

RACHAEL: Yeah. Like, what—do you have an idea of, like, what shark birth looks like? [laughs]

LATIF: I mean ...

LULU: Man, I don't know. Well, like, they are really fishy. Like, you think they do have eggs. But, like, I want them to have labor.

RACHAEL: Yeah, so I found someone to answer this question for me.

CLAUDIA GEIB: I've always been, like, an ocean nerd. But when I was young ...

RACHAEL: Science reporter, Claudia Geib, who, like most of the people we've had on this week, is a bit of a shark fangirl.

CLAUDIA GEIB: So by the time I got to this story I was definitely fully a crazy shark lady.

RACHAEL: I actually ran into her work because of an amazing article she wrote about baby sharks, and she kind of just introduced me to the very wacky world of shark reproduction. And I want to share it with you because it's just so fun.

LATIF: Okay.

LULU: Okay.

RACHAEL: So the first category of shark birth is ...

CLAUDIA GEIB: Let me just make sure I get the term correct. Gotta look back. Yes, okay. So we have "viviparous."

LULU: Ooh! [laughs]

RACHAEL: Yeah, viviparous.

LULU: Like, in vivo?

RACHAEL: Yeah, exactly.

CLAUDIA GEIB: Viviparous sharks give birth to live young just like humans or like other mammals.

RACHAEL: Just like you and me and dolphins. The embryo develops in the mother's womb.

CLAUDIA GEIB: They have a womb. There's a placenta.

RACHAEL: Some of them even make this sort of milk.

CLAUDIA GEIB: Essentially, like, secrete a type of milk into the womb.

RACHAEL: Like a little milk bath for baby sharks?

CLAUDIA GEIB: Yeah.

RACHAEL: Whoa!

CLAUDIA GEIB: They're in a little milk bath.

LULU: So they're just like fully pregnant?

RACHAEL: Fully.

LULU: And ...

RACHAEL: They come out like little baby versions of the larger shark.

LULU: Like, how big?

RACHAEL: It depends on the shark. So white sharks come out, like, three or four feet long.

LATIF: Whoa!

LULU: That's huge!

LATIF: That is enormous.

RACHAEL: But I mean, there's other sharks that come out, like, the size of your pointer finger.

LATIF: Cute!

RACHAEL: And, like, God bless the hammerhead shark mothers.

LATIF: Oh, that's cruel!

LULU: That would be so hard to make it work!

RACHAEL: [laughs] Yeah, so that—so that's the first category.

LULU: Okay.

RACHAEL: And then moving onto category two, which is ...

CLAUDIA GEIB: Ovoviviparous.

RACHAEL: Ovoviviparity.

LATIF: Okay.

RACHAEL: So it's like a live birth, but also eggs.

LATIF: Live birth but also eggs?

LULU: Yeah, what does that mean?

RACHAEL: So the embryo actually forms inside of an egg case.

CLAUDIA GEIB: But that egg case hatches still inside mom. And then the baby comes out.

RACHAEL: So it kind of is combining the strengths of a live birth, where you're protecting the young inside you, but it happens a lot quicker, and the sharks can make a bunch more eggs. There's one whale shark that was found, and it had 300 whale sharks inside it.

LULU: [gasps]

LATIF: Wow!

RACHAEL: And then there's sharks that can fertilize sperm from multiple fathers. So they kind of place bets on different sharks' baby daddies.

LULU: Okay.

RACHAEL: So they're just kind of like, taking it all in. They're, like, "We'll consider your offer," and then they just—like, just dole it out.

LULU: That's a new take on "take it all in." [laughs]

RACHAEL: But I think one of the nuts-est of all nuts shark reproduction stories is the sand tiger shark.

LATIF: Okay.

LULU: Okay.

RACHAEL: They create a bunch of eggs. And ...

CLAUDIA GEIB: The process that this shark has developed to get big and strong in the womb is to eat its brothers and sisters.

LATIF: What?

RACHAEL: It's like the coliseum for baby sharks.

CLAUDIA GEIB: It is a gladiatorial match in mom's womb.

LULU: Inside the shark?

RACHAEL: Inside the shark. So you'll see scientific papers where there's, like, a uterus that's been sliced open, and there's just, like, one shark and then a bunch of egg—empty egg cases. And it's like, "I ate those."

LATIF: Oh!

RACHAEL: Okay, so that's the ovoviviparity. And then the final category ...

CLAUDIA GEIB: Oviparous.

RACHAEL: ... are just the plain old egg-laying sharks. So the mom puts an embryo inside this sort of egg case thing. And then she just releases all of those eggs into the ocean.

CLAUDIA GEIB: It's feeding on a yolk sac just like a chicken. And it has everything it needs inside this little egg case.

RACHAEL: So the mom will only do, like, one or two of these at a time. And they look like these little envelopes. You can sometimes see them wash up on the beach.

LULU: Oh, yeah! Dude, oh my God, the mermaid purse!

RACHAEL: The mermaid's purses.

LATIF: What's the mermaid's purse thing?

LULU: It almost looks like two boomerangs back to back.

RACHAEL: Yeah, but there's also a shark that lays an egg case that's shaped like a spiral drill.

LATIF: So, like, screws itself into the rock, kind of thing?

RACHAEL: So that nobody comes along and eats it. Because, you know, they're out there hanging out in the ocean by themselves. And those egg-laying sharks, those are the sharks that we are gonna talk about today. That's where the story that Claudia had written about begins.

LULU: Oh, cool. This wasn't even the story?

RACHAEL: Just the warmup. That was just ...

LULU: I'm sorry.

RACHAEL: [laughs] I love it.

LULU: And I was just—it was just too Willy Wonka. Like, 'Come with me in the world of pure imagination."

RACHAEL: [laughs]

GREG NOWELL: And they're crazy little characters, you know, what they do.

RACHAEL: And so this story is one man's possibly Sisyphean but definitely sublime attempt to maybe just slightly rejigger the balance between humans and sharks.

GREG NOWELL: Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. [clears throat]

RACHAEL: Can I just ask you to introduce yourself? Say who you are and yeah, what you do.

GREG NOWELL: Hi. My name is Greg Nowell. What I actually do, or what I do when I do? [laughs]

RACHAEL: Greg has taught English as a second language. He's done quality checks on electrical circuit boards. But his life's work, I think he would say, is the shark conservation and education organization that he founded.

GREG NOWELL: Called Shark Lab Malta.

RACHAEL: Which is in Malta.

LULU: Hmm.

LATIF: And where is Malta again?

RACHAEL: A little island below Sicily. Warm, Mediterranean.

GREG NOWELL: And it's just a really beautiful place to be. So ...

RACHAEL: And so you were just interested in sharks because you loved being in the ocean? Or, like, what was it about sharks that interested you in the first place?

GREG NOWELL: They were just kind of fascinating. They're very, kind of, mysterious. So—so I thought, "Okay, let's—let's learn more about them."

RACHAEL: But when Greg moved down to Malta from Britain—this was in 2007—he pretty quickly realized ...

GREG NOWELL: There was nobody really in Malta focusing on sharks, doing anything about sharks.

RACHAEL: There wasn't a national aquarium at the time. And there weren't even many sharks in the waters near Malta where you could scuba dive.

GREG NOWELL: So that was why I first started going to the fish market.

RACHAEL: He wanted to learn about sharks so badly, he was just, like, willing to go look at them in buckets.

GREG NOWELL: Yeah, I guess it's kind of strange. But it was kind of like, "Well, if I want to learn something about sharks, I need to go and find where I can see them.

RACHAEL: So Greg would get up early, early in the morning, head down to the coastline where this fish market was, it was in this old rickety building. And he'd start talking to the fishermen, saying, like, I don't know, "You got any sharks? You mind if I check them out?"

GREG NOWELL: Yeah, yeah.

RACHAEL: And so he'd go back, see these bins filled with ice and dead sharks, and he started measuring the sharks.

GREG NOWELL: With my tape measure and my camera, taking pictures.

RACHAEL: Photographing them.

GREG NOWELL: Learning more and more about the different species of sharks around Malta.

RACHAEL: Learning about the basics of their anatomy.

GREG NOWELL: Checking them, whether it's male or female.

RACHAEL: Just, like, gathering basic information for this organization that he was setting up.

GREG NOWELL: Sometimes we'd recover certain parts of sharks from bins.

RACHAEL: He'd be like, "Oh, I'll grab a jaw and I'll clean it up, and I'll use it as, like, a demonstration that I'll give at, like, a community fair when I'm teaching people about sharks."

LULU: Wow!

RACHAEL: But a couple years into his fish market research, things started to get a little interesting for Greg.

GREG NOWELL: Yeah, yeah.

RACHAEL: One day in ...

GREG NOWELL: 2011.

RACHAEL: Greg's at the market, doing his thing. And he sees this small spotted catshark.

GREG NOWELL: A small spotty little shark.

RACHAEL: He just kind of inspects it like he always does. But then he just, like, notices something coming out of the small spotted catshark.

GREG NOWELL: I said, "Oh, what's that? What's that thing protruding?"

RACHAEL: He sees tiny, curly strings ...

GREG NOWELL: These fibrous tendrils.

RACHAEL: ... popping out of the shark's cloaca, which is, like, a shark vagina. Greg bends down ...

GREG NOWELL: Kind of carefully took hold of it.

RACHAEL: And at this point the fishermen nearby are just, like, giving him the side eye.

GREG NOWELL: There was a few kind of, like, craned necks looking across. Like, "What—like, what's he doing?"

RACHAEL: But he just starts to pull on it.

GREG NOWELL: Slowly pulled and pulled and pulled, and out came this perfect little four, four-and-a-half centimeter capsule with curly tendrils at the top, curly tendrils at the bottom.

LULU: Huh!

RACHAEL: And he's like, "Oh!"

GREG NOWELL: Ding!

RACHAEL: "This is a shark egg."

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

RACHAEL: So is it almost like a ravioli?

GREG NOWELL: Let's—let's imagine, like, a half ravioli.

RACHAEL: Like a two inch by one inch rectangle.

GREG NOWELL: Pale greenish color. Almost transparent.

RACHAEL: And he holds it up to the light, and he sees this little bulge.

GREG NOWELL: Inside the ravioli-shaped capsule.

RACHAEL: So here he is, holding this—this little ravioli in the middle of the fish market.

GREG NOWELL: What do I do now?

LULU: Is it dead?

RACHAEL: He doesn't know. So it came out of a dead shark.

LULU: Right.

RACHAEL: It could be dead, but it could maybe be alive.

GREG NOWELL: Just kind of thinking at least we could learn something from it. So I—I took it back home.

RACHAEL: Put it in a little plastic aquarium that he had.

GREG NOWELL: The kind of thing that kids would have sometimes. That was never—never actually used, just happened to be kicking around the house. So then I'm kind of thinking, "Well okay, obviously the shark would lay the egg in the sea." So I go and collect some seawater.

RACHAEL: With, like, a bucket?

GREG NOWELL: Yeah. Just literally a bucket. Take it back home.

RACHAEL: Dumps the ocean water into this little aquarium.

GREG NOWELL: With a little air pump, just to keep the water oxygenated. Dangle a piece of string across the width of the aquarium.

LULU: Why?

RACHAEL: Just to replicate, like, some seagrass or something that the egg would hook onto. So he hooks the little ravioli tendrils onto the string and suspends it in the floating water.

GREG NOWELL: And then wait. Because I mean, once you put it in there, what do you do, apart from watch it every day? Or several times a day. Or many, many times a day. Every time you walk past it, you take a look to just see what's going on. It just became a little bit like a magnet.

RACHAEL: Day one, day two ...

GREG NOWELL: Every time I was in and out, moving past it, take a look, take a look, take a look.

RACHAEL: Day four, five, six, seven, nothing happening.

GREG NOWELL: And after around about three weeks ...

RACHAEL: He noticed ...

GREG NOWELL: A little bump on the top right hand side of it. So now each time I'm walking past I'm now focusing on the little bump. And the little bump slowly separates from the main yolk section itself with a tiny, tiny, almost threadlike connection. And it starts to move.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: Nope!

GREG NOWELL: Just kind of like, wiggling a little bit. And it's like, "Oh my gosh!"

RACHAEL: "This shark, this baby shark that I brought home ..."

GREG NOWELL: From a dead shark—a dead shark ...

RACHAEL: "... is still alive." Now I should say Greg is standing, if somewhat amateurishly, on a sort of scientific frontier. I mean, sharks had been bred in captivity and eggs had hatched in aquariums, but ...

GREG NOWELL: But the thing that had never been done before was taking an egg from a dead shark ...

RACHAEL: And getting it to ...

GREG NOWELL: Develop.

RACHAEL: Nobody had ever done that.

GREG NOWELL: Nobody. So this was a first.

RACHAEL: And now he's thinking, "Maybe—maybe I could even get this thing to hatch."

LATIF: Which is what Greg is going to try to do right after this short break.

LULU: Radiolab. Sharks.

LATIF: We're back.

LULU: All right. We pick up with the story of Greg with his little egg case in his little kid plastic aquarium. And the egg case has a bump which has just begun moving.

RACHAEL: An egg case that Greg, at this point, has decided to name.

GREG NOWELL: … Squiggle. It was squiggling in the egg case, and I didn't know what else to call it. It's squiggling around. That's how I described it to people.

RACHAEL: And now that he knew that it was alive, and he'd given it a name ...

GREG NOWELL: Now I'm thinking maybe I need to actually get a slightly bigger aquarium and something a little bit, I would say, more professional. You know, made of glass instead of plastic.

RACHAEL: So he moves Squiggle into his happier, newer home.

GREG NOWELL: And—and so now we're, like, six weeks, seven weeks, eight weeks.

RACHAEL: And Squiggle is growing and moving more and more. It's still this sort of lump that's attached to a yolk in a thin thread. And then ...

GREG NOWELL: The yolk itself starts to appear to have blood vessels form on it. So you almost see, like, vein-like structures on the yolk sac.

LULU: What?

GREG NOWELL: And they kind of snake their way up the yolk sac to this little placental connection, which then in turn is going into the shark.

LULU: Like, blood?

RACHAEL: Yeah.

LATIF: Hmm.

RACHAEL: So it's blood going to the head of the shark.

LULU: That is wild!

RACHAEL: Yes!

GREG NOWELL: It is alien-like, because it has no distinctive shape. It doesn't have the distinctive snout; there are no fins. It's—I don't know, how would you describe it? It's just like a—a little something.

RACHAEL: So you'd walk by Squiggle, like, a couple of times a day.

GREG NOWELL: Oh ...

RACHAEL: "Hey Squiggle, what's up?"

GREG NOWELL: I wasn't necessarily talking to Squiggle, but when people said, "How's it doing? How's it doing?" I said, "Oh, Squiggle. Squiggle's doing fine."

RACHAEL: And then one day ...

GREG NOWELL: It just simply stopped moving.

RACHAEL: Squiggle stopped squiggling.

LATIF: Hmm.

LULU: Oh, no!

RACHAEL: And it just never—it never started again. That was the end of Squiggle. But Squiggle left behind this, like, little bit of hope for Greg.

GREG NOWELL: This beautiful little piece of ravioli kind of proved it was possible. So there was this—this kind of—this drive.

RACHAEL: So Greg heads back to the fish market, tries to get as many eggs as he can. Not even, like, pulling out the strings when he sees them, he now just starts cutting into the dead sharks.

LULU: Oh! The fishermen are just letting him do this?

RACHAEL: Well, Greg got very good at spotting which sharks had egg cases in them. But also, these fishermen …

GREG NOWELL: They were curious too, to the point where we arrived, they—they'd now tell us, "Oh, I've got some of this and I've got some of this."

RACHAEL: And at this point he has egg cases upon egg cases at home.

GREG NOWELL: Multiple aquariums, et cetera.

RACHAEL: And they're all starting to move, and they do a little bit of wiggling just like Squiggle did.

GREG NOWELL: Going good, going good. Everything's going good.

RACHAEL: But then, just like Squiggle, they would all die. And Greg is like ...

GREG NOWELL: What's—what's happening? Why do they suddenly stop developing?

RACHAEL: So he starts tinkering with, like, a couple things, like, the aeration, the salinity. And then eventually he starts to drop the temperature of the tank.

GREG NOWELL: Lowering the temperature, lowering the temperature, lowering the temperature.

RACHAEL: And lo and behold ...

GREG NOWELL: This mortality suddenly stopped. Massively.

RACHAEL: These eggs start surviving.

GREG NOWELL: Everything seemed to continue to develop ...

RACHAEL: Past the day that Squiggle died.

GREG NOWELL: Slowly get bigger, bigger, bigger, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.

RACHAEL: And then some weeks in, he notices that one of the embryos in the egg cases is starting to look like a shark.

GREG NOWELL: The fins develop.

RACHAEL: It seems to have a tail and a head.

GREG NOWELL: It's now starting to go into a position where it has its head at the bottom part of the egg case, and the body is looped over to the top, and the tail is now next to the head.

RACHAEL: And then one day he's cleaning the tank, and he accidentally bumps into the string that's holding the tendril. And then all of a sudden ...

GREG NOWELL: All movement stops. "Oh, I just killed it!" And then after a minute or so, "Oh. no. It's all right. It's all right. It's all good. It's all good."

RACHAEL: And then it started wiggling again. It's this defense mechanism these little egg cases have to protect themselves from predators who want to eat them. Now at this point, the little shark bodies, they're curled around the yolk sac. And Greg can see that that yolk sac ...

GREG NOWELL: Is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And after around about five and half, coming up towards six months, that yolk sac has almost disappeared.

RACHAEL: And so he starts thinking, "I bet when the yolk sac goes away, that's when this thing's gonna hatch."

GREG NOWELL: Now every time you go past the aquarium, you're looking, looking, looking. Can you see any yolk? Can you see any yolk?

RACHAEL: And then one day ...

GREG NOWELL: Oh, it's gone!

RACHAEL: And in the place where the shark used to attach to the yolk sac, there is just a little ...

GREG NOWELL: Belly button. Literally, because it's like a placental connection, so you could actually quite happily say that sharks have belly buttons. And at that point the shark is ready to be born.

RACHAEL: Wow. The belly button is the final touch. The masterstroke. [laughs]

GREG NOWELL: It is. It is. It is.

RACHAEL: So he's just sitting there waiting for this shark to finally break out of this egg case.

GREG NOWELL: You can only spend so many hours with your eyes open watching a shark, waiting for it to hatch. It's like the kettle, yeah?

RACHAEL: [laughs]

GREG NOWELL: You go to bed and you think, "Okay. Well, everything seems fine."

RACHAEL: But then one morning he wakes up ...

GREG NOWELL: And there's a little baby shark sitting at the bottom of the tank. It's just sitting at the bottom.

RACHAEL: Like a picture-perfect miniature version of a small spotted catshark.

RACHAEL: It's just sitting on the bottom of the tank?

GREG NOWELL: Yeah, yeah.

LULU: He did it!

RACHAEL: Yeah, he has a baby shark in his aquarium.

LULU: It came from a dead mother shark.

RACHAEL: Yeah.

LULU: Wow!

RACHAEL: And so this baby shark is just sitting at the bottom of the tank. And he's like, "I guess it's time to let it go."

GREG NOWELL: Release it into the sea.

RACHAEL: Back to the ocean. So one afternoon ...

GREG NOWELL: A group of us—I think it was seven or eight members of the organization ...

RACHAEL: They pack it up into a cooler and they drive to the north side of the island.

GREG NOWELL: We get our wetsuits on, put our scuba gear on, transfer the shark into the box.

RACHAEL: Just like a little Tupperware you put your lunch in.

GREG NOWELL: "Everyone got cameras?" "Yeah, yeah. Got cameras." "Are the batteries charged?" "Yeah, yeah. The battery's charged." "Okay, are we ready?" "We're ready. Let's get in the water."

RACHAEL: So they walk out into the water, dip down under and start to dive.

GREG NOWELL: To a depth of, I don't know, maybe about ten, twelve meters.

RACHAEL: And they're swimming around the bottom, looking for a good place to leave this baby shark.

GREG NOWELL: Underwater with a little box, a little baby shark. You can see—you can see the beaming smiles behind the regulators.

RACHAEL: And the reality of what they're doing and what they've done, it starts to sink in.

GREG NOWELL: The amount of time, energy, effort, dedication, concern, worry, built up over the year or so of development and then hatching and releasing ...

RACHAEL: They're all just tearing up. Like, their masks just fill up with—with their tears.

LULU: Aww!

GREG NOWELL: Seriously, it was just so super, super, super emotional. So when it—when it came to this final kind of like, now we're going to open the box and take the lid off and see what happens ...

RACHAEL: Greg's holding this little box, and he starts to open it.

GREG NOWELL: Just very slowly, slowly take off the lid of the box. And the little shark wiggles around a bit, and then it kind of lifts off the box and starts to swim. I don't know. There was just kind of—I don't know, there was just a very, very kind of, like, emotional but peaceful moment. It felt like many minutes but it probably wasn't. The shark had disappeared. We weren't gonna chase it. We had no idea where it was gonna go next.

RACHAEL: That shark was the first, but it wasn't the last.

GREG NOWELL: The total number of sharks we've released to date is 371.

LULU: Whoa!

RACHAEL: And one thing that science reporter Claudia Geib from the beginning pointed out is that ...

CLAUDIA GEIB: Greg had started this project in 2011, and I was reporting this in, I think, 2020, 2021. So he, by then, had been doing it for almost a decade. He had published a paper on it in 2018 that essentially was like a how-to guide for taking egg cases and raising them to be re-released in the wild.

RACHAEL: And now there are other scientists in other parts of the world rescuing egg cases from these dead sharks.

GREG NOWELL: So it wasn't a question of wow, we're stopping a species from becoming extinct. It was a question of putting them back where they belong. Let's let nature take its course, and if nature determines that this creature will have a long and happy, fruitful life, fantastic. If nature says something different, it's nature doing what nature does.

NICK DULVY: I hate to say it. They're gonna die. That's nature: red, raw in tooth and claw.

CLAUDIA GEIB: When I was reporting this story, and I spoke to this one prestigious researcher ...

NICK DULVY: Nick Dulvy, professor in conservation biology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

CLAUDIA GEIB: And in his view it's almost kind of pointless to put baby sharks back into the ocean.

RACHAEL: He says, like, these babies are just like a snack for another fish.

NICK DULVY: This is probably the most important, least well understood fact in marine conservation, that you should conserve the adults and not the babies.

RACHAEL: Nick says just, like, put this all in a different context. Just imagine you're a farmer.

NICK DULVY: You want to start an apple farm. I'm gonna give you a choice. Would you like 10 mature apple trees, or would you like 10 apple pips from my apple? And everybody, when they see it, they're like, "Oh, yeah. Of course. Yeah, of course. Give me the adults." Because they can breed multiple times right from the get go.

RACHAEL: Focusing on the babies instead of the adults is not only a waste of time, but also kind of a distraction away from conservation efforts ...

NICK DULVY: History's management tour, bycatch mitigation.

RACHAEL: ... that do make a big difference.

NICK DULVY: These kind of activities are described as what are called "feel-good conservation." These are an action that make people feel like they're helping to save the planet, but they don't have a real impact.

LATIF: Hmm. I had a similar question.

RACHAEL: I don't know. I—the more I talked to Claudia, the more I think they do do something, just a different kind of something.

CLAUDIA GEIB: You know, one piece that we didn't talk about is everybody spoke about how the people around them in their community responded to this project really, really positively.

RACHAEL: And even beyond Greg's community, you know, there's even a classroom in Spain now ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: My name is Jaime Penadés Suay. I'm a biologist from Spain.]

RACHAEL: ... using Greg's methods ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP: My name is Aline Martile. I'm 15 years old.]

RACHAEL: ... to raise baby sharks. So instead of having, like, butterflies, you would have a baby shark in your classroom! [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: My name is Ignatio and I'm 16.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Paula, and I'm 17 years old.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I'm 14 years old.]

RACHAEL: And in a way, it's not what's happening inside those shark tanks that matters, it's what's happening inside those kids.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Honestly, I was, like, concerned about how are we, like, going to take care of them?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: I used to think of sharks as, like, mainly dangerous. At first I thought—I thought of sharks as big and scary creatures, and now that I've been taking care of five of them, I'm pretty much relaxed.]

CHRIS LOWE: People have been taught to fear sharks.

RACHAEL: Chris Lowe again, our shark scientist from the very beginning of this week.

CHRIS LOWE: So the cool thing for me is if we've taught people to fear sharks, we can also unteach them to fear sharks, to appreciate the animal.

NICK DULVY: The wonder of the complexity of their lives and the complexity of their biology. You know, we need to change—change our concepts, get away from the monster image. They're not monsters at all.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Butterflies or sharks?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Sharks. Definitely sharks. They are more interesting.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Yeah, same here. I think I would prefer sharks over butterflies.]

LULU: Well, that is a wrap for our week of sharks.

LATIF: Big giant whale shark-sized thank you to Rachael Cusick for bringing this wild idea to us, and doing dozens of interviews to bring it to life.

LULU: Thanks also to our editorial ground control, Pat Walters, for wrangling so many sharks.

LATIF: This episode was reported and produced by Rachael Cusick, edited by Pat Walters. Fact-checked by Diane Kelly. With mixing help from Jeremy Bloom and original music by Alan Goffinski. And if somehow you are still yearning for even more shark stories going into the weekend, Terrestrials, our kids show hosted by Lulu has such a beautiful episode on the Greenland shark, which is the oldest of sharks. Like, individuals live impossibly long.

LULU: It's pretty neat! You can go find that on the Radiolab for Kids feed. The episode is called, "The Sea Troll." And one more thing: we want to give a huge thanks to everyone who supports Radiolab, especially right now. Everyone who's part of The Lab, our membership program, your support makes big projects like this possible, and we are so grateful.

LATIF: And if you aren't a member yet, or are thinking about giving more, this is the perfect time to take the plunge because if you join or re-up now, you will receive a really cool gift.

LULU: A limited edition Week of Sharks hat designed by the awesome Maine-based artist and surfer Ty Williams. It's so beautiful and fun, and it gives you a chance to show the world you support public radio in the form of Radiolab.

LATIF: It's available to everyone who joins The Lab this month, even for as little as seven bucks a month.

LULU: You can join at Radiolab.org/join. Existing members, check your email for details. And thank you so much. All right. That is—that is really it. We're stalling; I don't wanna end this thing. It's been so fun. But have a great weekend, stay equal parts open and curious as you are wary of the shadows in water and beyond.

LATIF: Dun dun, dun dun!

[LISTENER: Hi. I'm Michelle, and I'm from Richardson, Texas. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Rebecca Laks, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, my name is Anna and I'm calling from Somerville, Massachusetts. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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