[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF NASSER: I'm Latif Nasser.

RACHAEL CUSICK: And I'm Rachael Cusick.

LULU: And we're here with day two of our week of sharks, inspired by the 50th anniversary of the movie Jaws.

LATIF: And today we're gonna jump in the water with them.

RACHAEL: Well, I am. You two get to just sit in your cozy little offices and hear about them.

LULU: Very comfortably out of danger.

LATIF: Fair. Fair. Fair point. Fair point.

RACHAEL: But before we get into the water, I think we should actually start with the onslaught of shark movies that were inspired by Jaws ...

JEFFREY COHEN: All right, so there are 180 or so monster shark films.

RACHAEL: Wait, 180?

RACHAEL: ... with our monster scholar from episode one ...

RACHAEL: No way!

JEFFREY COHEN: I believe there are at least 180 listed on the Internet Movie Database.

RACHAEL: ... Jeffery Cohen.

RACHAEL: I definitely know Sharknado. What else is there? [laughs]

JEFFREY COHEN: You know Sharknado, but do you know Sharknado 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6?

RACHAEL: Oh my God!

JEFFREY COHEN: Where in part 6 ...

RACHAEL: Oh my God. [laughs]

JEFFREY COHEN: ... they return back in time to Sharknado 1?

RACHAEL: Well, of course.

JEFFREY COHEN: So I mean, Deep Blue Sea.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Open Water: We're stuck in the middle of the ocean!]

JEFFREY COHEN: Open Water.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, The Meg: How big is that thing?]

JEFFREY COHEN: The Meg, followed by a cheap remake called Jurassic Shark, which is not nearly as good.

RACHAEL: Ooh!

JEFFREY COHEN: The Reef, Ghost Shark. In that one, even if you kill the shark, you're not done because its ghost will come back and get you.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ghost Shark: They've tasted human flesh!]

RACHAEL: [laughs]

JEFFREY COHEN: 2-Headed Shark is exactly what's advertised.

RACHAEL: No!

JEFFREY COHEN: Double the trouble. Followed, of course, by 3-Headed Shark in 2015, 5-Headed Shark in 2017, and then 6-Headed Shark in 2018, at which point it looked like a starfish with all kinds of shark heads on it.

RACHAEL: Oh my God!

JEFFREY COHEN: There—there is almost every kind of shark movie. And what I love about the whole shark genre is that it looks to free the shark from the constraints of being underwater, so that sharks can be everywhere. There's Sky Sharks ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sky Sharks: Sharks, but they can fly.]

JEFFREY COHEN: ... Avalanche Sharks ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Avalanche Sharks: They swim through the snow like other sharks move through water.]

JEFFREY COHEN: ... Bait ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bait: I can make it! I can make it!]

JEFFREY COHEN: ... is about sharks in a supermarket.

RACHAEL: Where are they in a supermarket?

JEFFREY COHEN: Well, the supermarket does flood.

RACHAEL: Oh!

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bait: [People screaming]]

JEFFREY COHEN: There's just movie after movie like this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bait: Do something!]

LATIF: [laughs]

RACHAEL: So Jaws, like, kicked off this world, like, this universe of shark monsters, taken them out of their world and, like, dragged them into ours. And I—I kind of just wanted to go do what Rodney told us to do yesterday, like, go and see it for myself.

LATIF: I mean, I know this works for your guy, that seeing it made him less afraid. But, like, I mean, I think you're gonna go down there and see, like, "Oh, this thing is bigger than me. It is capable of completely tearing me to shreds." Like, there is a possibility that you're going to get down there and just be more afraid of it.

LULU: Yeah.

RACHAEL: Well, I—I—I think I actually want to know. So ...

RACHAEL: All right.

FLIGHT ATTENDANT: As you exit the aircraft, please mind your head on the way.]

RACHAEL: ... I hopped on a plane to this town in South Australia called Port Lincoln, informally known as "Tuna Town."

LULU: [laughs]

RACHAEL: It's this little fishing town, and that's where Rodney's cage diving boat leaves from.

LULU: Okay.

RACHAEL: We have the shark on the side and everything.

RACHAEL: Got to the dock. We drop our bags, we do some paperwork. Basically, like, sign away our lives. And then we set sail.

PASSENGER: Hold on. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

RACHAEL: Where we will spend the next four days looking for great white sharks.

LATIF: Is there a lesser white shark?

LULU: [laughs]

RACHAEL: That's a good question. No, there's not. It used to be, like, the white shark all along, and then once they started becoming scarier and scarier around the era of Jaws, we started calling them "great whites" to add fear to that.

LULU: No! No!

RACHAEL: Yeah.

LATIF: What?

LULU: They just added—it's not, like, actually the scientific name?

RACHAEL: Yeah. No, so all the scientists now, you'll hear them just say "white shark" because it's like rebranding the shark.

LATIF: Huh. Okay, so you're on the boat?

RACHAEL: Yep.

LULU: And how many people are there?

RACHAEL: I think there's, like, 15 passengers plus the crew.

LULU: Okay.

PASSENGER: I come from France. Paris.

RACHAEL: These people are from all over the world.

PASSENGER: From Switzerland. Lausanne.

PASSENGER: New York City, best place on Earth.

PASSENGER: I'm from Japan.

RACHAEL: And they're all so excited to see a white shark.

PASSENGER: I want to see the great white shark.

RACHAEL: Which was just, like, a fascinating little world for me to drop into.

PASSENGER: I'm passionate with sharks.

RACHAEL: Because, you know, like, most people hope they never see one.

PASSENGER: I want to meet the apex predators in their natural state.

RACHAEL: There were these two brothers ...

PASSENGER: Sergio, who loves sharks more, you or me?

RACHAEL: ... who were so into sharks ...

PASSENGER: I think I do, yeah.

RACHAEL: ... they were competitive about it.

PASSENGER: I love them, but he adores them.

RACHAEL: The older one said that when he was in kindergarten, he did a presentation about sharks.

PASSENGER: I even wrote it wrong on the board with a 'C-H,' so it just said 'charks.' Because I didn't know English, but I knew a lot about sharks.

RACHAEL: And he ended up getting in trouble because he had taken these books out of the local library.

PASSENGER: And I was so amazed by the shark pictures in the book, so I cut out the pictures with the scissors. And I was, like, looking at the pictures in my room and being so obsessed with them.

LULU: That's amazing!

RACHAEL: [laughs]

LULU: You just picture, like, the exact silhouette. Like ...

RACHAEL: Yeah, exactly. So from Port Lincoln, we sailed for hours—like, four, five, six hours—to this remote group of islands called the Neptune Islands.

PASSENGER: There's a wild rough sea bumping against the rocks. I will describe it as rough. Yeah.

RACHAEL: Yeah, very rugged. Like, dark blue water, dark gray rocks.

RACHAEL: It seemed sort of barren. But ...

PASSENGER: You feel that there's something around here. It's a feeling, you know?

RACHAEL: ... as soon as we anchored there, we noticed this intense smell, which was actually coming from us.

PASSENGER: I think it's called "chum." It's like minced up bits of fish guts, and skin and heads and stuff.

RACHAEL: The crew is throwing, like, buckets of fish parts off the back of the boat.

CREW MEMBER: I have a hat with a ribbon on it that says Master Baiter.

RACHAEL: And ...

PASSENGER: Ooh, what's that?

RACHAEL: Did you just see that white thing? Did you see that?

PASSENGER: What was that?

RACHAEL: ... all of a sudden, these colors start flashing across the water.

LULU: What?

RACHAEL: White and gray and silver.

PASSENGER: And they look like little sharks if you don't see their mouths.

RACHAEL: But ...

PASSENGER: [laughs] No sharks.

RACHAEL: ... they're not sharks.

PASSENGER: No shark. We're sharkless.

RACHAEL: Which is kind of the point. The bait is supposed to attract the smaller fish, which attract the sharks. But a day went by.

RACHAEL: Are we seeing anything?

PASSENGER: No, not yet. Not yet.

RACHAEL: And then another day.

PASSENGER: We see literally nothing.

PASSENGER: Yeah. I'm seeing nothing.

PASSENGER: I see water.

RACHAEL: And there was just nothing.

LULU: It's wild to me that you're pouring, like, blood, meat, flesh, fish corpses, all this stuff in and it's, like, days?

RACHAEL: Days.

LULU: I would be like, "Oh, they'd be there and they'd go—doot doot doot doot!"

RACHAEL: Exactly! [laughs]

LULU: You know, and they'd be there within 34 seconds.

RACHAEL: I know. I know. But that's not what happened. So two days have passed out of four, and we haven't seen a single shark.

LULU: Wow!

RACHAEL: And so there's just this cloud, like, looming over the boat. And so we go to bed that night and we're like, "We really hope that tomorrow, like, we'll see one."

LULU: No, I'm sorry, though. I'm sorry. I need—I need for the rest of us who aren't in this deranged epicenter of the world where you want to see sharks ...

RACHAEL: [laughs] You're like, "Yeah!"

LULU: ... I love knowing that you poured gallons of blood into the water and didn't see any sharks.

RACHAEL: Yes. Yes.

LULU: This is the best story ever!

RACHAEL: It's great news for you, yeah. It really—it kind of, like—you're in the sharkiest waters of all waters and they're not coming. And so, like, the next day, bright and early, the first cage goes down because they send the cages down even if they don't see a shark on the top, just in case there's something down there.

LULU: Yeah.

RACHAEL: So I'm up on the top of the boat next to the skipper, because he's the one that controls the crane.

LULU: Mm-hmm?

RACHAEL: And then suddenly ...

SKIPPER: Oh!

RACHAEL: ... he pauses.

SKIPPER: I don't know. She just did five pulls there.

RACHAEL: He feels five pulls on this string.

SKIPPER: Yeah, I thought it was five.

RACHAEL: This string that runs down to a cage they've lowered 60 feet to the bottom. And the people down there, they'll pull on the string to communicate with the surface.

SKIPPER: Five pulls for a shark, so hopefully there's one down there.

RACHAEL: And eventually ...

RACHAEL: Okay, I think they're coming up.

RACHAEL: ... the skipper winches the cage up.

RACHAEL: Okay guys, can you report back?

PASSENGER: [laughs] We did. We saw a white shark.

RACHAEL: And they had actually seen the shark.

PASSENGER: [cheering] Whoo! They do exist!

RACHAEL: They were so excited!

PASSENGER: Let's go! Let's fucking go!

RACHAEL: And then all of a sudden it was my turn. Like, the crew was like, "Get your stuff on."

CREW MEMBER: Okay Rachael, we're gonna start getting ready.

RACHAEL: We're gonna do it? Okay.

RACHAEL: It's go time.

LATIF: Okay, and how does that feel?

RACHAEL: I'm a little bit confused. I'm a little bit like, I'm so happy that we finally have a shark around. Like, it had been so long. But then I'm also kind of nervous when the reality of it set in. Like, oh, it's actually down there. It—it kind of feels like when you're in a line to just go on, like, a terrifying rollercoaster, and you've just seen all of these people with, like, shocked, smiley faces, like, tumbling off. And then you get buckled in and there's, like, no turning back. Like, it feels both exciting and terrifying.

CREW MEMBER: Okay, guys. Welcome to the cage.

LULU: Is anyone in the cage with you?

RACHAEL: Four people fit, one of them is the dive master. So you're with someone at all times.

CREW MEMBER: All right, regulators in. Leaning back. Hold on!

RACHAEL: And once the four of us settle into the corners of the cage, our dive master signals to the skipper.

CREW MEMBER: Okay, nice and slow, please. Make sure you hold on nice and tight.

RACHAEL: We're ready to go down. So we get dropped down like we're taking an elevator deep into the ocean. And as we go, it gets darker and darker and darker, and you can see less and less because you're getting further away from the sun. And eventually, we get down to around 60 feet, and the cage stops moving. And all I can see is this barren sand of the ocean floor, and above it is just this abyss of blue.

RACHAEL: I was bracing. There was just, like, so much fear building of what's gonna come out of that blue and, like, when is it gonna come out and which direction is it gonna come from? All I could hear is the sound of my breath, which was very heavy.

RACHAEL: And then I hear this scraping sound, and it's the divemaster scraping this little metal knife against the side of the cage. And the sound is supposed to get the sharks interested to come closer, but it kind of feels like a dinner bell. And then I feel a tap on my shoulder and I, like, look over to the left, like, behind my shoulder. And it's the dive instructor, and she just puts her hand in the shape of a fin on top of her head, kind of, like, to signal "shark," and then points into the corner. And as I turned, I remembered this thing Rodney had told me.

RODNEY FOX: Don't just look at their heads, at their teeth, because everybody's frightened of their teeth. Look at the rest of the body.

RACHAEL: And then out of the darkness—it comes truly out of the darkness—swims this white shark. It was a young one, so it was smaller. Six and a half feet, gray top with this scraggly white line and belly halfway through it. Little black tips on the front fins. But the thing that's most striking about it is the way it moved. No thrashing or darting like in the movies, just sort of floating.

RODNEY FOX: You know, they fly like airplanes, or airplanes fly like great white sharks. They have to dip a wing to turn.

GREG SKOMAL: And their moves seem to be incredibly deliberate and relaxed.

RACHAEL: White shark researcher Greg Skomal.

GREG SKOMAL: They don't do anything that's going to waste their time.

RACHAEL: The shark, it kind of felt like it was orbiting us. Like, it kind of fades in and out of your view, and comes—it goes in and comes out, and goes beneath you and then it kind of comes towards you.

GREG SKOMAL: It's just like, wow!

RACHAEL: It's beautiful.

GREG SKOMAL: You're looking at a prehistoric beast, millions of years old.

RACHAEL: Like it was carved by time to be exactly where it is.

JOHN LONG: Sharks are 465 million years old, you know? They've been on Earth for such a long time.

RACHAEL: This is John Long.

JOHN LONG: Strategic Professor in Palaeontology at Flinders University in South Australia.

RACHAEL: Now that amount of time is hard to wrap your head around, but John helped me.

JOHN LONG: They're more than twice as old as dinosaurs. They're way older than trees, flowering plants.

RACHAEL: They were around before Everest was even a mountain. All of the continents that we live on today, they looked nothing like they do.

JOHN LONG: They're even older than the rings of Saturn.

RACHAEL: And, I mean, over these eons, sharks had to survive all five of Earth's major mass extinctions.

JOHN LONG: Volcanic eruptions, a massive asteroid, ice ages.

RACHAEL: Outcompete other major predators.

JOHN LONG: Gigantic plesiosaurs with banana-sized teeth and walking whales.

RACHAEL: And along the way ...

JOHN LONG: They just absolutely exploded in diversity.

RACHAEL: So that today ...

JAIDA ELCOCK: Sharks fill so many different niches.

RACHAEL: According to Jaida Elcock, a shark researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

JAIDA ELCOCK: They are all over the place. There's sharks in the tropics, there's sharks in the Arctic. I mean, a bull shark was found so far up the Mississippi River it was in Illinois.

RACHAEL: And there's all these different versions of sharks carved in their own bizarre ways. It almost makes the white shark seem boring.

JAIDA ELCOCK: If you love the white shark, no hate to you. I also love the great white shark. But sharks are incredible. They are diverse. I'll just go through a bunch of them.

RACHAEL: Take it from the top.

JAIDA ELCOCK: I mean, some sharks only get to be about eight inches long, while the largest whale shark was almost 62 feet long. So just the sheer difference in the size range. We have glow-in-the-dark sharks, like lantern sharks that glow on their bellies.

RACHAEL: Ooh!

JAIDA ELCOCK: There's a shark species that spews bioluminescent goo from pockets near its fins, likely for avoiding and confusing predators.

RACHAEL: No way!

JAIDA ELCOCK: The rig shark can snap its teeth together to make kind of a clicking sound.

RACHAEL: Huh!

JAIDA ELCOCK: While the swell shark will swallow a bunch of seawater, blow up like a big shark-y water balloon.

RACHAEL: Oh my God!

JAIDA ELCOCK: And that makes it more difficult for predators to eat it.

RACHAEL: Wow!

JAIDA ELCOCK: And of course, the Greenland shark can live literally hundreds of years. I'm sure there are Greenland sharks in the ocean right now that were alive during the time of Alexander Hamilton, and the time that the musical about his life was written.

RACHAEL: [laughs]

JAIDA ELCOCK: Isn't that wild to think about?

RACHAEL: Yeah!

JAIDA ELCOCK: Hundreds of years.

RACHAEL: And there's even a shark that might help us survive one of our greatest threats. That's tomorrow.

RACHAEL: Okay, we just got back and we saw our first sharks.

PASSENGER: Yeah, we tried to kiss it, but it was too far away, actually. Yeah, yeah. But, like, keep an eye out, because ...

LATIF: This episode was reported by Rachael Cusick and produced by Rachael and Simon Adler. It was edited by Pat Walters and fact-checked by Natalie Middleton. With mixing help and sound design by Jeremy Bloom.

LULU: 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: And support sharks! 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.

LATIF: Day three of the Week of Sharks coming up tomorrow.

LULU: See you there.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Jane and I'm from Minneapolis. 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, I'm Danielle from Madrid. 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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