Who knows more about sharks than Jason “Aquaman” Momoa, host of Discovery Channel’s Shark Week? Well, a bunch of Kiwi kids, for starters, and in a trivia contest segment, the youngsters easily took down the superhero in a feeding frenzy. Granted, it was five against one, but still, the shame of it all. And to rub it in, loser Momoa had to dunk his head in a bucket of nasty chum, per the terms of the smackdown.
Speaking of shark trivia, we learned a few things ourselves by watching Monday night’s shows. Like the fact that despite our primal fear of becoming shark chum, it turns out the beasts are much more likely to turn on their own kind than humankind.
The ocean’s biggest, baddest boys might just be … girls? Scientist Michelle Jewell has been studying the violent hierarchy of Great Whites, and in Discovery’s Great White Fight Club, she hypothesizes that these monsters actually communicate through shark-on-shark biting. Teaming up with famed Shark Week regular Tom “The Blowfish” Hird, they break down just what’s being communicated. For example, a bite to the gills — a “punch in the face,” according to Hird — could be saying “get the hell outta here,” or it could be the result of an attempted mating or other close contact. But a bite to the tail? That’s an entirely different message, a kill shot meant to disable the victim’s ability to swim, leaving it ripe for the eating. Some of the episode’s sharks are so sliced, diced and scarred, they’d make Mack the Knife look away in disgust. But the biggest surprise? The most badly bruised of the bunch are males — who’ve been nearly done in by much larger and far more aggressive females.
Orange is the new Great White. Meanwhile, Bruce’s jawsy brethren are the prime suspects in a different sort of attack on Monsters of the Bermuda Triangle. In this whodunnit, scientists who’d been tracking a group of beacon-tagged porbeagle sharks are alarmed when two of them — pregnant females, no less — suddenly disappear in, you guessed it, the Bermuda Triangle. Figuring them for dead based on the abrupt loss of signal, researchers-turned-gumshoe-detectives use divers, cameras and bait to narrow down the list of suspects to — who else? — the poor Great White as the culprit, reasoning they’re the only thing large enough to easily take down the porbeagles. Can’t an apex predator just get a snack without a murder rap?
Stranger things. Finally, on Alien Sharks: Strange New Worlds, divers go in search of the elusive broadnose sevengill, but come up empty-handed due, they surmise, to the abundant and aggressive orcas who they fear may be hunting the ancient seven gills into extinction. Finally, divers take one last look in an area where the orcas wouldn’t dare go: human civilization, inside a busy harbor. Turns out it’s teeming with seven gills thriving beneath the orca-free but trash-strewn marina. Who knew?
Our guess is those shrewd kids who battled Momoa would know. Our advice, Jason: Rinse off that chum before you go swimming with any Great Whites.
Shark Week airs this week on Discovery.
