Shark Week at 25: Discovery seeks to keep fest relevant, builds conservation ties

Fin harvesting is a focus

This year, Discovery is offering two new segments with an explicit conservation focus. “Shark Fight” details the experiences of Salamone and five other shark-attack survivors and their crusade on sharks’ behalf, and “Great White Highway” chronicles the work of Stanford marine biologist Barbara Block, who has used satellite and radio tagging to identify a critical migratory corridor for white sharks and other top marine predators in the Pacific Ocean. A third segment, “How ‘Jaws’ Changed the World,” looks at the ramifications of Peter Benchley’s bestseller and the movie that it inspired, including how it contributed to the vilification of sharks.

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The true fear factor: Shark extinction: The growing demand for shark's fin soup, coupled with accidental catch by fishing vessels targeting tuna and swordfish, kills tens of millions of sharks each year. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, roughly one-third of all shark species face some threat of extinction.

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Sharks take a road trip from South Carolina to their new home in the Florida Aquarium in Tampa, as staff work to provide the smoothest and least stressful transport. Video courtesy of Discovery News. Shark week starts August 12 on The Discovery Channel.

Runnette noted that four of this year’s segments make references to shark finning, the practice of cutting off a shark’s fins so they can be used to make a delicacy, shark fin soup. A new DNA analysis by Stony Brook University and the Field Museum in Chicago, with support from the Pew Environment Group, revealed that shark fin soup served in 14 U.S. cities contains at-risk species, including scalloped hammerhead. Scientists say the shark fin trade — which accounts for 26 million to 73 million shark deaths per year — is one of the main reasons that as many as a third of all shark species face some threat of extinction, along with the accidental catch of sharks in long lines set to catch species such as tuna and swordfish.

“I was thinking, maybe that’s too much,” Runnette quipped.

Several conservation groups and shark researchers, which had somewhat tentative relations with Discovery in the past, are now collaborating closely with it. Block, who helped pioneer the practice of tagging sharks, turtles, tunas and other marine species, initially rejected the script Discovery sent her because it overemphasized white-shark strikes off the Farallon Islands.

But Block was pleased with the final result, which included a more than $1 million, two-year experiment funded by Discovery, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Census of Marine Life and Rolex that will use movable gliders and radio transmitters to track the movements of more than 100 sharks in what Block calls “the blue Serengeti in our back yard” off California’s coast.

“We know where the watering holes are, we know where the highways are and what we’re trying to do is connect people to where these places are,” Block said, adding that TV provides a critical megaphone for that work. “I’ve spent 25 years in conservation, mostly working on big fish, and I don’t feel like we’re winning the war completely.”

Block is not alone: Oceana and the Pew Environment Group have worked with Discovery for three years; Nature Conservancy science specialist Kydd Pollock and his fiancee spoke on camera about how a gray reef shark became entangled in a net they set in the remote Palmyra Atoll two years ago and bit Pollock repeatedly on the head; and Shark Savers joined this year as a conservation partner.

Addressing millions

Underpinning this shift is a simple calculation: Tens of millions of Americans get most of what they know about sharks from the annual event. At 29, Jason O’Bryhim — a George Mason University doctoral candidate in environment science and policy — has watched Shark Week for almost its entire run. (He’s the sort of kid who produced a shark pop-up book in first grade.)