While there are a lot of reasons so many people look forward to summer, one that’s easy to forget until it’s upon us is that with each passing July, shark fans can look forward to Discovery’s long-running Shark Week event.
But while it may be successful and entertaining enough, it won’t really have that much to offer the kind of fan who wants to learn more about sharks. And as shark conservation professor David Shiffman wrote in The Washington Post , it also has the added bonus of inspiring a generation of marine biologists to pursue their passion.
But while this is a clear benefit of Shark Week, it happened in spite of the quality of the information that you’ll actually see if you binge the station’s programming while the week is on.
Despite what some of Discovery’s executives may tell you, Shark Week is doing far more for the network’s ratings than it is for actual sharks.
The folks who decide which Shark Week programming appears often don’t let facts get in the way of a good story.
As Shiffman wrote, the shows that air in this bloc often get even the most basic of shark information wrong and they don’t always do it by accident either.
In addition to parroting old myths that make sharks seem way more intimidating than they are (they can’t smell a drop of blood a mile away), it seems that producers on these shows weren’t above lying to their featured scientists. For instance, a team that was doing serious sensory experiments on hammerhead sharks ended up getting their work shoehorned into some unrelated story about an urban legend about a giant hammerhead in Florida.
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The most egregious example, however, came with Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives , a faux-documentary that claimed a prehistoric 50-foot shark is not only still alive, but the subject of a cover-up by both the government and the scientific community.
Eventually, they had to add disclaimers admitting that this was a work of fiction.
Their attempts to promote conservation are half-hearted and not very helpful.
Back when he was an executive at Discovery, Scott Lewers described Shark Week content as “science first but mixed with entertainment” and “a platform to highlight the importance of conserving these beautiful and greatly needed creatures of our ocean’s ecosystem.”
We’ve shone some light on what makes that first statement misleading, but Shark Week shows also don’t really get into why — as Al Jazeera reported — people kill 100 million sharks every year, why the sharks can’t hope to replenish those numbers, and what we can do about it.
As Shiffman noted, this programming doesn’t address the overwhelming role of the shark fin trade in population declines, nor the fact that many countries have zero limits for shark fishing, or even which shark species need the most help.
Instead, they advise viewers to “record shark attacks” and “report illegal shark fishing,” which most viewers aren’t all that likely to witness.
And for a network that claims to love sharks so much, Discovery seems hell-bent on making us afraid of them.
According to LiveScience , there’s about a one in 3,748,067 chance of dying to a shark attack and it’s considered unusually high for 10 people throughout the entire world to die that way in a given year.
By comparison, The Guardian outlined that this not only makes snakes, bathtubs, and lightning more likely to kill you, but that’s even true of vending machines. After all, they fall on at least two people a year in the United States alone.
And while the heavy focus of attack re-enactments and monstrous (sometimes fictional) sharks you see on Shark Week hasn’t inspired a wave of shark killings, it doesn’t exactly make people more likely to protect vulnerable shark species.
After all, would you want to help something that you’re convinced is trying to rip you in half?
And even when correct information about sharks does appear on Shark Week, you’re not going to hear about very many of them.
When Shiffman wrote his Washington Post article in 2018, about half of that year’s Shark Week programming focused on great white shark.
That’s obviously because it’s a well-known and impressive shark, but it’s also a shark species that is enjoying a lot more protection than others and already has a high public profile.
Meanwhile, shark species that aren’t featured include the 10 most endangered types in the world such as the smoothback angel shark similar to the fish you see here.
Indeed, there are hundreds of species of sharks that we might expect to sustain Shark Week content for years to come, but it’s always the same “cool” usual suspects that we see year after year.
Basically, Shark Week isn’t offering us much more than those YouTube compilations that list close encounters or feeding frenzies. And it’s time they either walked the walk on what that gimmick is supposed to do for the world or stopped pretending that people aren’t just tuning in to watch sharks tear stuff apart.
h/t: The Washington Post
