Shark Week: 'Shark Planet' Highlights
Discovery’s Shark Week continues July 9 with the premiere of Shark Planet (9 p.m.), a two-hour co-production with the BBC that’s the most gorgeously-shot program in this year’s lineup.
Exhibit A, the opening sequence, which you can watch a clip of above. In it, 10 million anchovies, which believe there’s strength in numbers, find their annual migration coming to an abrupt end when blacktip sharks decide to work together and herd them into what’s called a giant bait ball. To make matters worse for the fish (and more eerily apocalyptic for the camera), gannet birds then descend from above to join the feeding frenzy.
Related: ‘Air Jaws’ Makes Triumphant Return in Discovery’s August Shweekend
We can’t show you a clip of Shark Planet’s closing sequence, but we can tell you that it involves capturing a great white hunting seals in South Africa and a spectacular breach. Andy Casagrande, a Shark Week vet who has his hands in seven specials this year alone (including Bride of Jaws and Tiburones: Sharks of Cuba), was honored to be asked to film both topside and underwater footage of great whites in Cape Town. “I was really lucky. On the very last day of a two-month shoot, I got this ultimate shot of a group of seals — all trying to make it back to their island — and through the middle of them, a great white comes launching out of the water with one of them in its mouth,” Casagrande tells Yahoo TV. “For some people, it’s pretty horrific to see a great white tear a seal in half. But for me, it’s just them surviving and a testament to these amazing predators and how they hunt. So I was able to nail a really good shot of a great white taking a seal in a natural environment — no seal decoys or bait. It was all just pure natural history. So it’s a pretty cool kill shot.”
Related: Shark Week: Inside ‘Bride of Jaws,’ the Search for Joan of Shark
Other memorable sequences feature less well known but even more fascinating shark species, including the tasselled wobbegong, which camouflages itself for an ambush attack…
… and the epaulette shark, which can walk on its fins when caught on a dry reef.
“It wasn’t just about sharks being these ultimate, perfect, supreme predators, it’s really showing how life as a shark is actually not that easy,” Casagrande says of the special. “They actively have to essentially risk their lives at every meal, potentially getting inured by the prey they’re trying to take down or by another shark that wants to steal their meal.”
Shark Week continues through July 12. Discovery and its conservation partner Oceana have teamed for the new initiative Change the Tide, which aims to create a coalition of engaged organizations and individuals to help preserve and restore our oceans.
