Sink your teeth into Discovery’s Shark Week
Get ready for a week with teeth in it — Shark Week is back.
Kicking off today, Discovery Channel’s 29th annual exploration of all things related to the oceans’ most notorious and misunderstood predator offers up nearly 20 hours of first-run programming over eight days, with topics ranging from migration patterns (“Shark Vortex,” tomorrow at 8 p.m.) and clashes with other species (“Shark-Croc Showdown,” tonight at 9:10), to strange sharks (“Alien Sharks: Stranger Fins,” tomorrow at 10 p.m.) and even those drawn to volcanoes (“Devil Sharks,” Wednesday at 10 p.m.).
There is also celebritydriven content: “Phelps. vs. Shark: Great Gold vs. Great White” (tonight at 8), in which Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps races a great white; and “Sharks and the City: New York” (Tuesday at 9 p.m.), which explores the decline of the great white population in Big Apple waters, narrated by “Sex and the City” star Chris Noth. And there is the return of “Shark After Dark,” a late-night talk show hosted by actor/producer Eli Roth.
One of the more noteworthy offerings is “Shark Vortex,” in which marine biologist Dr. Greg Skomal and naturalist and cinematographer Joe Romeiro study the annual migration of more than 30 species of shark north in the Gulf Stream to New England and try to discover the reason for the phenomenon.
“The Gulf Stream travels up the coast so strong every year,” Romeiro said, “that ... it crashes into Rhode Island and splits Rhode Island in half. Then it kind of takes off to the Azores on the entire Atlantic Gyre. It shaped the entire coast of New England and basically it crashes at Massachusetts ... and basically stops at Massachusetts because of the Gibraltar current there, the cold water current that’s hitting there.
“So there are these two opposing forces that happen there, but what happens there is unique,” he said. “So you really have to watch the show because when you see it you’ll be amazed that this is happening right next to us. ... And out of all the Atlantic, there’s something to this area that’s different than everywhere else.”
Romeiro was also in Cobourg Peninsula in Australia’s Northern Territory, braving triple-digit temperatures for the filming of tonight’s “SharkCroc Showdown,” in which 14-foot crocodiles vie with several species of shark for the same quarry: the sea turtle.
“There’s one of the largest crocodiles in the world and the sharks that occupy there I can tell you are some of the largest in the world,” Romeiro said. “So you get that hot weather and that high acceleration of heat, these animals have the metabolism that they have to ... hunt a lot. So it’s not like in cold water where they can kind of conserve their energy.
“Here at the peak of the season, they’re at their most active,” he said. “And if you know crocodiles at all, they’re reptiles, so they operate on heat. It was 120 degrees there. They move like lightning. They skip along the top of the water just to go after another crocodile.
“I mean honestly, the area itself was just like ... hours and hours of boredom followed by seconds of sheer terror,” he said. “It’s like what they say about war.”