Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Great White Shark Attack - The Surfer and the Shark at Monterey Bay

Episode Date: March 6, 2022

Another shark attack on our hands (fins?) and Wes, as always, did a great job researching and preparing to talk through the story of one surfer's unlucky encounter with a great white shark.  ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds                          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep number to a good life sleep. Hey everyone, it's Wes. If you typically skip the intro, I want to ask that you don't skip this one. I wanted to do the intro for this episode because sometimes when we record, I wake up the next day and I think,

man, I wish I would have said a little bit more about just how wonderful these animals are and how we don't really need to be afraid of them. This episode is one where I do feel like maybe I didn't say that quite enough in the episode. I recently have been watching a lot of videos taken in Southern California that show surfers going out in their drone videos and they're surfing and there's all these juvenile and sometimes even adult gray-white sharks nearby and they sometimes swim right under the surfers or the paddle boarders or the swimmers and this happens every single day on these beaches and these drone operators are out there every single day seeing these interactions or non-interactions and and they're non-violent interactions the shark doesn't charge the person

and they don't bite them. They just realize this isn't food, this isn't what I typically eat, and they keep going. And so I just want to remind you that for every single story that we talk about, like the story you're going to hear today, that involves a violent encounter, there are hundreds of thousands of nonviolent ones. And sharks don't really see us as a food source. Sometimes it does happen, and sometimes a shark does decide to go for it. But for the most part, they don't.

and they're beautiful animals and their animals I really care about a lot. Seeing Great Whites in the Wild was like a life-changing experience for me, even though I already absolutely loved them. It just made me love them that much more because they are so graceful and beautiful, and they've been unchanged for so long, and I just think that's really neat. So I hope you guys can keep that in mind as you list in the episode today. As always, we're really excited about this episode. It's a really great story.

I got really into the shark biology, especially thinking about incidents and encounters and attacks and how those work out. So I think you're going to like it. And as always, if you are enjoying the podcast and you want more, head on over to our Patreon. Just download that Patreon app and search Tooth and Club podcast and you'll find our landing page. Sign up because there's a lot of good stuff on there and you're going to get access to the whole bat catalog. All right. So I think that's all I wanted to say.

So I hope you enjoy the episode. is. Hey everyone, welcome back to tooth and claw. This feels good. It feels good to be back. You know, we had, we had Night of the Grizzly, which was a three-parter, then we had our news episode, and then Jeff led a Harambe episode. So I feel like it's kind of been a while since I've just been able to like really dig into a new story. And I'm, I'm really excited to be back doing it. Ooh, before I forget, yeah. Remind us to do Correction Corner. Oh, yeah. Yeah, let's just do it now. Okay.

You want to just do it now? Yeah. So we don't forget? Okay. Yeah. Are we talking about Jeff's monkey episode? Yeah, the monkey business. The monkey or not episode.

In the news episode. Monkey and around. Monkey in her hand. Turns out those monkeys really didn't kill many dogs at all, if any. And the whole thing was widely exaggerated by the news media. Turns out Jeff also doesn't know the difference between the New York Times and the New York Post. It's understandable. You get those mixed up.

I still thought New York Post would be reliable. Yeah, they're not. When I told you guys there's New York Times, that was a real. Yeah, I immediately was like, are you sure? So that's a correction corner. I feel like we had another one we had to do too, but I don't remember. That was our big one. Yeah.

Well, so I erroneously claimed that the fox at the end of the fox and the hound dies. That doesn't happen. That was a long time for doing that. I know. It's been weighing on me for a long time now. Yeah, we'll just get it in. It feels good to get that off my chest. I'm glad you feel so much better now. It's a thing that a lot of people think, though.

There's like the whole, what do you call it, the Mandela effect? Yeah, the Berenstein Bears thing. So if the fox doesn't die, we can all stop being sad. Yeah, that's true. They're just not friends. That's why it's sad. I need to rewatch it. I'll watch it someday when I feel like being sad.

Today's not that day, though. Today's not that day. Anyway, let's just get into it. So we are going to do an episode on Great Whites. People already know that because it's in the title of the episode, I'm sure. But we've done one before. We did Rob Rebstock Story. It was one of our first episodes.

It's famously, a little behind the scenes, the only episode we've ever had to re-record, which, yeah. Yeah, I had the echo effect turned on the mixer, the whole episode. And for like two weeks, I was like, I don't know what's wrong with this. It was a big mystery. It was funny too because we were like, our voices sound echoy. And then there was like literally something called echo that Mike had on. And it's like, well, that's probably it. My greatest failing is the tooth and claw technician.

We've come so far. That was so far. Yeah. What? He's going to mess up. Oh, yeah. It's going to be bad. That was our first great white episode.

When we did that episode, I promised we. have more. That's our best one. It was a good episode. Our best great white episode. Yeah, I would agree with that. Story is awesome. I think out of all the animals we talk about, great whites might be the one that I enjoy talking

about the most. Why is that? And I know that's weird coming from a bear biologist. I've just, you know me, Jeff, I've always been obsessed with sharks. Like since I was little, that was like my main obsession, even more so than bears and dinosaurs and everything else. Like sharks were number one. Yeah, you wanted to be a shark when you grew up.

right? Yeah. Yeah. In fact, one of our, one of our patrons, still working towards that? Yeah, I'm still working. One of our patrons in the patron Discord, which you plugged Mike and is now seeing a lot more activity. They posted a, like a shark book. Her name was Vanessa. She posted a shark book that she had one and she was a kid. And I had that exact same book and it brought back some, some fond of Cool. Anyway, so. I know if that story is that interesting. The Vanessa story?

No, just that you found a book that you saw when you were a kid. Oh, well, it just brought me back to, like, those feelings of, like, how much I loved sharks when I was a kid. Oh, like, how obsessed you were when you were a kid. I see what you're saying. Sorry. It's all right. It's mean. Yeah, it was kind of mean, but we'll just keep going, I guess.

All right. So we are going to talk about Great Whites, and the reason I wanted to talk about Great Whites is because, recently and tragically, a guy was killed in Sydney, Australia by a Great White Shark. And a lot of people sent us that story. It's one we're going to go more in depth into in our news episode. But my plan was to actually go really in depth in this episode about that story. And then I was going to supplement it with another story. And I found this other story.

And I got really pulled into it. And it had lots of really great details. And it slowly just took over the whole episode. So, um, Sweet. Okay. We are going to talk about this fatal attack in Sydney. It's a really interesting one. It's really tragic, but interesting because it was like a true predatory attack,

and those are very rare. But today we're actually going to be talking about a different one. We're talking about Todd Endress's attack in 2007. I haven't heard of. You haven't heard of him yet. Well, buckle up because you're about to hear a lot about it. All right. Are you guys ready to start?

Yeah. Yeah, let's rumble. I'm excited. Okay. You like those T-shirts that say, bite me with a shark on them? I don't know if I've ever seen one. Really? A bite me t-shirt?

Yeah. I always want to bite the person wearing it. Yeah, it doesn't really make sense too, right? Like, are they telling the shark to bite them? Or are they saying sharks bite me? Yeah. All right. So we're going to get into it.

Again, this is the story of Todd Endris. I got a lot of the material for this episode from the show, I Was Prey, which I think was on Animal Planet, one of the nature networks. then also Reader's Digest article and then a bunch of other sources too. This was a really popular story when it came out and you guys are going to learn why. There's a weird hook. Yeah, I'm excited. Weird hook to it. Okay. So Todd was self-described as like a chubby little kid. He grew up in California. He loved all of the activities that young boys growing up in California typically love. He skateboarded. He played soccer. And most importantly, he was really into surfing.

He got into surfing at a really young age and he says like when he caught his first wave, he just knew that was it. It was his true love. His whole family supported him in it, and every day he would try and get to the beach to surf. And when he was in college, he went to college in Monterey, he would like even skip classes to go surfing. It was just like that was his thing. It was the thing that made him happier than anything else. When he graduated from college, he got into like the expensive aquarium business for wealthy, or for wealthy homeowners. And so he would build and maintain saltwater. aquariums for wealthy people, and it gave him a lot of flexibility to go surf and kind of do

whatever he wanted and work whatever hours he wanted to do. So, in 2007, Todd's 24 years old, he gets up on the morning of August 28th, and he heads to the beach. It was actually his dad's birthday that day, and really all he had to do that entire day was go surfing and then go buy a present for his dad to give to him later that evening. So around 10.30 in the morning, Todd goes to Marina Beach with his friends Joe, Wes, Ernie, Brian, and Zane. And he's in Monterey, California, which if you've ever been to Monterey, it's very typically overcast there, really foggy. And that's exactly how it was this morning of August 28, 2007. Well, that's where Big Little Lies is. It is. Yeah. If you've ever seen Big Little Lies, just picture that. All right. So this Marina Beach

stretches 30 miles, and it's one of his favorite places to serve. And as he looked out on the water, that morning, he actually noticed a pot of dolphins that were playing in the waves. And Mike, if you saw a pot of dolphins playing in the waves, what would you feel your chances of running into a shark are that day? Pretty good. Pretty good chances of running into a shark? Yeah, because sharks are going to want to munch those dolphins, right? Jeff, what would you think?

I wouldn't, it wouldn't change my perception of if I'm going to see a shark. There's a common misconception among surfers and people that go to the beach a lot and swim, that when dolphins are around, it's very unlikely for a shark to be around. And that's because there's this, again, kind of old wives tale or myth that the two have this natural enmity and they avoid each other. And Mike, you're actually right. The opposite is pretty true. And it's not that sharks hunt dolphins, that sharks and dolphins hunt a lot of the same things. So when you have a lot of little fish in the area, if there's dolphins. And like mackerel and stuff that sharks will eat.

And so when there's when there's dolphins around, there's a decent chance there could also be a shark around. And so. Nice job, Mike. Yeah, good job. Does that count as being, I'll take credit for being. Well, it seemed like Wes wanted us to answer the other way. Yeah, yeah. I thought, yeah, I thought, I believed that misconception for a long time.

I thought it was like, if you saw dolphins, coast is clear. That's embarrassing. Yeah, I know. Talking to a lot of old wives. I learned a couple things during this episode. Anyway, so Todd felt that way. He thought like, oh, there's dolphins out there. It was kind of this sign of like surfing is going to be great.

Don't have to worry about sharks. Sounds cool. Surf with dolphins. Yeah. So he puts on a wetsuit that was in the back of his car that his dog had actually been sleeping on for weeks. And he and his friends, they run in the water and they paddle about 100 feet out into the waves. So throughout the morning they're trading waves, which means they're just kind of in this set lineup and they're waiting. and letting each of them catch a wave.

They're all friends. So they're being very generous and gracious. And Todd was actually furthest out from the friends, and he's waiting for the next waves. He's about 50 feet away from his friends. He's sitting on his board in the cold water, and he's watching his friends catching waves, just having a really good morning.

And he looks around, and he kind of comes to this realization quickly, that the water's a lot murkier than normal. It was perhaps like a swell it just passed through or some wind or something, but the water's pretty murky. and right when he's having that thought, he sees a huge dark shape in the water quickly moving toward him.

Oh, no. So, as you may have guessed, this big dark shape is actually a great white shark. And to be specific, it's a 16-foot great-white shark. So about the same size as the one that attacked Rob Redstock. So this 16-foot shark bites into Todd with such force that he remembers being completely flung off his board and actually like skipping across the top of the water.

And eyewitnesses said that Todd, was thrown almost 15 feet up in the air by the shark. Whoa. A lot of shark attack survivors, especially Great White attack survivors, they remember feeling like they had been hit by a boat or something or like they described as being hit by a truck or a bus or something. Or a truck. Rob said a truck.

Yeah, that's what it was. But Todd knew exactly what it was. Like he knew that he had been attacked by Great White truck. Yeah. Or a boat. A boat is a really common one too. So a little bit about... Submarine, maybe.

A little bit about this area that he's in. So Monterey sits in the red triangle. So the red triangle is this imaginary name. It's a nickname given to this area of the Pacific Coast. It extends from Bodega Bay just north to San Francisco, out to the Farallon Islands, and then down to Big Sur. So it's kind of this triangle that... What's the longest section of a triangle called again?

the, I can't remember. The longest part of the triangle is the coastline. Isosceles? No, that's a kind of triangle. Hypottenous, the hypotenuse. So anyway, this is the red triangle, from Bodega Bay, pretty much down to Big Sur and out to the Farallon Islands. And 38% of great white shark attacks on humans in the U.S. have occurred within this

red triangle. And it also makes up for 11% of the world total. So there's been a lot of short times. That's why it's made up the red triangle. Yeah. Is great whites? Exactly. You got to watch out for...

And red because of blood. Uh-huh. You ever see a triangle out there. You got... Go around. You're red triangle. Yeah, go around to the triangle. Okay. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items. Then, review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes. So you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way with Ralph's delivery and pickup. Get free delivery during online deal days, plus $30 off your first online order.

Ralph's, fresh for everyone. So the reason that there's so many sharks coming to the Red Triangle is it's a protected area that has a large number of marine mammals, including sea lions, elephant seals, harbor seals and sea otters, all of which are part of the Great White Sharks diet. It's also like the perfect kind of temperature of water for them. It's just, it has the perfect conditions for Great White Sharks. This area is especially sharky between late August and November when Great White show up to feed on seal pups and sea lion pups.

So in this area, October is commonly referred to as Sharktober just because there's so many sharks in the water. Cool. I'm going to start calling you that. That being said, most of the bites that occur along that. stretch of coast are generally exploratory bites, and the chance of surviving a great white shark attack in the red triangle is about 90%. So your odds are pretty good, even if you do get attacked by a shark. That being said, there have been 50 fatalities along the red triangle from 1959 until 2007

when Todd was attacked. Oh, wow. Yeah. So there have been a number of people that have died there, but when you think about all the people that are in the water from like north of San Francisco all the way down to Big Sur, it's really not that many people. Yeah, you'd be more likely to be killed by a vending machine. Yeah, that's totally. Totally. Why is it always a vending machine? It's always a vending machine.

How many people are dying for vending machines? Yeah, they always use vending machine as the example. I don't get it. How has one person died from one? I know. Like, let alone a 50 plus. I want to hear a survivor's account. of someone who are people survived the vending machine.

What would the, is there a triangle for vending machines? So if you're swimming or surfing or doing any kind of water activities in the red triangle or in places where there's seals and sea lions congregating, and you also know there's going to be great white sharks there, you're taking an inherent risk. Like people that surf in these areas know that it's a sharky place. Are most attacks from? On surfers? Surfers and swimmers and divers are the three main ones.

I think divers actually get attacked more because in that area there's lots of abalone divers and stuff, and they end up getting bitten. So a really good quote, and this is from George Burgess, he's the director of the International Shark Attack File. He said if you're like hanging out in places with sea lions and seals and whatnot, it's pretty much like walking with a herd of antelope on the Serengeti, knowing that a lion might attack you. So I thought that was a good comparison.

Like, we don't really think about it that way if you're out surfing and there's sea lions and stuff around. But really, you are just hanging out with prey species that a great white might be really into. So it is something to consider. But to people like Todd and surfers like Todd, encountering a shark is just part of the deal. He'd even been called out of the water a few times when people had spotted sharks. So before we get back into the story, and this is going to be a bit of a diversion, I want to talk, instead of going like really deep into Great White Shark biology, because we did that in the first Great White Shark episode, I want to talk a lot about attack theories and why they attack humans and kind of how they attack humans and also kind of maybe investigate the word attack even a little bit. Because I know shark, go ahead.

I have a theory for their attacks. Okay. Let's hear it. Do you think they're like more prone to attack cuter animals? Like the cute or the animal, the more they want to attack it? I think they attack a lot of really cute animals, but I think it's just a happy coincidence that they're pretty so cute. You don't think it's because they're cute?

No, I don't think so. Like if there's just a super cute seal, you don't think they'll stop chasing the fish to go after that seal? They would stop chasing the fish to go after the seal, but not because it's cute. There might be something to it. You never know. You should trademark that theory before we publish.

this episode. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, I think the thing I want to start with is when I was researching this, I know there's a lot of shark researchers and scientists that really hate the word attack because I think, especially for sharks, they've been so demonized and so villainized that that attack word is really hard for them to stomach.

We still use it on the podcast. I think it's just kind of the most colloquial, easy way to explain what's happening. shark biologists really want to pivot to like saying incidents or bites or encounters. And I think the reason is because a lot of these incidents with sharks really aren't attacks. It's the shark investigating whatever it is in the water and we're going to talk about that. But I do think in this case we are talking about an attack. So I am going to use the word attack for Todd's story. Okay.

Gotcha. So there are a lot of theories behind white shark attacks. And for a long time, the pervading theory was that it was like mistaken identity. So essentially, like, the shark was thinking that the person in the water was a seal or a sea lion or whatever. And we talked about this a little bit in our other Great White episode. But it could be true still. Like, I'm not discounting this. But I was reading about these experiments that scientists were doing with Great Whites where they would put two targets in the water.

And one target would be a square and one would be shaped like a seal. And when they put both of them in the water at the same time, the shark would go and investigate. the seal, when they put them each in the water one at a time, the shark would still investigate both of them. And investigate means it would bite them. So it picks the seal over the square, but if you just got the square in the water, the shark is still swimming up to it and biting it. And what that tells us is like, they are curious animals. And to them, if you're a great white shark, pretty much everything smaller than you and even a few things that are bigger than you are food.

And so you can go and kind of check out whatever you want. I mean, there's videos online of Great White swimming up to boats and like mouthing the propellers because they are just curious and they're wondering, is this food? Can I eat this? And unfortunately, when a shark does that to us,

if a shark swims up to you and bites you on the arm or the leg or something to check you out, it can take your arm or your leg off. It'd be nice if they found a gentler way to investigate. They'd give you a little, spank with their fin or something.

Yeah, instead of biting everything. Like, all of their organs that they use to navigate the world are all up front. And so the mouth is just, that's how they check things out. I don't understand how come they investigate humans and, like, take a little nibble of us. And then they're like, oh, that's not food? Yeah, we're going to talk about that. Because aren't, don't we bleed? We're going to talk about that.

Why wouldn't they think? It's a really good question. It tastes good. You know? Yeah. Are you offended, Jeff? A little bit. But before we get to that, what I really want to just emphasize here is that sharks investigate palatibility, whether or not something is edible with their mouth.

And I think that's really what's responsible for a lot of the attacks that we hear about. We're going to say incidents. It's just that the shark's like, you know what, this thing kind of moves like a seal. It kind of looks like a seal, but it's a lot clumsier in the water. I'm not totally sure what it is. I'm going to go up and check it out. and I'm going to do that with my teeth. And I really think that's more what it is.

If you didn't have arms, you would use your mouth for a lot more stuff. Right. That's true, probably. Like the tongue would be, yeah. Jeff, to your point, what a lot of shark biologists think is that we are just like too bony and meaty to really represent a great food source to a shark. And that exploratory bite is enough to really discourage it. And there's some really cool research out there where like dead whales that will be floating in the water

just attract sharks from all over. and Great Whites and Tiger Sharks and all sorts of other sharks will show up. And they'll just eat the blubber off of those whales, and they leave all the muscle and everything behind. And it's because they're just looking for high energy content food. And a lot of, like, polar bears are kind of the same way. That's why they really only kill seals and stuff. And so to them, we're almost like, we're not cost effective. If they eat a human, they're almost using more energy than they're gaining, and it's just not worth it to them.

That makes sense because they don't really just like gna on you. They take all the bone too. Right. So then they have to digest your big old bones and everything. Exactly. Exactly. And so it's not unheard of that they eat people. They don't have blow holes to shoot them all out of. Shoot all the bones out of.

That's a callback to something before. I know we've talked about that before. Anyway, you just threw me off of my train of thought. There are predatory attacks from time to time, but most of them are just these exploratory bites. Shark realizes it doesn't really want us and takes off. That's really interesting. I didn't know that. Thanks.

It could be that like in these full-fledged attacks when they're predatory and everything, they actually are mistaking people for sea lions, or they've just made up their mind that, oh, this is food, I'm really going to go for it. But this whole mistaken identity thing, I don't think it's really giving a shark enough credit. Like this is an animal that's remained unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. And so I don't think it's really giving it credit saying like, maybe they think we're seals. They're smarter than that. They have eyes.

They have amputated Lorenzini, which are those mucus-filled pores that they use to detect electricity in the water essentially. So that kind of gets to that point. So a couple things that we talked about before with the biology that I just think are important to understand. one of the things I just mentioned, amputated Lorenzini, which are electroreceptors in the shark's nose that it uses to detect like struggling fish or seals or whatever in the water. They have a really crazy olfactory bulb,

which can pick up really small amounts of blood in the water. And then a really interesting thing that we've talked about before is that they have this conveyor belt of teeth. So when they lose a tooth, another one. And it's weird, they're like pointing down and they kind of like rotate up into its mouth. And so they just are constantly making. new teeth and sharks will go through thousands of teeth in their lifetime.

That's so cool. And a lot of people get cool necklaces from them. All right, so I want to talk about a little bit more about attacks and how sharks subdue and kill prey. They have a few different approaches when they attack prey. So a really common one is an underwater approach. And the shark will be about a meter below the surface, so three or four feet, and it kind of just zooms up to the prey, and then it turns its head up and lifts its head out of the

water sometimes and attacks its prey. So that's one way that it does it. That's a common way you'll see. Another common way is they kind of shoot across the surface of the water. That's less common than the underwater approach, but it does happen sometimes. And then the third way that's also very common is a vertical approach. So that's where you like see him launch and seals. Right. Like that's what happened to Rob Rebstock where the shark just shot him out of the air. And that's probably what happened to Todd on this initial hit too because he got launched in the air. And I think the cool thing about that tactic is that when a predator approaches a prey animal,

the prey animal naturally wants to go the opposite direction of the direction the predator is coming toward it. And if you're a seal or a sea lion on the surface of the water and a shark comes up you from underneath, you can't fly up into the air to get away. And so they kind of like freak out because they can't go in the opposite direction and so they don't really know where to go, and it paralyzes them for a second,

and it gives the shark an upper hand. It's really cool. It's really so smart. Yeah, it's super cool. Yeah. I feel like the only ocean animal with a cooler attack is when orcas use their back fins to fling seals in the air. Yeah. Yeah.

Which ones do you think can get a seal higher? Definitely an or a great wife. Are you kidding me? Yeah, they throw them way up in there, like 50 feet. I've seen Great Whites get some pretty good air. with them. Yeah, orcas just launch him though. My dad used to do that to us at pools just for fun. Do you think the

orcas and seals are just playing around? Just headbut you out of the water? Well, he'd like throw us out of the water and to the deep end and stuff. Yeah. Does he still do that when you guys go swimming together? Yeah, the lifeguards have a real good time with us. All right, so a little bit more just because I find this all

really interesting. Back in the day, scientists also had a hypothesis for the exploratory bites. And their thought was the shark was coming up, delivering a devastating bite, and then backing off to let the prey kind of die. And the whole thought there was, it gets less energy the shark has to put forth to kill the prey. It just kind of waits for it to die. And it's a lower risk for the shark to like, you know, sustain wounds from a defensive battle. This has pretty much been debunked, though.

So, again, as we kind of explained before, those exploratory bites are more to really determine whether or not what it's eating is food. and it's just a really good way for the shark to figure it out. Unfortunately, again, it's a really bad way for us to be explored. Okay, so a couple more little things I want to talk about, and I want to ask you guys, well, first of all, let's get to this. I think there's really three attack scenarios when it comes to a gray-white shark. There's a predatory attack, which we've talked about a little bit. I think that's what just happened in Sydney.

We talked about that woman in Australia who was just completely ripped in half by a gray-white in front of her family. Those are really rare. They don't happen that often, but they're not unknown. There's an exploratory attack, which we just talked about a lot, where the shark just comes up and bites. I think that's one you would call more like an incident or interaction. And then there's a territorial attack.

And that's where you maybe have just pissed a great white off enough to where it's just going to come and hit you really hard and then probably back off. You scared its fish away or something? Yeah, totally. The last thing I wanted to talk about with shark, incidents before we get back into the story. Actually, you know, we're going to save this for the end. So we're just going to, we're going to get back into the story. Okay. Let's go. Let's go, Todd. That was a good tease, Wes. I'm on the edge of my seat now. So Todd is feeling completely helpless.

He's been slammed up by this huge predator. He said it felt like a freight train and that he was hit like he'd never been hit before. But he did know it was a shark. After the initial impact, he's floating dazed in the water and he managed to get back on his board and he starts swimming for shore, only to turn around and see the shark coming speeding in his direction. So the shark hits Todd again, it knocks him away from his board, and then it sped up again and grabbed him in its jaws. Not where you want to be if you're taught. This summer, serve up the cookout classics, craft mayo and dressing. Toss green salads with delicious ranch dressing or zesty Italian. Serve smooth, crave crave crave crave-crably creamy potato salads with mayo. We all know it's not a cookout without craft.

So nearby Todd's friend Joe is relaxing on his board and he hears a huge splash and he turns to see a massive gray animal splash back down in the water with his friend Todd and his surfboard in its mouth. The animal he saw it was so big he thought it was a whale and then he hears Todd screaming and Joe just turns in terror and he starts paddling as fast as he can toward the shore. He stops a few seconds later and he turns around. He makes eye contact with Todd ashe screams help me and then get his. pulled under the water. Todd's in its mouth talking to, Joe? Yeah. That's kind of crazy, right?

Yeah. They're like a good distance away, but he just screams, help me, and then it pulls him under the water. So Todd doesn't... Something Joe's going to remember his whole life. So of all these guys that witness this thing, Joe's the only one that, like, won't surf this spot anymore. He's done.

So Todd doesn't remember seeing the shark open its mouth, but he does remember feeling an intense pressure around his torso. and then the really lucky thing is his surfboard was actually sandwiched between him and the shark's jaws. So on one side the shark is like pushing his surfboard against him. And then on the other side, the teeth are actually going into him. So his back was getting bit, but the front of his torso wasn't. Can just bite him in half? Yeah, the front of the torso is just like getting pushed up against that surfboard,

which would be uncomfortable, but much less uncomfortable than shark teeth ripping for it. Uncomfortable might not be the right word. We get it, though. It would be uncomfortable, though. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. So he sees blood just pouring out of his body. And in like this moment of horror, he just sees the blood or the water all around him turn red.

And he realizes in this moment, like, I'm being eaten by a huge fish. I'm getting killed by a shark. And sharks are fish. All right. So he feels like as helpless as a rag doll in a pit bull's mouth, he's getting shaken around. He knows he can't really fight back. but his sympathetic nervous system kicks in. That's your fight or flight response.

And he knows he can't get away, so he starts hitting the shark and doing everything he can to get away. He's trying to hit it in its eyes and its gills. And later he would say that it felt like trying to punch a Chevy suburban covered in sandpaper. Just like wasn't going anywhere. I really like this guy.

Get imagery. Feeling a whale shark, like they're very sandpaper. Yeah, they're rough. Imagining that's kind of how it is. Yeah. And so a lot of this. He's in its mouth. Is he like...

He's sideways. He's not like a... Where are the teeth at? They're on his back. And then his surfboards being pushed against his chest. Oh, okay. So the shark has him like hot dog. By the torso.

Yeah, by the torso. He's horizontal in the shark's mouth. Anyway, he, you know, he realizes like fighting back is useless, even though he's still trying. That's kind of a common thread with great white shark attacks is just that it doesn't seem like any punches or anything or doing anything. And that makes sense. Especially underwater. It's so hard to punch. Yeah, it makes sense too because they kill sea lions and elephant seals and these huge animals that

can fight a lot harder than we can. So us like punching them isn't going to do much. The shark does let Todd go and he floats for a minute wondering how badly he's hurt. He can feel no pain, but he can see that the water all around him is turning red. Then the shark strikes again and it grabs him by the leg and it starts shaking him in the water and it nearly severs his leg while it's doing this. Geez. Once again, it's uncomfortable. It is uncomfortable.

Yeah. His fighter flight response kicks in, goes to fight, and he has his right leg completely down the throat of the shark, and he starts kicking in the face with his left leg. And this time, he's kicking it hard enough. He kicks it once in the nose that he thinks that might have caused it to let go again. Now here comes the weird part. At that moment, he comes up to the surface, and he comes up to the surface, and he kicks it. he looks around and he's surprised to see six dolphins stirring up the water and jumping all around

him and even over top of him. And he says that he felt like these dolphins actually put themselves in between him and the shark. Whoa. So nearby his friend Wes is watching, he's sitting on a surfboard just like stunned and he's watching all these dolphins churning up the water and jumping all around his friend while his friend's like screaming bloody murder and saying, help me. And he thinks the dolphins are attacking his friend. No way. And like the timeline of when all these things were happening was kind of hard to figure out. But I think the dolphin showed up like right when his leg was in the mouth of the shark.

Yeah. So the shark lets go. These dolphins get in the way. He's convinced the shark isn't finished. So he gets like he knows he has to get back to the shore. And his mind's racing to figure out how. And he looks up to see his friend Joe sitting on his board just outside of this huge ring of blood that had formed in the water. And Joe, who had tried to paddle away before,

decided he couldn't possibly abandon his friend to this animal, and he returned to help. So Todd's surf leash is still attached to his board and his leg. And as he's swimming to try to get to Joe, he's dragging his board through the water, and it's just like an anchor, and he's really struggling to get to Joe. And Joe's screaming at him, take your leash off, take your leash off, grab your board, grab your board. And he's just not thinking. And he's swimming, towards Joe and he tries to like clamber up on Joe's board and Joe pushes him off and like really firmly and calmly says get on your board get on your board so Todd gets on his board and they managed to catch a wave and he feels no pain at this point still but they catch this wave

so Todd surfing now one-legged I think he's just laying on his board and he remember seeing the white water like turning pink on the wave and everything from all the blood that he's spurting into the ocean and he tells Joe like I've been attacked by a great white and Joe says I know let's get to shore. As soon as he gets to shore, he's just laying on his board because he has no energy left and his friends run up to him and they pull him up onto the shore and as they're pulling him up onto his shore, he sees blood just pouring out of his mangled body and it's gushing all the way down the sand and into the water. And as soon as they lay him down, the pain just sets in and it's completely overwhelming. His friends Ernie and Brian both had medical background and they were smart enough

to immediately place Todd so his head was downhill. And that way all the blood that's still left in his body is going to his brain and his heart, and it's not just being wasted in his legs and whatnot. And then they also use their surf leashes to tourniquet some of the parts of his body that were spurting blood, especially his leg. And he remembers feeling a ton of pressure on his leg in his back

because his friends were literally sitting on them to try and keep pressure on him. And they're doing their best to stay calm and they're talking to him and they're keeping him warm. But they can't ignore that there's a 40-inch gash going down his back, and that the skin on his back had literally been filleted. The skin and muscle had been pulled all the way back, so they could see his spinal column and all his internal organs that you can see right there.

Like you could see his kidneys and his lungs and a bunch of stuff. Oh, my gosh. So they're like telling him everything's going to be okay and to stay calm, but in their heads they were all thinking, we're going to have to tell this dude's parents that he died because there's just no way he can. survive this kind of wound and losing this much blood. So he's struggling to keep consciousness and he sees the lifeguard truck pull up and he gets loaded

onto a backboard, which are those boards that they carry. And his wound was on his back and his back's on this board and then there's a bunch of sand between his back and the board. And as he's like moving back and forth on this board with the sand and his wound, he said it was just excruciating pain and it felt like his back was on fire. And then they load him into the truck. It probably hurt worse than being in the shark's mouth. Yeah, he didn't feel anything when he's in the shark's mouth, aside from a ton of pressure.

He said it's uncomfortable. Yeah, I said it probably was uncomfortable. True. He gets loaded in this truck. They have to take him up to where a helicopter can get him. The truck's bumping around. That's causing a ton of pain. And he's taken to Lifelight helicopter.

There's no trauma center in Monterey, so they had to take him to a nearby hospital and then straight into the operating room. And the doctor said his back was literally filleted from the shoulder blade all the way down to the bottom of his butt. And they could clearly see his kidneys when they brought him into the operating room. We were watching this show about him and Jesse was sitting next to me on the couch. And they showed like a blurred photo of his attack wound. And she got queasy and almost threw up, like got dry mouth and had to turn away. It was really bad. It's crazy like what some people survive.

Yeah. Across his spine, there's a big half-moon bite shape. And then on his right thigh, he had a huge bite that went all the way around and missed his testicles by a few centimeters. Like he was like just barely missed him. Yeah. Also, the bite did hit one of his vertebrae. They had to use 10 gallons of saline to rinse the sand from his wounds. And then they used 500 internal sutures and 200 staples to close up the wounds.

What, geez. The surgeon says he spent eight hours trying to reconnect the muscles in his leg and his back. And a quote from the surgeon said, his muscles were completely severed. It was hard to tell what belonged to what. It was tedious work like doing a jigsaw puzzle. His doctors estimate that he lost about half of his blood, and that's about as much blood as it's actually more than enough blood for a person to die.

They think that that's like a 40% is supposed to be a critical amount of blood to lose, and he lost about half. Had the rescue taken even a couple minutes longer, he probably would have died. Wow. So his parents got to the hospital after he was in surgery. and he woke up to their faces. I like to think that he was just like, happy birthday, to his dad.

Sorry, I didn't get you a present. I ran out of time. So in a lot of the articles and stories I read about this, a lot of people did it with this angle that the dolphin saved his life, which is possible, but in my mind, the true hero of the story is his surfboard.

Because I think had that surfboard not been sandwiched in between him and that shark, the shark could have bitten right through him. It would have torn through, like, the softer parts of him. So, like, all of his intestines, his organs that are much more exposed. I'm very confident that he would have died had that surfboard not been sandwiched there. I think you got three heroes. Yeah. The surfboard, the dolphins, and Joe.

Yep. Those are all three heroes. Yeah. A lot of the, like, medical personnel probably could count. Yeah. And you don't know how many dolphins. There's probably what? How many dolphins you say?

Six. There's like 20 heroes in this story, Jeff. I would say. I do want. It'd be crazy to be a surgeon and just have that come in. Just a dude that's like missing his back. Or maybe it's just like normal and he just goes home and his wife's like, how's your day? And he's like, oh, you know, same old, same.

I want to bring up the dolphin thing. When I watched the show, I was prey, he doesn't bring up the dolphins. once. And that was the last interview they ever filmed with, like the last interview he ever did. And we're going to get to that. The shark finally got him. No, unfortunately, it's much, it's really sad, but we'll get to that. That was the last interview he did. And I kind of wonder, this is just me being a little bit of a, like, not devil's advocate, but maybe like a party pooper here. Skeptic, negative, really. I'm not totally sure about the. dolphin thing. And I just, it just seems like if you were doing a show, that would be like your

hook. That would be the thing you would want to talk about. And they didn't include it. So I do wonder if maybe as he got older, he decided not to include that part. Maybe he hallucinated or something. I don't know. But on the other hand, there seemed to be multiple eyewitnesses that said dolphin. Yeah. What that could have been, though, is someone seeing those dolphins and then seeing something thrashing it on the water and thinking it was a dolphin. when it was actually a shark. So I'm not going to say the dolphins didn't happen.

I'm not going to say they happened. I'm going to operate on the assumption that they did happen, but I did want to put just a tiny shred of doubt because I thought it was really strange they didn't include that in that show. Could be they just didn't have time for it and they didn't see it as relevant. But to me, it's like the most interesting part of the story. Yeah. I'll say it did happen.

Okay. Yeah, I'm going to say it happened too. Okay. So dolphins and sharks don't avoid each other. They often are in the same places at the same time. And dolphins sometimes will just, like, antagonize a shark. They'll, like, run into it and ram it and stuff. They're much more agile in the water than a shark is, so they can do that and get away with it.

That could have been what was going on here, is they, like, saw the sharks. Do sharks ever eat dolphins? They would if they could, but I don't think they hardly ever catch them. I do think, though, and don't quote me on that. Maybe they do more than I know. But to me it seems like it would be hard for them to catch a dolphin. So I don't think these dolphins were like, we need to save our friend. But I think they might have just been like, let's fuck with this shark, you know?

Yeah. So that might have been what happened. All right. Six weeks later, Todd was out surfing with his friends again. He recovered really quickly. What? The main thing he had to recover was like blood loss. His leg was okay.

Six weeks. Six weeks after this attack. So even the after the surgery photos, they really pieced him together really well. Like really all that had to recover was like his suture wounds and his blood. Like he just had to get all that blood back. Wow. It didn't ruin any of his organs. It didn't cut any like major arteries.

It really just like really ripped up his tissue. So he got really like, wow. I'm thinking of like my beaver attack story where the guy just got like bit by the beaver once in the leg and it like broken artery and he bled out. This guy got tore out of shreds by a shark and he's surfing six weeks later. Yeah. It's pretty amazing. He actually got really into both dolphin and shark conservation. He was an outspoken ally to both species.

Sharks really need it. Dolphins do to some extent, but they're also very beloved. And really tragically, in 2016, four months after he filmed this I Was Prey interview, he passed away in a car accident. And it actually made me really emotional when they brought that up because they just played a segment of him just laughing. And then they like did the little on-screen text that said he had died. And he just seemed really cool and really upbeat. And everyone really just seemed to love him. And it was a big loss for the surfing community.

everyone really liked this guy and he was famous for having survived this attack. So it was a bummer. It really bummed me out actually. Yeah, that's too bad. You're great at protecting your data, but lots of places could still expose you to identity theft. I thought it was safe.

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bit about these different types of great white shark attacks, I want to ask you, what category do you think his attack falls into? Well, Jeff kind of said it in a way that was maybe he didn't intend it as a joke and I just took it to be this way. But since the dolphins were there, obviously, there was like a food source happening there and maybe the shark was just feeling a little territorial and wanted to keep that portion of the ocean to himself. I don't know. That's just like

if that's the one circumstance I can see that it was a territorial attack. I didn't even think about that. These dolphins might have been antagonizing the shark already before these guys even showed up and then it was just so pissed off that it charged the first thing it saw. It seems a bit predatory to me just because

it was like a double attack. Like a lot of times with like the territorial, I feel like they kind of just send a message. Yeah. But this guy seemed to really be trying to eat him. So I think that's really interesting, Mike. I don't think that's out of the question. I can't like clearly say in this one what it was. What my knee-jerk reaction was, was that it was, it started as a predatory attack.

It thought that he was like something that was, typical food and that's why it hit him so hard to begin with. And then once it had him in his mouth, it realized, like, I'm not into this. I don't really want to eat this. He had it in the mouth for a while, though. Yeah, but sometimes it takes a couple bites. It was also chomping, half of the chomp was a surfboard and he was just like, this isn't food.

This kind of sucks. Yeah. So he probably just left. And, you know, these stories, it seems like this takes forever, but this was probably all like a matter of 15 seconds that this happened. or maybe like 20, 30 seconds. I don't think it was very long. So I think it could go anyway.

I think it could have been a true predatory attack. I think it could have been started as a predatory and went to it deciding that it, you know, didn't want him. I think it could have been territorial and I think it could have even been exploratory. It's not unknown in these exploratory attacks or incidents that they'll take multiple bites before they really decide, I don't want this. I have a stupid question. Yeah. So, like, how good are sharks at, like, spitting something out that's not food? Like, is it possible he just got him stuck in his teeth?

It could be. And just, like, couldn't get him out of his mouth. It could be. And, like, I, especially with the surfboard, I could see it, like, trying to shake the surfboard loose. But, yeah, I don't know. So I think that, like, it could have gone anyway. Mike, I think that's a really interesting point about the territoriality that I didn't think these dolphins could have really just been pissing the shark off and it decided to take it.

out on Todd. Anyway, so I want to talk a little bit about how badly demonized sharks are, because I do think there's a few species that we talk about on this podcast that are kind of just on everyone's list of what they're afraid of. And unfortunately, sharks are one of them. And I think when you're afraid of an animal, you are much more ready to demonize it and to be scared of it and to really, like, get into these stories and think, like, these are bloodthirsty monsters. And that's not at all the case. Yeah. They're really key to their ecosystems.

They're super beautiful. Like, if you've ever been in the water with a shark, there's nothing that moves through the water like a shark. They're absolutely gorgeous. And they're just really, I mean, they're important. They're the top predator in the ocean. So we just, there's a lot to talk about there. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the psychology of why everyone is so afraid of shark attacks. And I wanted to ask you guys why you think that is.

I think it's the eyes, honestly. Eyes and teeth just look really scary. Yeah. I think it's the same with like vipers. Vipers just kind of look evil to me. Their eyes look like very scary. Yeah, I think sharks kind of have that too. Where like if you look at a huge shark, they just look scarier than most animals.

Yeah. Mike, what do you think? I think it's Jaws, the movie. I think that's a big part of it for sure. So I had a couple theories too. And Jeff, yours plays into it and so does yours, Mike. I do think they're not a very cute animal to a lot of people. And that is part of why they have such a bad reputation.

Like, people are afraid of them just because they don't seem cute. I think Jaws did really scare a whole few generations of people. Like, I was scared to get in the pool after I saw Jaws. I think a big part of it is just that it's such an alien environment. When you're in the water, you feel totally out of it. control and helpless and the thought of something like rushing up from the deep to get you is really, really scary and just you feel powerless. When I went shark diving and I was in a cage, there was one point where I looked down and there's this metal grating and I could see a great white come out

from like the dark water below us and like shoot up to the surface. And it was so scary. Like it was terrifying how it just materialized. It was also incredibly beautiful. But I do think out of all the animals we talk about, this is the one that everyone is just really afraid of. Like, when I'm in the water, I get afraid of sharks. If I'm just like bobbing in the ocean by myself, my mind almost always goes back to sharks, even though I understand them, even though I know my chances of being attacked or so small. So yeah, I don't know. I just kind of wanted to talk about that because I think it's an important note to, like, touch on that I think it's okay to be afraid of being attacked or bitten or whatever by an animal, but it's not okay then to demonize it.

and to say these are vicious, bloodthirsty monsters. Like, it's an animal, just being an animal. Yeah. You know? They're not really vulnerable at all either. You can't, like, headlock a shark. Yeah, there's really nothing you can do. And that's, yeah, it's scary.

How much damage can you do to their eyes? Like, can you make it so their eye doesn't work with, like, just your hands? It would be really hard because most predators don't, I mean, they don't have eyes like us that have this big empty socket behind them. A lot of them have, like, a hard. plate behind their eyes. So when you try and push on it, it just kind of squirts out and moves around. It's not like you can like push it back into its socket and pop it. They kind of just squirt around when you try and do it. So it's a lot harder than it seems. It seems hard. Yeah. I guess just to finish that note though, sometimes when sharks attacks happen in Australia,

especially, people go out and kill thousands of sharks because it's not like you can just find the one shark that did it really easily. And it's really bad for sharks when you're spreading like when you're fearmongering. And that's what we don't want to do that here. We don't want to fearmonger. This guy after being absolutely ripped apart by a great white fell in love with them and wanted to be an advocate for them. So I do think it's important that we just realize these are really important animals. It's okay to be afraid of them, but that shouldn't turn into hate. You know, We need to recognize that they belong on this planet as much as we do, if not more so. Well said, Wes.

Yeah, they've been here way before humans. Yeah, I mean, they're really cool. I love sharks so much. You're going to be a shark someday. Yeah, I hope so. I don't want, we'll talk more about conservation in the categories. But that's the story of Todd Endress. And do you guys have any questions about it?

I don't. Nope. Rest and peace, Todd. You said, wait, I guess I do. So Todd went and surfed in the red triangle again? Yeah, he surfed on that exact same beach. So Joe's the only one that didn't. Joe's the only one that didn't.

Well, I knew he surfed again. I just didn't know if he went in the red triangle. If you remember, like, the Robbstock story, Rob went and dove again and was like an avid surfer and ocean. But his brother, like, wouldn't do it. And I think sometimes the people that see the attack have a much harder time than the people that are actually being attacked. Yeah.

Okay, that's the story. Let's get into our categories. So category one, I wanted to ask you guys, what is your favorite moment from the movie Jaws? I'll go first. All right. There's a part in Jaws where they pull out a tiger shark, and it's like on the pier, and they're all looking at it, and what's his face? Richard Dreyfus's character says it's a tiger shark, and there's this guy who turns to the camera, he goes, a what? And he says it just like, Mike, I might have to have you cut it in, but it's so funny. Every time I watch it, I forget about it, and then I remember it and it just cracks me up. That's my favorite moment of the entire movie.

Mine's got to be when Jaws starts eating the boat and then eats Quinn. Quinn, yeah. Quint? Yeah, Quint. Yeah, I say Quinn. Robert Shaw. That's a gnarly scene and just his screams and everything are really. Yeah, like if if I'm watching Jaws and I'm like know that that part's going to be anywhere close to coming up

I'm waiting you're sitting down yeah yeah Mike my favorite part is for sure Quintz USS Indianapolis monologue yeah it's that's my something about that whole scene just like is so captivating and it really amplifies the next you know the next day when the whole shark attack actually goes down and gets eaten but man This is not a movie podcast, but like that is a fine bit of acting, Robert. Yeah. And also just how they go from being so like joky and grab assy. And then all of a sudden it just gets really serious.

The tone is really cool. Yeah, it's great. You feel it. It's perfect movie. None of us shows the little kid getting eaten. No, that's my favorite attack scene in the movie. That one hits hard. Yeah.

Okay, my second question for you guys, pop culture related, was what is your favorite movie featuring surfing. I'm guarantee you, me and Jeff have the same one. Mine's point break. Yeah, it's all three of us. But having anticipated that answer, yeah. I'm an FBI agent. I want to give a special shout out, and this is maybe even cheating because it is a movie

that is about surfing, but the endless summer duology. I don't know. As a landlocked little kid. I wasn't really landlocked, but like I was nowhere close to the surfing culture and I watched them when I was really little because my dad loved them. I love those things too. And it just made me want to be a surfer when I grew up so bad. Yeah. Like just a fantastic cinematography, surfing adventure, everything about them is just amazing. With point break, I love that movie because it's like my favorite surfing movie, my favorite

bank robbing movie, and like my favorite FBI movie. I think it's all three, you know? it's like so many different it fits so many different categories it does it's a great movie all right so my next our next category is going to be um what would mike and jeff do so yeah the we're just going to say what would you do you're surfing and you get attacked by a gray white shark well it's interesting because i was going to say like i'm i'll just have the dolphins help me yeah and then that's he did so like I think I would just done what he did done exactly what Todd did it sounds like you would have lived through it Mike I would have had two surfboards with me so I could have had one on each side so the shark is biting only surfboard a little Mike sandwich yeah yeah I like that

all right so Jeff yours I guess works because we proved it Mike I think yours would actually work pretty well too so for once you guys yeah did it did it well so really the key with shark attacks is just avoiding them because again it once you're in the mouth of a great white shark there's very little you can do you can try and strike the nose or the eyes or the gills and that might it might work the shark might just decide this isn't worth it but really the main thing is avoiding them so what you're going to want to do is avoid areas with lots of seal activity or sea line activity don't go in the water in places where sharks have recently been seen or known hot spots of sharks, pay attention to anything that might be happening in the water. So if they're

circling birds or lots of animals feeding or schools of dolphins or whatever, there might be a shark nearby. You're going to want to use the buddy system. A lot of shark attack survivors, including Todd, live because they have a friend that shows up to help them. You want to avoid low light, so don't be out in like nighttime, dusk or morning. That makes it a little bit harder for the shark to actually figure out what you are. You want to avoid murky water, so avoid like river mouths or places where the water's a lot murkier. If you're bleeding, you might want to stay out of the water. There's really no clear-cut answer on menstruation.

So people that menstruate, if you're menstruating, you might want to not go in the water. I don't want to say for sure either way. Is that thing with sharks true where they like smell blood a mile away? Yeah, they can smell it really close or from really far away. and they do pick up on it. I don't know if a mile is true, but they do pick up on it, small amounts of blood in the water.

And then if you do see a shark, you're going to want to tell anyone else that's in the water, stay calm, avoid being like jerky and splashing and everything. Keep the shark in front of you. And if you can get anything in between you and the shark, do it. So if you can get underwater and, like, if you have any kind of pole or anything to keep in front of you in the shark, that creates a barrier between you and that shark.

and it will discourage it usually from coming in and actually biting. Okay. Do they use the four longi gorilisi to smell the blood? The amputated Lorenzini? No, that's to detect movement. So if you're splashing around in the water, that's what the amputated Lorenzini would pick up on. All right.

Stop, drop, and roll. That's what they say, right? That's not what you do. Okay, so we're going to do our Anaconda scale for this episode. Oh, let's do it. So for Todd, is he a J-Lo, an ice cube, an Owen Wilson, a John Voight? Is that all we have? Yeah.

I'm going to say an ice cube. I almost feel like inherently surfers are Owen Wilson's. That's good point. Just because they know. They go out into the ocean and they know. And it's not them being dumb. It's just them, like, assessing the risk and their appetite for risk is a threshold a little different from the average human.

That's a good point. I don't know. Yeah, I'd say, I'd say Owen too. Yeah, I think he's an Owen Wilson. Like Ice Cube didn't want to be there. He wanted to be there, you know? Yeah, right. That's true.

I do, I respect the passion of surfers, and I do get that that's just, I do, I do, I think it's neat that a lot of surfers just say, this is an acceptable risk, and they do it anyway? And rarely when surfers are bitten by sharks, do they say, like, I want to kill every shark in the world they almost always are like well that's what happens and you know i still love surfing and i love sharks so so we'll say we'll say he's in owen but not like like he was not dumb for being a surfer like you know it's not like he was being dumb we'll give him like a owen cube put himself in a situation where he could get attacked right you said this place was steps from the

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When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Let's do our cage match. Yeah, so I wanted to just know, like, great whites, how they stack up. against all the other sharks. So like how much better of a fighter or like a predator are they than all the other sharks? Yeah, that's a good question.

And actually, I learned something new when I was doing this episode. I always assumed that Great Whites were the largest of the macro predator sharks. So like sharks that eat like sea turtles or seals or sea lions, not ones that are eating like krill and Plankton. And they're not. Tiger sharks get longer than Great White. Greenland sharks get longer than Great Whites. That's why I was going to get. I think mass-wise, great-whites might be bigger than both of those, but length-wise,

they're not. So I do think there's an argument for like a good fight between a really big tiger shark and a really big Great White and a really big Greenland shark and a really big Great White. Greenland sharks, though, are really slow and sluggish. I don't actually think the Great White's going to win that one. But I think there's an argument with a Tiger Shark. I think that one could go either way, but my money would be on the Great White. What about a full-grown, huge whale shark?

The Great White. Yeah. They don't have anything to use. No, I don't think a Great White would ever attack one. I'm not sure about that. Maybe it does happen sometimes. But I think it's just too big a prey for it, and it would have to bite it too many times before it finally dies. And then it's also not really, like, blubbery, and that's what they like.

But wild sharks just couldn't do anything. thing to like take down a great white whale sharks all they can do is like swing their tail to to discourage something so just swallow you a hole yeah I guess probably not a great white um okay so that's I'd say tiger shark is the one where it could be a pretty interesting battle but I would still put my money on the great white great white's going to win most all the time yeah and on average they're bigger exceptional tigers on average they're bigger than tiger sharks but tiger sharks can go a little longer apparently. And if there's a shark biologist out there listening right now that wants to refute me on that, I would definitely welcome it because I'm not a shark biologist. And just like a refresher,

the only animal like that's like for sure tougher than a great white in the ocean is an orca. Orca, I think, well, like tougher. I don't know what you mean by tougher. Like a humpback whale. Or blue whale. Yeah. But but I think as far as a predatory animal in the ocean, Orcas and sperm whales would both have a pretty good match against a great white. Orca would kill it, no problem. Spirm whale, I don't know which way it goes. Oh, yeah, sperm whale have teeth, huh? Yeah, they're predatory.

But orcas are like hunters and, I mean, they like hunt seals and sea lions. Sperm whales are mostly just diving deep for squid. So they're not, they don't have that same kind of, I don't know. I shouldn't say much more because I don't know as much. But I know orcas are famous for being such good hunters. So that's the alpha predator. That's the one that Great Whites would have to be most worried about besides us. Great White's probably second or third.

Probably. They're in the top three. Yeah, they're up there. Okay. Okay, so that's that for that category. Mike recently came up with a new segment that we really like. Mike, do you want to do it? I want to do this.

Okay. This is our first time doing it not on Patreon. Yeah, that's right. It's fine. Okay, so whenever we are planning episodes, I was like to peruse Cora. CORA is basically just a website where people can ask questions and professionals in that specific field can weigh in with answers to, you know, Q-U-O-R-A, Cora. Right. Professionals or just, you know, right?

That's the idea. But inevitably, I'll run across some of the dumbest things I've ever read on the Internet. And so I thought maybe it'd be kind of fun to compile some of these questions and answers and, uh, let you guys get on the, uh, it came from Quora. We got to have like a music sting that like I'll come up with something, but this is like a thereman from Quora. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So you guys ready for this? Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. So question number one. Why does no aquarium in the world have a great white shark? We have two people weighing in on this. And you can help us understand after we get through the answers.

But Cedric answers with because people don't like to see them scary. And they don't also want to be. killed. All people ever want to see at the aquarium is fishes and crabs. And then Ben. Ben weighs in. He says, logically, like other fishes, they cannot fulfill their destiny in an aquarium. I would agree more with that one. That's somewhat true. Great Whites are like, they're notorious because for being really migratory. They're, They travel really large distances. They exploit a number of different food sources.

And animals like that that are so highly migratory don't do well in aquariums for the most part. And so Great Whites are notorious for not surviving in aquariums. I think the longest that one ever lasted was a year. It was a really young shark in Monterey Bay. They put it in the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It lasted about a year. And then they just start running into the glass

and just declining in health really rapidly. and when that happens, they just go re-release them. But they don't do well. And I think it's just because of how migratory they are. Not because they're scary and people wouldn't want to see it. I don't think so. I'm not sure it's the migratory thing either, but I think it is. Yeah, for the record, I would be pretty excited to see one in an aquarium.

Yeah, it'd be neat. Even though, like, I'm glad that they're not. I think it's cool that they don't like to live in aquariums, you know? So what you were saying, Wes, the professionals that answered that question, And that's mostly what they were saying is just there's just not enough space for them because they move so much. And there's just not a realistic way to create like a tank or an enclosure for them. Okay. Question number two.

Which is the most dangerous shark? Steve says, the ones that eat you. The rest are harmless. Don has this to say, the shark that bites you on the weenie. Wes? Oh, this is so dumb. I'm not know. What's the one that bite you on the weenie again, Wes?

I don't know. Okay. Last question from Cora. A user asks, what kind of an animal is a great white shark? And there was only a single answer and it said dot, dot, dot, really? And it's not that dumb of a question because at first I kind of laughed at it and it's like, oh, it's right in the name, duh. But you brought this up earlier. Sharks are fish.

Yeah. And we have had some confusion. that in the podcast people saying, oh, you said it was a fish when it was a shark. And it's, they're the same, they're one and the same. Sharks are fish. They're, they're fish that have skeletons made of cartilage. There's a word for that, but I always say it wrong. Cartilaginous, I think is how you say it. But they are fish. They're just fish with cartilage instead of fish with bone. Cool. Yeah. There it is. Yeah, the only thing in a shark that's bone, I believe, is its teeth. I think everything else is cartilage.

Okay, thanks Mike I do love these Quora questions That's great All right So our next category is Listener questions Okay Oh baby

So we're going to start out with a couple Patreon questions This one This first one is just kind of mean But I'm gonna I'm gonna do it So This listener says

Can Jeff try and pronounce my name. I haven't practiced it, so we're just going, we're just going for it here. Guianina Vescovi Giority. You'll have to let us know how he did. I can't even guess at what nationality that is. Is it Italian? It sounds Italian to me.

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's Italian. So it would probably be like a hard G, a Gennini. Gianina? Yeah, probably. Gianina. No, it's Gianina. Okay.

Gianina? Gianna. Gianna Vescovi, Chaudi. There we go. Yeah, the hand motion really helped you get through that. This one is kind of funny, but from Karen, if a person somehow ate a venomous snake without cooking it just swallowed whole, would the venom contained in the snake still hurt them as is digested? so you're assuming it doesn't bite you as you're swallowing it whole. It wouldn't.

It might make you a little sick, like you might throw up or something, but venom has to be injected into the bloodstream. At least snake venom does. So again, like poisons ingested, venom's injected. We say that all the time on the show. So really for venom to do its work, it has to make its way into your bloodstream. And if you're eating it, that's not happening. So you might get a stomach ache.

throw up, but it's not going to kill you or make you have to go to the hospital even probably. That's a good question. Yeah. Good job, Karen. Yeah, it's creative. From Lindsay, if you had to fight a typical Halloween creature, vampire, werewolf, zombie, etc., which one would you pick and why? And if you're turned into one of those creatures, which would you want to be? Well, fighting the zombies.

I mean, I'm team Edward. I'm fighting the zombie. Okay. Team Edward, yeah. So, yeah, I just feel like vampires, like, worst-case scenario, you're just a vampire that's hot and lives forever. Yeah, exactly. Vampires got the best deal. I don't know.

So, I don't know. What about where you only have to worry about being a werewolf really once a month, right? That's true. So I think that might not be that bad. Teen wolf makes a werewolf seem kind of cool. Yeah. And sometimes you could just really like, like, you might be like, you know what, this month, when? it's full moon, I'm gonna go kill some people.

And then maybe the next month you're just like, I'm gonna take it easy this month. Yeah. It's great too because you wake up the next morning and you're like, maybe I killed someone, maybe I didn't. Who knows? You never have to live with the guilt. The transformation seems painful though.

You lose clothes a lot that way. I'm split between werewolf and vampire. I think you both make some good points. No one wants to be a zombie? No. I want to fight the zombie for sure. Slow moving. If there's a zombie apocalypse, I probably wouldn't want to survive that long.

No, but I'm fighting a zombie out of those for sure. All right. So this question, I'm still not sure. I understand everything going on, but here we go. Okay. This is from Natasha. Hey, guys, I have a question for each of you to chime in on. It's weird, so buckle up.

What would you do with a shrew? I was gifted a shrew in a box out of my friend's freezer, recently and I'm pretty torn on what to do with it. I don't know the backstory, but it's laid on a bed of toilet paper and dried flowers in a small cigar box. Super cute, but it feels wrong for it to be hanging out with my pyrogees on pierogies in the freezer, some type of food in the freezer. You feel? Do you guys think this would be a cute curiosity to get stuffed or should I bury this little fellow in the

It's dead. Yeah. Buried. Yeah. It took me a while listening to it to Noah's dead. Like who gifts their friend a dead shrew on a pile of flowers? Yeah. Get new friends.

Or maybe your friends are cool, actually. I don't know how I feel about this. Yeah. Is your friend like a dog? I definitely wouldn't keep it. Yeah. I could feed it to my snake if you want to send it to me. Yeah.

Make sure it's frozen still. We'll feed it to smithers. All right. And then a couple of questions from Instagram. M. Jurganaut. Can Wes explain the science behind how polar bears might have originated from grizzlies? Essentially, like, what we think happened is that brown bears or grizzly bears have existed for millions of years. And that that probably two million years ago or maybe even more recently, there was a brown bear or a group of brown bears that started catching seals in the Arctic and then slowly evolved in.

to polar bears because they were really just keying in on feeding on seals. So they developed the white fur for better camouflage. They developed all these different traits that polar bears have that are unique. But they are an offshoot of brown bears. So brown bears and them are really close cousins, and that's why they can hybridize. But that's the general idea. Maybe on our next polar bear episode, I'll explain that a little bit better. But that's kind of the basics.

Cool. from a wandering Troy, what do you think bears dream of? Electric sheep. Food. I just guess they dream of food. I see Bryce dreaming all the time, my dog, and I just know that she's dreaming of, like, treats and food. And so I would imagine bears are the same way. Marmalade sandwiches.

Pot of honey. Yeah. But who knows? That's a good question. We don't know. We'll never know. Do you think when bears are like... Occasional sex stream.

Yeah, maybe. Probably, yeah. When bears are kind of visualizing their, you know how like we always imagine ourselves like, oh man, I wish I was totally ripped and had a six pack and all that. Do you think bears imagine themselves just being like super huge and ready to hybrid? They're like, man, I wish I was Hank the Tank. Yeah, Hank the Tank is like the ideal image of what a bear wants to look like. Which, by the way, we are going to talk about Hank the Tank in the news episode.

Oh, good. I don't know. I can't say it's hard for me to. they're looking in the mirror, West? Maybe. Yeah. I do think, like, for them, the best quality would just be super fat, to be as fat as possible. Like, the female's going to think a big old fat male's the hottest.

Yeah, he's good at getting food. He's got good genes. Bears are so lucky in that sense. Yeah. All right. Thanks for the questions, everyone. All right, well, let's go into our conservation corner. This is always a hard one when we're talking about a shark.

It's truly the one conservation issue that's kept me up at night and that's brought me to tears is thinking about how many sharks are being killed every year. So we've talked about it before. It's up to 100 million sharks a year. That number is actually anywhere between 30 million and 100 million. It's really hard to know how many are actually being killed. Even if it's 30 million, like it's way too many. There's a lot of reasons that's happening. It's overfishing, but there's a lot of things about it.

overfishing that causes it. They're often taken for their meat, their fins, their gill plates, and their liver oil. They're caught incidentally by fishermen using nets or long lines, so they're bycatch, but then they keep them or they kill them and throw them back in the water. It's a really, really huge problem, and it's something we need to fix. If this were happening to dolphins or whales or something that we see as a cute, lovable animal, people would be up in the streets protesting and because it's sharks it's been a lot harder to get public opinion on their side and they are so important to the oceans they're important to people and cultures all around the world and they're really important to me personally so i don't want to get too emotional on

the podcast but i really care about sharks and i hope you guys do too yeah yeah i love sharks i saw some sharks at an aquarium today. Yeah, that's cool. And I was like, that's a, I got, so beautiful. I got like half of them right when I was telling the person I was with what they were. Nice. As far as great whites are concerned, they are really hard to get an accurate number on because they are so migratory, but they are protected in most of the countries where they're found.

They're considered vulnerable, and the reason they were given that IUCN listing is because we don't really know. So it was kind of like a preemptive protection because there's a good chance their numbers are going down, but we're not really sure. So they're considered vulnerable. And they are caught sometimes by fishermen and as by catch. All right. So we need to do our ouchies and our claws or our claws. So owches. Toots works with sharks. It does. We should say tooths for this one. So ouchies, I'm, I'm going to say, oh, I'm going to say nine ouchies. Yeah, I'll go, I'm thinking nine or eight. Yeah. I think it's like, the only thing that would make it not a 10 is that he, like, recovered in six weeks. That's what I was thinking to. It's pretty quick recovery.

But man, he was super close to dying. Yeah. And he got his back pulled off. And he's uncomfortable in the shark's mouth. Yeah. The sand rubbing into the wound really got me. The sand. That's gnarly. I'll go to nine. I'm with you.

It's not a 10 because he didn't die. It's a 9 or an 8. So yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle. I'll say 8.5. 8.5 sounds good to me. Yeah. Can you imagine how mad Anakin Skywalker would be if he got sand in that wound after all that? He ate sand.

I'm going to say 9 as well. I don't know. I feel like I don't really have to explain why. Yeah. It's a bad. It's a bad one. All right. And then our tooths for this animal.

It's a 10-tooth animal for me. It's easily top five. It's if not top three. Like animals in the world? Yeah. Of my favorite animals. Yeah. It's my favorite shark.

I think they're incredibly beautiful. No. What? More than a whale shark? That's a good point. I don't know. It's constantly back and forth between those two. But I would probably say,

Great whites for my favorite shark. Okay. If I were to get a tattoo of a shark, it would probably be a well shark, but who knows. Which I might do soon. We'll see. Where would you get it? Your face? My forearm.

Your butt, dude. Swimming out of his butt. That'd be so funny, dude. You got to do that. How many? 10 teeth for me. Teets. Yeah, 10.

I forget what I ranked it on the last one. Ooh. That's a shock. It's like somewhere between 11 to 15. You mean you don't have these all like categorically filed away? Someone, oh man, I need that guy to send me that list. They need to join our Discord because someone made a subcategory in the Discord, Jeff's Animal Rankings.

And no one's posted in yet. No one's posted there yet. Yeah. All right. Well, thanks everyone for joining us talking about Great Whites, an animal that we all really love. And thanks for listening to us. Thanks as always for following. Yeah, we love you guys.

Thanks so much. And thanks for all the shirt orders, too. And the shirts are like, Like our store. That's an evolving thing for us. We're getting better at them. So if you do have any complaints or problems with your shirts, let us know. Yeah.

We'll do what we can to fix it. And for sure. We're trying to get better with every new release on the quality and everything. But it's a learning process for us. So hopefully you've all been happy. Tooth and Clawpod.com to see our store. Yep. Well, thanks, Wes.

That was great. You really brought the magic. That was really fun. You didn't. You've done it again. Sharks. Well, we love you guys. We'll see you.

Bye. Bye.