Wild Times: Wildlife Education - TWT #98 - Shark Week 2022 with Dave Ebert & Andrew Lewin!

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

Joining The Wild Times Pod this week is Dave Ebert & Andrew Lewin, co-hosts of Beyond Jaws Podcast. Beyond Jaws is the official podcast of the Save Our Seas Foundation and aims to engage and inform shark enthusiasts, the general public and more! Dave Ebert AKA ”The Lost Shark Guy” is known for finding unknown or little-known sharks. Beyond Jaws Podcast: https://www.speakupforblue.com/show/beyond-jaws/ Enjoy, brosteners! TWT #98 - The Breakdown 00:00 - Intro 02:09 - Beyond Jaws Podcast 03:10 - Dave’s Thoughts on Shark Weed 10:30 - Are There Sharks Everywhere In The Ocean? 11:30 - The Effect ”Jaws” Had on Society & Research 19:20 - Early Days of Shark Behavioral Research 23:40 - Academic vs. Observational Scientists 32:55 - Is The Younger Generation Willing to Do The Dirty Work of Shark Research? 36:25 - California’s Ocean is Fantastic 38:20 - Forrest Encounter With A Mako Shark 42:15 - What Makes A Shark, A Shark? 44:10 - The Most Underrated Sharks 58:14 - Battle Royale 1:09:20 - Forrest’s Shark Week Show Teaser - The Island of The Walking Shark 1:14:20 - Wrapping Up Leave a review on iTunes Apple Podcast: https://thewildtimespodcast.com/itune... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wildtimespod/ Official Website: https://thewildtimespodcast.com/ Info: https://thewildtimespodcast.com/info Merch: https://thewildtimespodcast.com/merch Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wildtimespod

Wild Times. Here we go. Episode number, I literally don't even know. I've completely lost count at this point. Doesn't matter. Don't care. It's number 98. Kyle just texted the group. Good to see. Episode number 98 of the Wild Times podcast, the greatest podcast in the world, known by all wide and far. I am your host, Forrest Galante, the Broologist, joining me the Forever Handsome, the looking mighty groomed at the moment. well-rested for a guy with a newborn. Mr. Peter Fitzer, PhD in podcasting, the professor. What's going on, Peter?

Not much, man. I appreciate that. I haven't washed my hair in probably five or six days. It's nice when you got long hair. You could just pull it back into a ponytail and nobody knows doing good, man. You look good. I'm not just saying that. You look very well-rested for a guy with a newborn.

You really do. I wish I could say the same about you, but thank you. That's very mean. All right. Well, I'm going to move on to our lovely guests who I like so much more than Peter. Joining us tonight in honor of Shark Week, which is coming up this week, very exciting. We have two of my favorite sharkiest people. And joining us tonight, very excited for this.

We have at Speak Up for Blue, a good buddy in mind, the brocaster, Andrew. What's going on, Andrew? Nothing much, man. I'm excited to be here. This is going to be a lot of fun. Yeah, it's fun. We're going to talk about how you became the king of podcasting, how you got into all these sharky podcasts. There's a lot to dig into there.

I'm sure Peter's going to have some nerd questions for you. Right on. And my good longtime friend, co-host of Extincter Alive Live Land of the Lost Shark, the Elasmo Broologist himself, Mr. Dave Ebert. Who! Clapping sound effects. Very nice. What's up, Dave? How are you, buddy?

Hey, yeah, thanks, man. Thanks, buddy. I'm super excited to finally get a chance to be on your podcast here. I've been following it since you started it. And I just can't tell you how excited I'm to actually be here. Thank you. Yeah, it's great. Super stoked to have you.

So, guys, it's Shark Week. You run a Shark Podcast. Before we even dig into all the meat and potatoes of fun sharky stuff and Shark Week stuff, tell people where they can check out your podcast if they want to continue listening to Shark nonsense. Yeah. Well, yours isn't nonsense. Sorry, ours is nonsense. Yours is actually shark science, in fact.

Ours is nonsense. I should clarify. No, Rob. Yeah, you can go to any podcast app and just look up Beyond Jaws. You can also go to the website. We have a host of podcast called Speak Up for Blue.com. And you can just click on the Beyond Jaws podcast if you want to listen on the web. But we're on Apple, Spotify, all those wonderful places. And soon to be on YouTube, too, with your show. There you go.

that we just interviewed you on Forrest, and that's going to be up on YouTube as you're listening to this. So you can subscribe as you're listening, and then after this show, you can go listen to ours. Nice. There you go. Dave, what do you think of Shark Week? You've been in the shark world as long as anybody.

You know, Shark Week, in my opinion, it's a good thing overall. I think sometimes it gets a bad rap. There's definitely some muddying of the waters with some nonsense that we won't talk about too much or discover it. You'll cancel me. But what do you think? Tell us about Shark Week. What are your thoughts?

You know, the biggest thing for me that, you know, because they obviously, like a lot of these programs, they beat the white shark, the flying white shark stuff to death. It's just, you know, how many times can you show a white shark flying around in the air? And the thing I like about the show you and I did, Land of the Lost Sharks, and have done some of the other alien sharks here, is that we go out and look for unusual sharks,

little known species. And that to me is where the fact that discovery is taking a chance and doing some of those different types of, looking for different types of sharks. They wouldn't normally, most people don't think about because if you ask the average person how many species of sharks are out there, they'll say, well, maybe five or 10 or 20 or something. Or they'll throw around some number. But if I tell them, there's 1,280 species of sharks out there, their jaws just, you know, drop open. They can't believe there's so much out there. And yet, you know, people just don't know that. I think that's really been great that's like discovery and stuff

with Shark Week to like highlight some of these little-known species because they're not, as you know, forest, they're not easy to find. They're easy, you know, you just got to go out there. It takes a little, it takes an effort to go find those things. And a lot of times it's just a matter of going to actually look for them because nobody outside myself and you and a couple others, nobody bothers to even go look for them.

But they're so important to the system that, you know, I think it's terrific that Shark Week at least features some of those. some of those little known species out there. You know what's weird for me is they're not considered sexy, right? We're talking tiger sharks and white sharks and bull sharks and like they're sexy, right? They're big and they're mean and they eat them. I'm very attracted to that type of shark. I imagine that.

Yeah, I imagine that. But those are the sexy sharks. I call bullshit on that. I think the sexy sharks are like your cat sharks and your lantern sharks and these things with these incredible unique patterns and like weird morphology. and goblin sharks with big rostrums and then things like sawfish. Those to me are sexy sharks and yet they're not getting the spotlight. Whereas the big toothy ones, sure, they all look a little different.

But at the end of the day, they're like all sort of filling the same ecological niche. They're kind of boring, if you ask me, they all do the same shit. Well, if you ask people like what sharks, you know, something about like sharks like describe or something, you never hear anybody say like, oh, you know, there's a pink shark with blue fins. And they just look at you like, what you have pink shark blue fins. But a goblin shark Bluefin. The Goblin shark.

Kyle, let's take a look at a goblin shark. I want to see a pink one with blue fins because I've seen Dave catch a goblin shark, but I haven't seen it pink with blue fins. Sorry, Dave. I didn't be interrupted. Please continue. Oh, no, that's fine.

That's fine. No, they're pinkish. They can be pinkish to whiteish. But nobody, you know, you'd have, when you see one of these ones that comes out very pink, and I did one for about four or five years ago, for Shark Week, an alien shark series. We went to Japan to catch a goblin shark.

We caught a couple of them. And the cool thing for me is we actually were able to put satellite tags on these things and let them go and swim around for a few days and kind of actually see what they do. Now, it's a little misleading here because these are mostly dead sharks and dead goblin sharks. And when they're dead, like you see a couple there where they're pinkish. That's more what their color is when you see them alive. Some of the ones you're looking at there, they're dead. If they're brownish color, they're dead or they're dying.

Yeah, that one. They're sort of dead or dying. Attractive fish. Let me tell you. That's the one you want to kiss on the mouth. That's for sure. Well, you know, I think... I had a girlfriend when I was 13 who had braces,

and it looked just like that, by the way. Sorry, Dave, go ahead. No, so the thing of the goblin shark, one of these little known things, is like they think, again, like white sharks or tiger sharks. But the goblin shark has the fastest jaw reflexes of any shark in the world. When that jaw... And if you want to think how the jaws come

out. It's a little exaggerated, but it's like if you ever watch the alien movies, how the alien has the jaws shut out. That's what the goblin shark can kind of, literally, that jaws come out at you. And it's the most rapid jaw protrusion to capture prey of any species, that includes the white shark.

To me, that's just fascinating stuff, but nobody would know that, you know, watching, you know, endless hours of flying white sharks, that there's these really cool sharks that do some bizarre, I mean, I think about, and I kind of wonder, once in time when they did the alien shark series, or not the alien shark, the alien, alien,

uh, movies that came out. If they actually, somebody had actually seen a goblin shark and the way the jaws protrude, that's where they got the idea for the alien. Oh, I guarantee it. I bet you a million dollars that's where they got it. That, that's like a whole thing. What's his name, Peter, the guy who made Avatar? Peter, Peter Jackson, no. James Cameron? No, James Cameron. James Cameron. James Cameron came out and said when he made Avatar that he drew all of his weird inspirations of all the, you know, the creatures in Pandora from real life animals. And basically, he took smaller critters and blew them up and changed their, their look. And he came out and said that. He's like, where else would I get them from?

You know, it's not just something that comes to me. It's like, I have to take inspiration from real creatures. And so, anyway, we're getting off on a tangent, but I think, uh, I agree with the point. Well, I have a comment on Avatar. Imagine if Avatar was just about the ocean. that would have been like same graphics but just about the like real ocean animals like the new thing yeah like somebody told me avatar two was all underwater it's underwater it's under water it doesn't have anything to do with ocean animals it's just like the alien kind of beast that they've thought of i think isn't it oh i don't know if octopuses were not so if everybody didn't know what one was and then you saw one and you saw what it could do you would

certainly think that that's like a creature out of a movie that doesn't really exist. I mean, it can just change color instantly and texture. Yeah. It's fluid. It's nuts. Could you imagine if you could just change skin texture whenever you felt like? You're like, I'm pissed off. I just want to be spiky, so nobody talks to me.

There's no way society would be able to handle at this point in time. If you can just change color at will, there's no way. Oh, my God. It would be amazing, though. It would be amazing. Well, or, or the first. flip side to that, Andrew, would all the woke stuff like disappear because we can all be whatever color we like and whatever texture we like? Yeah, whichever one we ever know.

There's going to be textureists out there who are like, oh, you're brick texture. He's all bumpy today. Yes. Yeah. So I think that's a pretty fair assessment of my feelings on Shark Week as well, Dave. I love Shark Week. You know what's funny is I've done six of them now. I've never seen a white shark during a Shark Week show. That's awesome. I've seen hammerheads and bull sharks and tigers, but I've never even been associated with a white shark during a Shark week show. And you'll remember, Dave, one of our camera guys saw a white shark in South Africa

while we were diving on one of the scouts while you and I were somewhere else doing something else. And then we went back and dove in like, oh, it'd be so good for the show. If a white shark buzzed us and then, of course, we never saw it again. Yeah, which leads me. Right, which leads me to my next point, which I think is fun to talk about with you guys here, sharks, right? People think about them. They go, oh, my God, if I touch the water, there's going to be sharks everywhere. They're going to be all over me.

There's 10 per square foot. As a layman, that is true. But is that not what you think, Peter? Like, you think if you go to the ocean, a shark and your feet touch the sand, you're going to get eaten by a shark. I've told the story before where I flew off a jet ski in the ocean and I was like terrified. trying to swim back to it. I was in a full-blown panic. If you get in your head, if you get it in your head, you can freak out in any water. Like I remember as a kid. Yeah, in the bathtub. Bathtub, pool, lake. It doesn't matter.

If you have it in your head that something's underneath and something's going to get you, it doesn't matter where you are, you can freak out. And let's be honest, Jaws did that to all of us as kids. Like, you know, you were scared. There's a Jaws Marathon coming up. Oh, I look forward to that. I'm sure. I'm sure. that's timed with Sharkweed. I probably got the distinction here being the only one that actually saw Jaws the summer came out in 1975 for none of you guys. I was not born.

I was not bored. I was not born. You guys weren't even in the construction phase. But I can tell you, having seen that when I was about 15 or 16 when that movie came out, it was like a scary monster movie. But, you know, I kind of grew up in my right here in the Monterey area. And like, I was already, I was already free diving and spear fishing in that point in time. And you just have my little perspective was different because you just knew there were white sharks were around.

But you just put it out of your mind. As far as I know, you're spearfisher too. But you just, you just go spearfishing. You go watch the movie. Like, wow, that was a really scary movie. And it was really cool and stuff. And, you know, people talk about all the negative sides from Jaws. But, you know, I can tell you, having lived it, that really is what started the build of,

started the whole thing on modern shark research was Jaws. Because people, in addition to all the bad stuff you hear, people started going, like, asking like, well, how many shark species are there? And how old do they get? And where do they live and where do they reproduce? And I was just kind of fortunate, you know, I started in college there in the late 70s, early 80s. There was a lot of funding started coming out for doing shark research.

And I was just really fortunate to catch that first wave of it at the time. And so there was a lot of it. there was a lot of negative. You hear the negative stuff on and on and on, but it was really a lot of the people that, like myself, we're for, we benefited because I wanted to study sharks from time that's five years old, but there was, there literally was no field of shark research unless you were studying shark attack.

That was it. That was the extent of it. I had, yeah. Because like you said, and just to clarify for the listeners, you hear the word jaws, and especially if you're into like the environmental, naturalist side of the world, you're like, jaws is the worst thing ever. because it led to fear of sharks,

and we want to murder all sharks now, and it's Jaws' fault, right? And I certainly don't agree with that wholeheartedly, but I get the point. But it's interesting to think of the flip side of that, which is like, oh, Jaws, yes, it definitely demonized and villainized sharks, but it also opened up this whole world of curiosity

for shark funding and research. That's pretty fascinating. I had no idea that that was the case. Yeah. Yeah. Well, see, the thing to me is a lot of the people, they're more in your age groups, to you guys, they're talking about how bad Jaws was.

And I'm like, well, you guys weren't even born yet. And you're telling me, you're trying to speak like, you know what happened. And here I, and I'm not unique, but myself and others, we live through this whole thing. And some of the people have had on our podcast beyond Jaws, like Chris Lowe is a professor at Long Beach State. He grew up in Martha's Vineyard. And like, for example, when we had him on our podcast, the two boys that played the sheriff's sons in the movie, they were classmates of his at school. That was pretty cool.

And so, like, yeah, and so there's a couple other people, Greg Schoomel, who's up in who studies the White Sharks in New England now. Again, here's another one that kind of grew up in that whole, had some direct connection with Jaws as well. And in fact, my one, my connection is if you watch Jaws, the last credit that comes up in the movie is say, Mr. LJV. Capanio, Stanford University, well, Caponez was my PhD advisor. Oh, cool. And he was the guy that, he was the guy that Steven Spielberg hired.

to design the mechanical jaw shark bruce in the movie and they flew him down there when he when he was a phd student to actually help design the thing so a number of us actually have some direct connections through professors or direct interaction with the movie and i just wish sometimes these people would kind of like these younger people kind of like give us a call or say hey what really happened at the time so when i get on shows like this i kind of go off and say hey no this is what really happened at the time yeah and uh It really led to, I mean, there was no such thing as shark conservation. That all came about because of Jaws. Literally.

And that seems to have a whole crazy. We did a whole, we've done a full like year of Beyond Jaws podcast. And we've talked to people who have been like been in shark research for for 25 years plus. And all of them said the same thing. Whether they were in New Zealand, whether they are in Australia, whether they were in like Sri Lanka. There was, there were no programs of shark. research that were around until like that Jaws era kind of came through and Dave actually says he goes these are the Jaws era scientists that have kind of built these programs you know that were never

existed nobody wants to know about sharks it's it's insane it was a general where we're people in my group we're the we're the Jaws generation as we tell them it's literally the Jaws generation so so it's got to be I mean do you think part of that was because it's so difficult to study sharks into actually, especially during that time, like, it was probably much harder to actually get in the water. Well, yeah, certainly the equipment, I mean, I look at, you know, people, like even just diving now, like when I used to, when I started like free diving here in Monterey Bay, and I was really young when I learned, you know, we'd get out the talcum powder to put it in the wetsuits to get into our wetsuits. Now you got all kinds of fancy. You got more, you know, you use different types of lotion stuff to get in. I use a product called shark snod.

by the way, which is a wetsuit loom. Not joking. It's very expensive, so I usually use horse conditioning. Is that a potential sponsor there for us? I think. Shark's not. Get your wetsuit lube only on the Wild Times. Discount code.

SH.J.A. Car. I don't know. No, I wish. That would be great because it's like $12 a bottle for wetsuit lube, which is insane. The shark's not figuring you get out. Oh, yeah. Anyway, sorry. Well, I see, the other thing I can tell you, I can tell you, like, we'd be

occasionally because shark attack. would be around here like the Monterey area or Santa Cruz. Before Jaws, it would just be like a little thing in the paper, oh, there was a shark attack here. But after Jaws, it became this, every attack became like this sensational story. And so that was a big change because suddenly people were like, oh, this is when people started thinking like, oh, my God, if I go in the water, I might be attacked by a shark.

Right. How is that like the forefront? The media hype from after the meet, after, again, after the movie came. came out before the movie, be like, oh, there was a shark attack. And that was, and that was, that was pretty much to be the extent of it. Do you think politicians, you think politicians saw Jaws and they saw the politicians and Jaws being so ignorant of the, of the shark, and be like, no, everything's fine. And they're like, we don't want to be that way.

We have to study them. We have to find out where they are, where they go so that we know everything so that we don't look. I think you're giving politicians way too much credit, man. Way too much credit. Yeah. Way too much credit. Maybe scientists were telling me, like, Dave and his colleagues were telling that to

politicians. So, hey, so you don't look like fools. Give us money and we'll study these things. Right. Well, some of the, a lot of the funding initially started because there were, there were shark fisheries that had been gone going. You know, things like people like talk today, like you can get you look at social media. You think they just discovered that shark finning just started last week. I mean, shark finning was going on like long before me, but things like shark finning and shark fishing, suddenly people started paying attention to it. And a lot of the funding early on had to do more with fisheries, had to do with like Asian growth,

population dynamics, reproduction. And I always, you know, when my colleagues and I, from my Jaws generation talk, it was a totally exciting time because there was no roadmap. There was nothing, it was literally, if you could think about it, well, let's go try this. And there was

no one saying like, well, you can't really do that or, no, no, we don't do that. It was literally like, if you could think of it in your mind, sure, why don't you go try it? We have no idea what's going to happen. So it was kind of a well-in-west golden. What's one you can remember that's like the craziest instance of that? Like just some crazy concoction of an idea to study sharks, like way back in the day. Well, a lot of it would go out. Well, probably the biggest thing that

I kind of people got to know me early on was I started watching sharks foraging and how they would hunt. And I was trying to put, I was trying to put all of this together. And again, There nobody had really done this before. I was watching this, and Forestville appreciate this. I couldn't, I was trying to figure out how these things were hunting because there's a coordinated pattern these things were doing. And my professor, Leonard Capano, he gave me a couple books. One was, they were by Hans Crook, one was on the spotted hyena, and one of the other ones

on the Serengeti Lion. And it was all about foraging how hyenas and lions forged. And this obviously I was going to, I went to Africa. And I started reading up on them. Then I would go out and spend time actually in the field, in the bush, watching hyenas and lions hunt. And I was going like, that's what these sharks are doing. If you look at what they're doing, including things like Sevengill sharks,

seven gills sharks, they pack hunt. And like one Sevengill shark can't subdue like a Cape Fur seal. It's too big. But a pack of them take them out. And these things will literally hunt in a pack. like again you know hyenas and stuff that they they might not be able to take out like a individual prey like a wildebeest or something but a whole a whole group of them well can take them can take them out and so that's what really that's where it's a kind of a nice watching how some

of these different things hunted and even things like you know learning about crocodiles how the crocodile behavior and and then killing machines realizing well they are they're they're they're they're they're they're just because they just see these like beautiful rivers. Yeah. They are. Oh, yeah. They really are.

They're made for. High up as they get. Yeah. But anyway. Yeah. But they would, but they would, you know, but if a crocodile is successful hunting in a certain little tributary, it'll stay there as long as the hunting is good.

And sharks, some sharks are the same way. If they know there's a good place to hunt, whether it's seals or fish or whatever. Humans. You know, they'll, they'll keep coming back to the same beach, the same cove, the same area. And again, what I'm talking about this is this is not just white sharks, but this is all these other species of sharks. They have their own unique patterns for hunting, but

you can't obviously spend as much time underwater as you can like out in the bush watching lions or hyenas. But you can learn, you can learn from them. And then if you watch what these things you're doing, if you get some and I was fortunate, I had some, and keep in mind, there was no drones when I was doing this stuff. There's

no cell phones, no drones. But you'd get up, you'd find locations, we knew the sharks were, you get up high and you're just watching down. And I wasn't trying to quantify stuff. I was just writing down field observations, which is what most naturalist historically would do. They just describe what they're seeing.

I think that's kind of an art that's lost today in the science community where you've got to quantify everything. You've got to run these models. I want to talk about that. I don't need to interrupt you now. I want you to finish your train of thought, but I want to talk about that for a second. So finish what you're saying,

and then we'll circle back to that observational science. Yeah, it's just like you, I just would sit there and write stuff down. And again, you were able to publish them of this stuff. Like, here's just an observational behavior. I didn't try to over, I didn't try to embell. I just, here's what I saw, tried to put in a context of like with some of these. And I read up a lot on lions and hyenas, and I talked to wildlife biologists on what their behavior.

And again, it was just a, it was suppositional a bit admittedly, but it was just there was the only way you could do it because you can't be in the water. but that is an art that's been completely lost, I think, in this younger generation. Of course, I'll let you roll. That's it. That is the segue I needed. Okay, so I say this all the time. Okay, and Dave, here's your chance to stand up for like traditional academics. And this isn't pointed at them because obviously I have many friends who are,

you're a traditional academic. But I've said on this podcast, and Peter can attest to this. What would you say 100 times, Peter? I've said that observational scientists are most of the time, know the animals better than academic scientists. And that's like this thing nowadays where it's like, oh, you're an academic, you know everything about the animal. It's like, yeah, well, I've never actually seen one in the wild. So, well, how the fuck do you know about it then? You know? And it's like, oh, no, no, I have a PhD

and I've written seven papers. It's like, great, but you don't know a thing about the animal. You might know how many teeth it has or where it's weird scales are. Its nostrils are different or whatever the hell its morphology is. But you don't know a thing about this animal that you're supposed to be the world's leading expert on. You've never. never even seen one in the wild. And it drives me nuts because like you said, and I pointed this out on the podcast, that didn't used to be the case. The people that were the experts used to be the people that spent their life watching these animals day in and day out. The best African scientists were ex-safari guides. The best shark people were fishermen. And the list goes on and on and on,

because they had seen these things day in and day out. And for the last, I don't know, 30 years, there's been this like weird thing that's happened where it's like, no, no, no, they don't know anything about the animal because they don't have a degree. And it's like, well, they observe that animal 12 hours a day, 300 days a year. They know a lot more than you and your degree. And this huge divide has been created. Your thoughts. Yeah. I was going to say, you know, we, Andrew and I interviewed Chris Fowles today, who for our next podcast be coming up after you. And he, he almost verbatim said, what you just said for us. And Chris spent a ton of time in the field. You know, he's well known for a photograph in the white sharks in the air.

But he'll tell you, he talked all kinds of different shark examples, and he said the same thing because he can't get any people in the academic world to go, the younger people to go out and actually spend time. And I mean time, like, I mean, days, weeks, not a week, not a couple hours, like time, like years staring at these creatures. Yeah, I mean, people ask me about like the, like the forging behavior in like seven Gills, because that was what I started on Sevengill shark in California when I started my research. And I studied them here in California, South Africa.

And it was just, I mean, I, you know, people say, like, wow, that was kind of cool. You got to watch them feed. I go, how often does that happen? I go, well, you know, I've been doing it for like 15 years. At that time, it had been like 15 years. And I've seen like, oh, maybe a handful of predation bouts. But when you see them, they're awesome. But you had to, I spent years, literally years in the field to just catch a few glimpses of

something. Yeah, waiting for that one moment. And a big regret now that I think people have that they were, again, misses this opportunity. you got drones, you have gopros, you have camera phones. And I didn't have any of that stuff. You just had to watch what was going on. I think also, though, because there's always a caveat when you talk about these things because I'm going to try and play a little devil's avid.

I agree with both of you in terms of you need to be out into the wild. But if you look at the way budgets are made for a lot of scientists, for a lot of graduate students these days. people who are studying science, you know, either you're traveling somewhere because it's not you're in your home area. Say you live in the Midwest or you live in, you know, Central Canada, wherever you are. So you have two weeks to grab as much data as possible and then you come home. And then, or if you even live on the coast, you've got boat time for like maybe a week, maybe two weeks. You grab your data, you come home and you process and you hope to God that

you have everything you need to have. It's very rare now that you have the time to go out, unless you live along the area you study, which I highly recommend to be almost a naturalist. There was actually a podcast I was listening to a while ago where the person who was like she had become a scientist, but while she was in her graduate degree, her supervisor was like, you need to be a naturalist. Like if you're out in a river and you're out, you know, surveying fish, you need to look around and you need to know the plants, you need to know the trees. you need to know the birds, you need to know the insects, the amphibians.

You need to be almost like a naturalist to really get the full breadth of what you're seeing and what you're observing. And then you can include that into your conclusions and interpretations and everything like that. But I feel like people are set up to fail in this kind of way because I don't know. And I may be mistaken, but I don't know if people have that time to go out and spend the months in the years. Here's the difference, Andrew. here's the difference, okay? Dave was six years old and he knew he wanted to study sharks. So he got into free diving and spearfishing and getting in the water and staring at sharks every second he could. Then he became a scientist. Today, you have these fucking kids and I'm going to rant because this upsets me who are like, I don't know what I want to do with my life, but I kind of like sharks.

I've never seen one in the wild, but I'm going to go at a degree and become an expert in sharks, even though I only made that decision at age 27 because I kind of like sharks. sharks. Not because I've grown up and I've obsessed with fucking sharks. I spend every spare minute of my time looking at sharks or frogs or turtles or salamander. It doesn't matter what the hell it is. But those are the people that used to lead our scientists. It's the people that were fanatically passionate about spending time around these animals. And I know, and I could speak from the heart, because I'm fanatically passionate about spending time around wildlife. And so that's the only reason I became a scientist and got a degree in biology is because I was so fanatically passionate. And the second I got out of school, I got back into spending time with animals because I was so obsessed with them.

And today, what I've seen, and Dave, you've had a lot of grad students, so maybe you can speak on this. But I see all these kids who are like lost. And they're like, I don't really know what I want to do. I've got my undergraduate degree. It's like a generic biology degree or generic, you know, whatever, environmental science degree. I'm going to go become a shark scientist. I'm going to go become a turtle scientist or whatever scientist. And then they become this expert on paper.

and they have no fucking passion for the species or the topic. They just do it because they're lost. They kind of like the animal, which is great. I'm not hating on that, but they're not fanatically passionate about seeing that animal. They're not going to put themselves in discomfort. They're not going to put themselves in harm's way. They're not going to spend 300 nights in a tent to see this thing every single day

and go, oh, my God, that was the greatest experience of my life. They're not even going to spend a week in a tent because they don't care that much. They just want to sit in a lab or read a fucking book. I tell Where they go, buddy? I tell grad students that this is going to be the best time you're ever going to enjoy

your research because you're not, you're not hampered by bureaucratic bullshit basically and you can go out and spend in me, again, part of this is my own experience but like, and again, you guys have heard if you tell this story certainly on my podcast, but

you know, I would go off when I was living in Africa I went off to this, I went off to Namibia I just go for two weeks, and I'd literally like just tell everybody like, I'm going to be gone for 10 weeks. If you don't hear from me in 12 weeks, send somebody to look for me. And we'd go on up the fucking skeleton coast. And you know exactly. I mean, we literally lived out in the desert. We literally caught fish to eat.

Once in a while, we'd run over a bushbuck and accidentally kill it. And then we'd eat that for dinner. Accidentally. For dinner. Yeah, I know all about it. Accidentally. And so, I mean, that's how we live. And again, if you, if the skeleton coast, for those of the, no, it's one of the most remote areas in the world.

And it gets, it's called the skeleton coast for a reason. And nobody at that time had ever explored sharks up that coast. And we literally went as far up the coast as we could, just surveying to see what sharks we could find. I mean, it was just, I mean, we'd go like, you know, a week or so, you know, our, the only way we'd bathe would be just to like jump in the ocean, get wet, bathe, jump back in the ocean, wash off. And that would be, and we literally, there was nothing. Yeah, there you go there. You get a sense of what it's like. There's not even a tree.

There is sand and the ocean. By the way, for those... It's like a desert that comes up to the ocean. Yeah. You get... No, go ahead. No, no, go. So you get all these boats.

You see these boats, they... All these boats washed up on the beaches there because of the shifting sand. That's where it gets the name the Skeleton Coast. And it's just an in-hospital part of the world. But, you know, I just had some of the most incredible experiences. You're sitting there at night having a fish. you just caught and you're watching the sun set on the ocean there, the Atlantic, and you see right at the end that green flash comes up. And I don't know if you've ever seen, if you ever

experienced it's one of the most, it's, it's magic the first time when you see that. It's just, you know, you have to either be in the desert or out there you get. You see in the desert out in the ocean, there can't be any light out there. And it's, it's, it's one of those life moments you just think, God, it's great to be here. I wouldn't be anywhere else in the world. And it's just You can Google it. You can Google it and you can see it right there. You don't need to be uncomfortable. That's right. But Dave, Dave, and I don't want to harp on this all podcast.

How many you've had, what, dozens of grad students under you now, if not more? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Hundreds. How many of your grad students, and I'm not trying to point fingers or name names, would actually be willing to do what you did on the skeleton coast and not because they were being paid to do it, but because they had such a passion for sharks that they didn't give a shit that they weren't bathing and that they were mostly eating sand and that there were scorpions everywhere and the list goes on and on.

How many kids today would actually do that out of passion? Boy, I'd say a handful. I'd say a handful. I'd say a handful would. A few. You get some. I agree. You get some. Those are the handful that should be in charge. I agree. Some. Yeah. But now it's this big thing where so many people have access to it. And yet the ones, there should be like an initiation process. Like once you get your PhD or something, It's like, okay, six months in a 10, come back from that. You, you, you, you, you, you, you, hot. Like, that's it.

You get your doctorate. Well, it's kind of like a survival mission to get through, to get through some of that stuff. But you learn, the thing is, the education you get out of that, you can't get in a classroom at all. No, down. And just, just the experiences. And then you all, you know, the other thing, too, is you learn a lot about yourself.

Like, you know, can I really do this? Can I really, again, you know, force your, I know, your background. you grew up in the bush basically, but that sort of primal feeling that like, I did this and I survived. It's kind of you have that feeling. I can do this. I can do this.

It gives you the confidence to then do the next one and the next thing and push the envelope a little bit further and be a little bit bolder. And, you know, sometimes those lines get a little muddy and things go wrong. But the point is when you do that, you're then able to push it further and figure out, okay, well, we did this trip.

Here's where I messed up. Here's where I can find more information. or find the species I didn't catalog or whatever it happens to be. And anyway, you get the point. The point is I think that something has been lost, and I don't know how to fix it. I'm not offering a solution here, but something has been lost in the way that like sort of modern science is conducted. I will say that a lot of our brosners, because I've talked to quite a few of them, even Drew, the guy is doing the eye naturalist segment. Yeah, he's great.

These are people who are, I feel like in that hand. There's a lot of them that are in that handful that are super incredibly passionate about going out there. Like, Drew is just basically driving across the country just like researching shit because that's what he wants to do, you know? Yeah. And it's, it is cool to kind of have this sort of a platform to bring those people together, not just with us, but with other people that are just like that, too, you know? Absolutely. Because you can make outside of, outside of the academic portion of it, these days. you can make a huge impact with things like YouTube podcast and other media that way,

just by gathering together with like-minded people and power in numbers kind of thing. Well, one thing I was kind of fortunate about, and again, Forrest can really relate to this, is in California, you don't have as much opportunity to do, to go exploring like the Skeleton Coast. When I went to Africa, boy, it was a whole different thing then. It was just like, well, we can go here and go to. go to these different places that they'd really ever been to, and you just find some out-the-way places, whereas California's a little, not this impossible,

but you just don't have that same. You can't drive for like, you know, 500 kilometers and not see anybody. I'll tell you why I disagree, Dave. The ocean in California, and I'm very lucky, I've been to so many beautiful oceans around the world. The ocean in California is one of the greatest oceans on the planet. I don't care who you are.

I don't care what argument you have. It is a goddamn fact that our ocean here in California, the marine life is one of the most exciting in the world. Now, it's not always easy, right? It's not the Bahamas where it's 85 degrees and crystal clear every day. It's cold, it's mean, it's stormy. There's big toothy critters in there. But I don't agree with you because if you have that sense of adventure and that passion,

and this is from personal experience, that ocean is right in our backyard and it is filled with so much adventure. and you don't have to drive far. You can go right off the pier in any city in California and be like, oh, my God, this is a whole different world. Yeah. Oh, no, no, I guess, I agree with that. We've got an amazing ocean out that.

There's plenty of stuff to study out here. I'm just saying as far as the going out, the thing like in Namibia and some place in Africa, where you just go, you don't see anybody for long stretches. Immolateness. You know, go out here. Yeah, we have a phenomenal ocean here. We're very fortunate just to have,

because you go from northern California at Southern California, you got the islands, you got just a range of habitats to learn from. And I felt fortunate that I grew up diving in cold water because then when I go to the tropics,

it's like, it's like a pleasure because I grew up diving in a jacuzzi degree water. Yeah, it's like a jacuzzi of the warm places. But yeah, no, there's a lot of cool stuff. In California, you can go diving, then go to Jack in the Box afterwards for lunch if you wanted.

You know what I mean. There's no remote. And then skiing. Then skiing. Yeah. And then skiing. Yeah. The same day.

I dove all weekend. I was offshore this weekend. I was chasing tuna around. We got a couple nice fish. And we were way offshore. We were about 50 miles east of Catalina to give you a rough idea where we are. Out in the middle of nowhere. And, you know, when we're tuna hunting, we're looking for foamers, which are where the

the tuna are boiling or breezers where you can see the water pattern changing. And every now and then we see a kelp patty, which is a free floating bit of kelp that has been torn off of the seafloor and is washed out to sea. And they act like fads, fish attracting devices, right? And Dave, I know you know this. And Andrew, I know you know this. I'm just explaining to our listeners. And so you get these little beacons of life in otherwise a desert, which is what the big blue open ocean is when you get away from the coasts. And anyway, that's a lot of setup to tell you that on Saturday, Friday, I was out there. I saw Patty, had a single turn sitting on it. And I'm like, yeah, let's jump in. Maybe there'll be a yellow tail or Dorado.

I'll shoot that and, you know, we'll have a nice dinner out of it. Hopped in the water and it was beautiful. It was big mola, big like 300 pound mola. It's a big school of bait fish. There was Jack mackerel and sardine swimming around. And just as I was about to get out of the water, because there were no game fish. I look and go, oh, there's something coming out of the murk. And sure enough, a nice little Makko shark came cruising in on me under this kelp. Peter, you would have loved this. This one is in about 3,000 feet of water, just so you know, the definitely you're in. Yeah, that have been real fun.

Yeah. And this Maco shark came cruising in. And it's, I have seen MECOs in California before, but typically I kind of hightail it out of the water when I do see them. Not in a panicked way, but like, oh, there's a Maco on this paddy. Let's not stick around. This Maco was only about five feet long and a little spicy, but not aggressive, just sort of arch in his back a little bit like, hey, hey, what are you doing all my patty?

And I got to spend a good, not long, three minutes with that. Mako swimming around on that paddy and it was really fun to see. So did you think like, did you look at it? Did you say, I can take this, I can take this guy? Is that what you looked at for a Mako? No. No, I mean, I can take this guy if he attacks. I can get him.

Dude. So I don't with Makos in New Zealand with, I'm sure Dave knows this guy, Riley Elliott. I did, uh, I did Makos with, with Riley in New Zealand. And we had Makos from about about, about four or five feet all the way up to like 12, 12, 12, 13 footer. and the little ones are way scarier. They're like, they're like, they're like a teenager, right? It's like, I'm tough, I'm young.

I think I can take on the world. The big ones are like, look, if I'm going to fuck you up, you're going to die. But the little ones are, but they're like, but I don't need to. I've been around the block. I know I'm the boss. The little ones are there to like prove a point. And at least from my experience. Yeah, they got a chip on their shoulder.

And that was different because, and Dave can speak to this with mackerel sharks. you know, they're always competing and the most dominant ones highest up in the water column, so on and so forth. But this was, so that's when I experienced like nasty little kind of shitty makos in New Zealand. I say shitty. It was still amazing experience. They were just jerks. This Mako was all alone on this paddy.

He wasn't competing with anybody except for me. So he came in to be like, hey, what are you doing on my paddy? And they eat sea lions, as we all know, so, you know, he probably was like, hmm, is this little snack coming in here. And then as soon as he realized, I wasn't a snack, which was probably before I even knew, he was there. He was totally fine. So he just sort of patrolled around and just kind of kept an eye on me going, you know, like, what, what are you doing over here, fella?

And it was nice. I just had this very peaceful, like, three-ish-minute interaction with this little little Mako, which is really fun. Well, you know, it was probably his interest that that Mako was probably swimming around watching you for probably like 30 minutes before he even, like, decide to show himself to you. Totally. Totally. Totally. I mean, that's the, yeah. Yeah, because I know guys, I know. So go ahead. I was just going to say, so all this shark talk, and I've got like a stupid, I've got like a dumb question.

It might be dumb, you tell me. But what makes a shark a shark? Like, what are the features? Because there's so many different species of shark that look so drastically different, looking like fish and other sea mammals. What makes a shark a shark? It has a cartilaginous skeleton. That separates it from all the other fishes.

It has a cartilagin. Okay, very simple. Yeah, it's really, it's pretty simple. They have cartilagin style. I can tell you they've been around for 400 million years and blah, blah, blah. But the big difference between. They're older than trees. The biggest thing is that they have cartilaginous skeleton versus all the other.

Most fish have a bony skeleton. And they have a color. And that's why I tell people like we talk, talk about like sharks, because rays completely get lost in the whole shuffle at all. But Rays are really, if you just take a shark and you flatten it, and the gills put the gills under its head, that's just a flat shark is what a ray is. Because it's got the same Xerlid.

Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I just, I try. And Rays are actually more diverse than the sharks. But it's one of these sort of, I hate to say marketing things, but if you talk to people about flat sharks, people perk up.

But if you talk about Rays, they just kind of look at you like, yeah, okay, that's fine. So a lot of it, so I try to use terms like flat sharks or the other ones, ghost sharks, because it's another group. They're also called chimeras or ratfish. But if you say ratfish or chimeras, nobody pays attention. But you say, go shark. I mean, I've had audiences enthralled by watching talking about go sharks because I'm using

the term go shark. And they really come out and form about this. This is a good. It's the third one, Kyle. Just so, you know, that's a ghost shark. Yeah, that's exactly what it looks like. Yeah. All right. This is actually a really good segue for a little game. Okay? And Dave's going to go first. And then I'm going to go and then Andrew's going to go and that's going to give Peter enough time to Google something. All right. We're going to play a game. I think you Google one too. I don't know. That's fine. That's fine. Most underrated shark and why. Okay. We talk shark week. We said they don't do it very often. All right. Peter's Googling like crazy. mute yourself, Peter. It's a joke. I wasn't Googling. Yeah, sure, sure. Dave, why don't you go first?

First, most underrated shark and why? I would just say what I just said, not sharks. You pick a rat, bat rays, skates. Bat rays. I mean, I, bat rays. You know, they're common out here. They're, you know, they're very, especially to the islands. California bat ray, Kyle.

California bat ray. There you go. There you're lovely. They're very gentle. Yeah, they're really common. Really common. I look at them when I'm henting halibut because they bury themselves in the sand where halibut like to be.

Beautiful to see. That's a cool looking creature. Yeah. It looks like a sea bird. Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're, they're, they're majestic to see. I know, they're so cute.

They're majestic to see swimming. They're just absolutely beautiful. I could watch Rays. You can almost like film Rays and like put on some new age music and sit back with a glass of wine. Just like, oh, it's been a, you know, fuck today. It's nice. I'm watching my race swim across the TV and have a little, you know, you know, Merlo or something. It's just really chill you out.

When we all make our millions. from Dave's Shark series, we'll all get ray tanks in our mansions. How does that sound? That was one of the things that I wanted to do when I was a kid. I was big into like marine aquarium hobby, and I wanted to get a stingray as in the aquarium. Then I realized how difficult it would be to get actually a stingray.

They sold them, but they didn't, they needed like a really like, you know, a really big bottom. The rectangular ones just didn't work for it. So it's a little more different. I had, just simple clown fish, a puffer fish, and a damsel, which is the angriest fish that you can get

in the angriest but most hardiest fish you can have in your home saltwater tank. And they all still just died constantly. I had to give up. Kyle, dear producer, Kyle, and we will continue this game in a second, was bitten by a damsel fish yesterday. Kyle, pop on for a second. Kyle is getting his scuba certification right now. And he texted me earlier today and said, this mother. fucking Garibaldi bit me today.

And I've never heard of that. I've been in the ocean in California. More days Oh, you really got you. 15 years. Look at that. You got a Garibaldi bite on his scuba cert the other day, which is absolutely hilarious because if you don't know, pull up a picture,

Kyle, go away again, and pull up a picture of a Garibaldi so people can see. They're like the goldfish of California's ocean. And how someone gets bitten by one, I don't know. Maybe it's your weird mustache, Kyle. I don't know what you did. That's what. It looks like a gold theater, just so you know.

Yeah. Wow, it looks exactly like a goldfish. Thanks for showing us that, Kyle. I think that story is hilarious. All right, I'm up next for most underrated shark. Dave and I actually put together a show on these guys, among several others. And since that, I've just had this fascination with these creatures. And I'll preface it by saying this.

I probably have a stronger passion for freshwater fishes than marine fishes. I just am obsessed with them. I think it's because I grew up in Zimbabwe, which has such a high diversity of them. I love the ocean, don't get me wrong, but I'm just so interested in freshwater fish. And to my knowledge, for like my entire youth, there was only one shark that went into freshwater,

and that was the bull shark. And then, I think slightly before Dave and I started talking, but that definitely reinvigored it, we started talking about glyphus, which are river sharks specifically from Australia and New Guinea, and Kyle will pull up a picture here in a second. and I just went to myself, holy crap,

there's like a whole group, and not a lot of them. I think there's three, or correct me if I'm wrong, Dave, three or four of these glyphus, which are these bizarre looking sharks. Some of them with these big sort of, yeah, that guy right there,

the elephant trunk looking one right there. And these glyphists go into the rivers of Australia and Papua New Guinea, and they're like a bull shark, but they're not very aggressive, they're not very mean, and yet they're going way up these rivers in estuaries. And I just, they're just,

why don't we have a whole show on river sharks. I have no idea. Because I think I would freak out all the freshwater people live around the freshwater areas. I think it would freak. Isn't that what Discovery is always trying to freak everybody out? That sounds perfect. Did you ever hear the ad that the Shark Week tried to do one year? I forget it was a number of years ago, but they tried to make it look like somebody had discovered a shark or there was a shark that attacked in the Great Lakes, like in Lake Ontario. It was a big commercial that was shown around Ontario.

People just freaked out and being like, it was like one of those Blair Witch type of like scenery. And you're just kind of like, oh, like, what is that? I don't want to understand. And the thing just pops out that you just, it just cuts. And everybody's like, was that a shark? And then just on Facebook, it was just all about it. Oh, yeah.

We got to do something like that, man. That's how you make a viral leader. No, stop being a sensationalized jerk. I've actually discovered a new species of shark why we're filming shark week in Japan a few years ago. And they just had like no interest in it. No interest. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we got gobbling sharks. That's what we're here for. And stuff. Well, there's a whole new species of shark. Yeah. Okay, great. We're here to do the goblin shark.

Yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. The opportunities that they had and they just like, yeah. This is what people want. Yeah. Do they just go with what people want? I'm going to try not to like hurt my entire.

career here. When Dave and I went to South Africa to do land of lost sharks, we went there with this goal. Yeah, there were actually four lost sharks, right? And we're like, if we get any of them, it'll be huge, right? If we just get one, that'll be an epic show. And we ended up getting three. Now, one of which we caught on a brough, one of which we caught on a hook and line. And the third of which is a flat shark that we got on a sit from a citizen scientist, a scuba diver. And when we turned in the first cut, I don't think I ever told you this, Dave. The network came back and we're like, you know, we really like the one where you get it on the camera

and the one where you catch on the hook and line, but we probably just don't need that other one in the show. And I like, oh, man, I stormed around the office. I called my business partner. I screamed. I screamed at my wife like it was her fault. You name it. I was angry.

And it was just because it was a flat shark, aka a stingray. Or a ray, rather. And we hadn't found it. It came from a citizen scientist. Anyway, I very eloquently and very calmly presented my argument for why it was important and why citizen science is so important. Right.

Why this is a historic discovery because the whole world hasn't seen this lost flat shark. And they're like, okay, well, I guess you can keep it. You know, and that was it. Like, that was it. It was like, yeah, okay, that's fine. And I was like, oh, my God. I like, I just, like, couldn't even believe that that was part of the conversation. But, yeah.

I mean, that's akin to me, that's akin to me getting very excited about some technological advancement and then telling you about it. and you're like, oh, dude, did you know that with text messages you can now send voice clips? That's great. Yeah, cool. I mean, that's what you're dealing with there. You're talking to somebody who has no idea, totally different industry. Correct.

But the thing is, it's shark week, and you think like if you're out there filming, and even so you're looking for whatever else you're looking for, you find a new species of shark or shark you haven't seen in 40 years, you'd think, right, Hey, that's pretty damn exciting. Just that phrase alone. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, all right.

It's like, brocoster. Oh, sorry, Dave. Go ahead. No, go ahead. No, go ahead. I was going to say, Brocaster. Andrew, you are up. Most underrated shark and why?

I'm going to say like these, this shark is like under our noses. We see them all the time like diving and stuff like that. But I find them absolutely fascinating. And it's the nurse shark. I just think the way they. look the fact that you can I've gone scuba diving with them and and

just the look the way they eat like it's almost like a suction it's like a really cool species to and they can yeah and they see them in schools like they look like Star Wars spaceships Kyle go to my Instagram if you don't mind go to my third post like two or two posts ago in other words and you'll see I put up a photo where I'm holding this nurse shark

and my caption literally says is this I think wrote like, is this a Star Wars? Because their morphology looks like something out of Star Wars. They don't even look like a real... Like, look at that thing. That doesn't look like an animal. It looks like a sperm. It looks like a sperm. It looks like a sperm.

Just a little bit. With wings. But I just... A bit like a jumbo jet too with a tail. Somebody, look at the comments there, Kyle. I forget who it was. Somebody said, we won't go off. Steve Baxall said something about me being too young. And he said, looks like a Thunderbird 2.

And I meant to Google it. I'm looking on my phone now. Can you Google Thunderbird 2 while we're here? Do you guys know what that is? Do you know what that is, Dave? It's got to be a plane. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

That does kind of look like that. It really does kind of look like that. Wow. That's hilarious. That's a good pick. That's a good pick. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. This is a good. Yeah. This is a competition. I'm about to blow everybody out of the water, even the shark expert. So the Greenland shark, size of a great white, size of a great white has developed a biological antifreeze in their skin to help them survive the temperatures. Flesh is poisonous.

So, and the biggest thing, there was a case of a Greenland shark that ate a reindeer, and they regularly are predators to polar bears. What else is Wikipedia safe here? No, no, this is vice.com. But I'm still giving the information. They're also average like 150 years old, isn't it? Or they reach sexual maturity at 150 years old or something like that? That's bonkers.

It's a little, yeah, it's a little, yeah, they get old. They get old. There's some little question about exactly, but it's, you know, 100, 150 is probably not unrealistic. The 500 years you hear might be a little bit of a stretch based on the stuff. But you know, an interesting thing with these sharks, the Greenland sharks and the Pacific Sleeper Sharks is they will sit under the, you know, the seals in the article have these holes that they'll go in and out of. They'll sit under there and wait for seals to come through the ice and they'll nail them. And so sometimes when seals are getting away from polar bears, this is crazy.

They're getting away from polar bears. They'll go ahead to one of these holes to get into the water. There's a greenland shark brush right there just gobbles them up. They have no chance. In the Arctic, it has no chance. Like they are just... Well, that's what you get for being a swimming meat sausage. And that's what they are.

They're like swimming calorie sausages. Like, I would eat a seal tomorrow if I was on. They're just balls of energy. That's what they are. Yeah. There's so much energy wrapped up in there. Like, I get it. Yeah.

I mean, the only thing they can do is just fucking... I mean, they don't have any defenses except for running away, right? Well, they've got claws and stuff. They can, like, like, they dig through the ice and things like that. but they're super agile too, right? Like they're, you know, even when we were talking to Chris Fallows today when we did our interview,

he was talking about how like, he's actually witnessed, you know, seals like literally balance on the, on the nose of a great white as they're trying to eat them. Just be like, nope, you're not getting. It's crazy. It's insane.

And they're talking about how they're bouncing around. There's like, you know, more than one white shark trying to get them. Yeah. You know, like I honestly, like after hearing that, I walked down my hallway and I stub my toe three times. Like, there's no way I would survive a shark attack if, you know, if I was that seal. There's no way. Like the agility.

Agility is not our superpower as humans. There you go. Yeah, this is some of the crucial stuff. He was telling me some of these young seals, he told us today that sometimes a seal trying to get to the get on to like seal island, they'll have to dodge three, four, five. to get there. So they have to run this whole gaunt just to get out of the water onto the island after swimming out to feet. And it's crazy where they have to go through. That is a hard. Yeah. Do you think they remember? Do you think they remember or do they just by by by by by nature? Because otherwise they'd all commit suicide. They just forget at the end of

every day like what they have to what they dealt with that day. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think They get it. Yeah, they learn. Yeah. Today's going to suck. Let's make the swim for it. Very stressful. The other interesting observation he says, the seals don't just swim flat out for the thing.

What they do is they'll get behind the white shark just behind the gills so the shark, when it turns, it can't bite them. Yeah. And they'll just like do this until the shark gets kind of tired out and then the shark will just kind of peel off. But they have to stay, they don't try, because they're not going to outrun the shark. If they try it out and swimming, it's not going to happen. They get behind it. Interesting. Yeah.

Imagine if that's how you made your living. You're like, yeah, you want to go out and fish today? Sure. I'm just going to like, see that field of lions. I'm just going to stay right by its main where it can't see me. And then, you know, as soon as it's bored of me, I'll go out and hunt and then we'll do that again to go back home. Yeah. Sound good?

You in? Very stressful. Let's go. Yeah. Very stressful day. Nice little day. Yeah. Nice little Saturday.

Oh, man. Okay. So we play a game on this podcast every episode. It's called the basketball. Battle Royale. Uh-oh. Now we'd have a jingle. I think I know what time it is.

Battle Royale. Okay, so the Battle Royale is this, gentlemen. We are going to pick something. We're going to go in a snake draft fashion. And we're going to do it, which means I'll go first. Well, let's go Dave first, then me, then Andrew, and then Peter, and then Peter goes back and so on, back and forth. Snake draft, okay? The battle royale is this.

Because it is Shark Week, and we have two Sharky guests. on we are going to do an ultimate shark battle royale you're going to pick three features from any shark and combine them to make the coolest meanest toughest toughest cutest sweetest whatever you like shark and the vote then the brocesters are going to weigh in and vote whose shark creation is the best but it has to be a shark feature has to be a shark feature so you could take the speed of a maco yeah the head of a hammerhead the fins of a bull shark you name it or the aggression of a bull shark, you name it, and put it together to make this concoction, this Franken shark that the broosters are going to weigh in and tell us who won, and hopefully

it's one of you guys. So Dave, why don't you go first? So it's snake drafts. So you're going to pick whatever you like, head, body, speed, fins, whatever you like first, and just go one pick at a time and we'll go down the line. Okay. I want to, okay, speed of a mego shark. Okay.

That's simple. How about tell us about that? Paint a picture. Well, it's something that's sleek, fast, and, yeah, it's sleek and it's very fast and it's very agile. What's a Maco's top speed, Dave? You know, I've heard anything from like... 43 or something, what is it? Yeah, 47.

I've heard different things, at 40, 40, 40, 43, 45, 46? That's very fine. Average 31 miles an hour. Oh, Miles. They're fast. Speed of a makeo. All right. Nice.

I'm glad you didn't take mine off the list. I said this on your guys' podcast. My number one shark to ever encounter and work with is the sawfish. So I'm going to take the rostrum of a sawfish. That is the first thing Kyle's going to pull up a picture here. You're going for the slashing type. Yep. I'm putting that.

I'm putting a chainsaw on the front end of my shark. Nothing you can do about it. And it's pretty obvious why. I mean, just look at that damn thing. Yeah. So, Andrew, you're up. What's your pick? I'm going to go, just what Dave was mentioning earlier is the jaw speed, I guess, you would call it, of the goblin shark.

Nice. Because if you want to grab something, you got to grab it quick. There you go. Okay. Nice. These are good picks. Peter, what you got? Yeah.

Am I going for two here? Yeah. You're going for two. All right. So my first pick, just because, you know, I'm not really. too into fighting, but if I'm in the ocean, I definitely want to, like, see things. I want to, I want to look around. I want to be aware of my surroundings and look at all the majestic, beautiful things. I'm picking the 360-degree vision of a hammerhead shark as my first ability. It's also

a great defensive tactic if I want to get out of there. My second, my second. Are you going, just so I understand, so we can paint a picture here for Dave Sunshine, who's going to draw these up. Are you putting the head of a hammerhead shark? The head in the eyes. Head in the eyes. Okay, which includes the vision. Got it. Got it, got it, great. Now, all sharks, I've just recently read,

are able to get impregnated by multiple mates. And I just want to be clear that that's all around. We all have that ability. So I just want that to be known. Second of all, your pick is. My second pick is going to be, I'm playing very defensive here. I already mentioned it,

but the Greenland, the Greenland shark, so that I can, what's that? What, what, the what of a Greenland shark? No, I'm telling you, calm down. Don't interrupt. I'm very excited. I will hear it as again, this beautiful creature. Not only do I have the ability to live very long, again, defensive, think defense, I have the ability to scurry away into the Arctic where no other shark can traverse.

So sort of your cold adaptations. Yeah. My special ability. Gotcha. Very nice. Very nice. Cold adaptations of a Greenland shark. Okay, very good. Very good. All right, Andrew, you're up for another pick. I'm going to go with the tail of a thresher shark because it's nice to bat something out of a school of fish or something like that. And then you pick it up with the jaw, the speed of the jaws. So the fish have no chance of getting that.

competitive shark. Yeah. I like it. These are all features I don't have, by the way, speed. I don't have any of those features in real life. You don't have a very long tail. I don't have a long tail. I have a big butt, but I don't have a long tail, so we'll go with that.

Very good. Okay. So I've got the rostrum of a sawfish. I am going to take the anoxic abilities of an epaulet shark, and we should circle back to that, too. meaning I can walk out of the water if I want to onto the reef and survive very harsh conditions of a walking shark or an appellate shark. Look at you.

Man, that's a good one. Yep. So that way when global warming kicks in. I've been working on this every day. When global warming kicks in, you guys are all going to die and I'm going to be chilling in a tide pool, no problem. Well, how happens if you get your Rostrum stuck in a reef or something

and you can't get out? You know, let's not get into the minutia of this. Looking at the holistic. That's great because my final ability is reef creation. What shark has that? All right, Dan, you are up for two. You've got the speed of a make go. Yeah.

Okay. So, okay, now just picking up, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a, this is a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, whatever you want to. make sure. In a way. I mean, whatever you want to say. Okay, whatever. Okay.

Pick it up, picking up on Peter's thing about, uh, uh, multiple fraternity and stuff. I, I want, the shark I want to have that,

the claspers of a, of a priapus cat shark. Wow. Okay. The claspers of a priapus cat shark are the longest classpers relative to the body of a shark of any known shark species. Is it, and a claspor is like an attack tool?

No, it's, no, it's, it's the, it's basically, it's basically, It's, yeah, it's basically

So you're sure, your shirt So it's a Well hung. He's just very well hung. He's just very well hung. He's just very well and down.

He's specifically He's specifically attacking me with the two penises. Well, right now he's basically the Hussein Bolt of sharks. Yeah. He's massac.

He's fast and he's like a horse. Yeah. He's like he's a pretty cool Great analogy. All right. What, Dave, round us out with your third and final ability

from your shark. Um, Hung like, uh, what was it? What was the name of the shark? A priapus cat shark. Priapus. I can't read my own hand right. I know it was a cat shark.

Priapus cat shark. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And the, uh, and the, uh, and I would say let's, for some flashy, kind of a going back to a 70s disco era, which I, I, I can recall quite vividly, unfortunately. Um, something with bioluminescence. Okay. You're thinking a swell shark?

I was thinking more like a lantern shark. Lantern shark. Very nice. Okay. So if you got it, you know, if you got it, flaunt it. Yeah. So here is Dave. There you go. You can just swim a million miles an hour. Has just hung like a horse and is glowing. I mean, this is a baby making shark right here.

Are the claspers growing, glowing? Are the claspers glowing? because that would be interesting. Sure. That is a good question. I think you've got to keep the claspers hidden so that you can be covert with what your intentions are. Okay.

Well, seeing as everybody else's sharks are just a mess, mine included, I'm just going to add something to make mine dominate the other sharks in the pool here. I'm going to go generic. I'm going to go shark week. I've got the rustrum of a sawfish, the abilities of an epaulet.

I'm putting all of that on the package of a great white shark's box. Oh, dude. Oh, come on. a good pick. That's a drop out. I thought I was the lame. succumbed to the dark side.

Yeah. I have. I could have done something cool and I didn't. All right, Andrew, what what's your third and final ability here? I'm going to go with the ability to go into fresh water like a bull shark. Ooh, that's good. Because like you said, climate change is going to make it difficult, you know,

just to live. And you've got to be able to be adaptable. So you've got to be able to hunt in both fresh and salt water. That's a good one. That is a good one. All right, Peter. What do you got for it?

So to round out my fish, I will, he will have the ambush attack style of the cookie cutter shark, which also has the bioluminescence, but has this disgusting,

vicious mouth that has razor sharp teeth that essentially clings on to my prey and rips out chunks to flesh. It's terrifying. And it'll be on the body of a Greenland shark. So watch out.

That's a big chunk. That's a big chunk. That is a big chunk. Yeah, that's like a decapitator. Go ahead, Dave. I say the cookie cutter has, this has the largest teeth proportionate's body size of any shark. Oh, see? The buck toothed shark. You might have just come in with the

double you then. I rest my case. No knowledge. All right. So let's recap, brocters. Way in. Did Dave's concoction win, which has the glowing abilities of a lantern shark, the hemipini, if you will, the hungness of a priapus cat shark

at the speed of a maco shark. Am I winning with my lame pick of a great white shark body, the rostrum of a sawfish, and the walking abilities of an epaulet? Does Andrew take the cake with the jaw speed of a goblin shark, the tail of a thresher shark, and the bull shark's freshwater

abilities? Or does Peter's menace win with the head of a hammerhead and vision, the cold adaptations and body of a Greenland shark, and the attack abilities of a cookie cutter shark. Saying that out loud, that's a pretty good... That's a unique looking shark. Yeah, it really is. It really is.

Okay. So typically we sort of start to wrap up the show at this point, but there's a reason I left this till the end, because if Dave hates it, I'm just going to hang up and go cry before we out the show. This is, guys, I haven't actually announced this yet. So we're in a very special place. By the time this comes out, people will know it, but they probably won't have seen the thing we're about to share.

So Peter knows it. We've talked about it. Dave knows it because I worked with one of his grad students, who was an absolute delight. And I have a new Shark Week show coming up on Wednesday, and that is Forrest Galante and the Island of the Walking Sharks, hence my pick for the Epilette Shark. So we're going to stream the trailer.

I'm going to watch your guys' faces. If you fall asleep or puke, I'm leaving. And if you tell me anything but that it's fantastic, I'm going to be very offended. No, I want to see what you think in all seriousness. This is the trailer. We literally just finished cutting it today. So Kyle's going to stream it. And this is an exclusive for all the watchers on YouTube.

If you're listening, go check it out on YouTube. And this is the first for you guys, Andrew and Dave. I'm super excited. This is awesome. You know this shark? You know it? You haven't here? No, no, no.

I don't leave here. Okay. But everyone, I can take you. You can take me there now. So was this part of the plan? Nope. All right. Watch your head, Mitchell.

Watch your head, Mitch. Wow. You've got tons of them. Have you ever seen this one come out of the water onto the rocks? Yeah, no time. These sharks have evolved the ability to belly crawl like a salamander out of the deep ocean into these tide pools. Whether this will work or not, I have absolutely no idea, but I think it looks cool. Cool.

Watch out, Johnny, watch out. Oh, did you check eat that fish? Hello. He's telling us to come. I need your help to find the- Recognize that book, Dave? Yeah, awesome. A time pool on me.

Let's go. What's that? What's that? What is? There he goes. Look, look, look, look. Look, look. Look, look.

Do-do. Clifhanger. That is awesome. it's fun it's fun what do you think awesome looks cool nice there we go

that looks so exciting thank you thank you Andrew it was really fun it was fun to make we're lucky we uh it was sort of a roundabout way but Dave's grad student Vicky who you see in that trailer knew our showrunner Thomas

from something else I don't even know what else and so Discovery really like Vicki she's awesome been on before she's super cool I'm sure you guys have had her on the show and stuff. And she came and she came with us for about a week of that expedition, which was really fun. And then as soon as we basically left grid, she took off home.

And it was fun. And we got to see these epaulet sharks. You know, we, I kind of say whether or not we captured the behavior that we set out to capture at this point. Sure seems like it from the trailer. Well, that's the teaser, isn't it though? Anyway, I wanted to show it with you guys. I love it, man. I thought it'd be fun to share it with you guys.

Nice, dude. So how long were you in the field for for that to get that footage and that kind of stuff? Just under four weeks. We were there for, yeah, it was a long one. We were with Vicky for a week and then we stayed on for like another 20 days. Oh, is that why you were missing for so long when we were trying to record podcasts? You were out in the ocean there? You know that's why I was missing for so long.

I'm just reminding the broosters. Don't hate us because we don't have a podcast every week. I was glad the head hunters didn't find them. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, we had a lot of fun. Listen, it's been fun having you guys on the pod tonight. Thank you so much for coming on and doing a sharky podcast with us. Tell us a little bit about your podcast one more time where people can listen.

And it's all things shark, very sciencey, but still a lot of fun. Tell us, Andrew, like, a little bit about where people can tune in. Yeah, Beyond Jaws is the name of the podcast. Dave and I co-host. We do one every other week. we're about to launch our second year of episodes. We've done 26 so far. Forrest is going to be on Monday.

Like I said, right after this, go listen to ours. It's audio and we're on YouTube as well. But essentially what we do is we talk to some like shark scientists who have been in shark science for as long as Dave has or even longer. And then some people who are just graduate students and so forth, and people who are just doing some cool things like Forrest, you know, all sorts of people who are just so passionate about sharks, we get a bit, there's always that, that little bit of like career advice type thing for a lot of people who want to get in shark science.

And shark is really good for our listeners. Yeah, and it's a lot of fun because everybody's always asking, how do you get into sharks and, you know, is it always have to be a science point of view or, you know, can you do conservation and not have to go to, you know, and it's all these different types of questions and we always like to answer them just through examples. And it's, what we realize that even people who have done it for 30 years, they've taken roundabout ways. You know what I mean? Like Dave is sort of the authority of lost sharks and he owned an aquaculture plant for quite a long time. You know, so it's just like, it's just you really get to see all these people who have been like the names and the published papers and people have kind of looked up to them.

And you realize that they also, they didn't have that straight path to being where they are. And so I think that really personalizes everybody and brings them to the same level of being like, oh, they struggled in certain times or they did this that actually helped build their career. So it's always great to hear from, you know, straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, or the scientist's mouth.

And we just have some great conversations and some great stories. So check it out. You can check it out on all the favorite podcast apps, Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, all of them. We're all on there. And we're going to be on YouTube as well with Forrest's interview as clips from that interview as well. Just what it's a big for us.

The Save Our Seas Foundation has been our sponsor for the last year and then for this coming year. And they just want to thank them for all of their support. They've given us over the last year and the year to come. And yeah, I hope everybody gets a chance. Please check it out. It's a different type of program on sharks, learn about the people behind the shark science. Yeah. Very cool.

And to find us, you know where to find us, the Wild Times podcast, forward slash info, to find all the links to this podcast and all of our other podcasts. Patreon.com forward slash Wild Times Pod for the Patreon to support us. We release a podcast every week there. And at Wild Times Pod on all the socials. Find us there. We're always posting stuff. at Speak Up Blue and at Law Shark Guy on Instagram for our wonderful guests today. I love all of you guys and brosters.

I love you too. Good night. Good night. Thanks luck.