It’s a bad week to be a seal. Three fan-favorite staple scientists in the field are once again returning to Shark Week on the Discovery Channel this July: Tom “The Blowfish” Hird, Paul De Gelder, and Forrest Galante.
For as entertaining as the programming is, these three men often put themselves in very real danger to get the content they need and want to educate people.
“I’ve lost limbs off of my arm. My legs have broken, we’ve had to weld parts of my leg together,” De Gelder told DECIDER over Zoom.
Although it comes with some trials and tribulations, the men of Shark Week undoubtedly love the job that they do.
“[Sharks] will never not be great,” Hird said. “They are like fabulous works of art or going and listening to your favorite band even if they’ve been touring for 20 years. They will always be great.”
De Gelder added, “It’s crazy that I actually get to do this, be part of something that’s a heritage and it’s something that so many people love, and the new discoveries that come out every year.”
From stuck cages and live shark births to diving just feet away from an actively-erupting underwater volcano, DECIDER got the inside scoop on what gills and thrills viewers can expect from the guys’ shows this year, and why it’s worth tuning in even if you never have before.
DECIDER: What inspired you to join the Shark Week team in the first place, and what keeps you coming back to do the program?
Tom “The Blowfish” Hird: What inspired me initially was that they gave me a ring a couple of years ago and said, ‘Look, we need someone who knows about sound and sharks,’ and as I’m the only person alive ever to play live heavy metal to sharks not once, but twice, I was a world leading expert in it, so it was meant to be. I turned up on the boat, did my bit, and they’re like, ‘You’re loud and annoying, do you fancy being loud and annoying again next year?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, why not?’ But it’s realistically all about telling the right story. I am really proud of what we’ve done on 6000lb Shark. We’ve told a fun, entertaining tale. And we’ve kept the science in there as well. We haven’t demonized any of these animals or gone for a cheap buck, and that’s great.
Paul De Gelder: Well, I was never really interested in sharks. I just wanted them to stay away from me. I was a Navy bomb disposal diver and so I was always diving in super murky water with explosives, doing crazy dangerous stuff. I just wanted to focus on my job and not have to worry about these animals that apparently wanted to eat me. And then I turned up to work one day, and one of them ate me. And so I wasn’t really into sharks until I was in a shark. And then after that, it was a very slow progression … There’s an old adage that says knowledge dispels fear. And so the more I learned about sharks, the more I realized how little we have to fear from them, but how much they have to fear from us. And so I thought, this is a great transfer of my military service whereby now instead of protecting people, I can speak up for an animal that doesn’t have a voice, and I thought that was a really valuable calling.
Forrest Galante: I have been working with wildlife, specifically critically endangered edge-of-extinction species, my entire life. Eight, nine, 10 years ago, I was sitting in an office in Discovery Channel, speaking with one of the executives, and said to him, ‘Look, Shark Week does nothing on these critically endangered edge-of-extinction, really cool and weird sharks. It’s all about tiger sharks and mako sharks and great white sharks, what about the rest? There’s 400 species of sharks. Let’s go out there and find some of these lost species, missing species, underrepresented species, and give them some focus and highlight.’ We did our first one and it was a huge success and we’ve done two or three every year since then, and as long as I can keep making programs about underrepresented sharks that are cool, unique, different, weird, whatever you want to call it, and putting that out there for people to fall in love with them, I’ll keep doing Shark Week.
What do you think is the key to getting people to understand the need for sharks in the ecosystem without fearing them, and how does having a week-long event on broadcast television help?
TH: The key is connection. For me, it has to be connection with the sharks. If you’re a presenter and you’re putting your face in front of that animal, you better have a bloody good reason for doing it. Why are you doing it — are you telling a tale, are you explaining something? Otherwise, get out the way. I think that often with other shows that you might see around the world, you’ve got a presenter that’s kind of pulling away the interest from the sharks and instead, they should be adding interest to the sharks, they should be adding spice and information and tidbits because that’s when you as the viewer, you are standing next to that presenter watching the shark. And I think that, for me, is the difference, because if you’re standing next to them, both enjoying this animal, bang, that’s when you get connection.
FG: The narrative around sharks has changed so much. If it wasn’t for things like Shark Week, we would still be under the belief that sharks are mindless killing machines and that they need to go and that we need to hunt them and there need to be calls and all these things to keep us safe, and we’re learning through programming and exposure and diving and everything else that sharks are critical to the ecosystem. And I think it’s so important to get that out to the mass media because look, if you live in Chicago, you don’t know about sharks, you don’t have exposure to sharks, right? You need to have something like Shark Week to make you go, ‘Sharks are pretty cool, we should protect them,’ and that’s all it takes. If Shark Week has one guy doing that once in a while, it makes a big difference.
There are always thrilling moments during Shark Week. Are you able to tease any exciting moments from your show that viewers can expect?
TH: There was a little problem on the boat. A problem you don’t want on a boat when you’re in the water with nine great whites and you’re stuck in a cage that’s negatively buoyant, i.e. stuck on the bottom. That was a squeaky moment.
PDG: For my show, specifically, there is some crazy stuff. We did a show called Deadliest Bite where I was hand feeding a 13-foot tiger shark with a hand, not by a hand, which was a nice change, on camera to measure the bite force mechanics. We had this whole rig set up underwater, and I’m luring the tiger sharks in and it’s like, you got to see it to believe it. It’s absolute insanity. And then another show, the Real Sharkano, we were out in a very, very remote area of the South Pacific where these indigenous tribes actually collect the skulls of their ancestors. And so we went out there to try and explore their realm, their relationship to the sharks, how commercial fishing is affecting their ability to live off the ocean, but while I was there I was free-diving, which means breath hold diving, 60 feet down to film some sharks, 300 feet away from an active underwater volcano while it was erupting.
FG: My shows are awesome, right? Alien Sharks Japan is a ton of fun. It is a true show-and-tell, 17 elasmobranchs species in that show. I’m certain that’s a Shark Week record, nobody’s ever put 17 species of shark in a show before as far as I’m aware, which is an amazing show-and-tell of really cool, weird sharks looking for the critically endangered Japanese angelshark. Really cool tools and jetpacks and crazy species and eating sushi and working with Japanese fishermen and all the fun stuff.
For people who may not be avid shark fans or marine biologists themselves, why should they tune in? What can they get out of the programming?
PDG: That’s the biggest reason to tune in! If you don’t know anything about sharks, come join us. Let us teach you because it’s not it’s not just dry learning. This is edu-tainment. It’s an adventure, it’s characters. Me and my friends, we love to have a good time and we love sharks just as much. It’s not going to be a boring, you know, flicking through the channels. Once you tune in, that’s it. You’re done. You’re there for the rest of the week. I’m sorry, but it’s just the way it is. It’s Shark Week. There’s a reason we’ve been going for 36 years.
FG: They can get exposure to a whole other world. It’s like watching Avatar, you look at these crazy blue people and these weird plants and these made up animals, that’s what the ocean is like. It’s a whole other alien world, and sharks are at the tippy top of that food chain, they’re the kings of that domain, and Shark Week is so phenomenal for bringing us a whole week to look into a real world, not a made up imaginary one with CGI, but a real world that exists right here under our own feet right next to us, filled with the most spectacular and incredible creatures known to man. And we’re bringing that to people in their own living room so they don’t have to go and get scars like these to try and learn about these critters.
Shark Week has aired every July and for the last 36 years. You guys are the longest running cable event in television history. What does this mean to you? And what do you think the secret is in keeping the content interesting and different and having people come back year after year?
TH: I think that it’s a double whammy of one, sharks are always great. They will never not be great. They are like fabulous works of art or going and listening to your favorite band even if they’ve been touring for 20 years, they will always be great. But we also get the benefit that even though they’ve been around this long, and even though we’ve been looking at them for even longer, we still don’t know really anything about them. So there’s always something new to learn.
PDG: It’s crazy that I actually get to do this, be part of something that’s a heritage and it’s something that so many people love, and the new discoveries that come out every year: new characters, the new scientists, the new sharks, the new areas, like pushing the boundaries on things as well. We’re adventure seekers, we love sharks, we love being on the ocean, we love being in the ocean even more. And so I think that passion, it just comes through all of us. We want people to fall in love with them as much as us and so we’re going to take you on the adventure. We’re going to show you the scary stuff as well, because I feel like half the time Discovery Channel’s trying to kill me, but my job is trying not to die. Finish the show, don’t die. Probably make for a good show if I did, but you know, there’s so many areas where science is continuing the exploration of sharks and so being a part of that is rewarding. And then at the end, you get this professionally made movie that millions of people get to watch and the beauty of social media is then they get to reach out to you and tell you, and I know from firsthand experience these shows that we do, they do seed the ideas and the beliefs and the thoughts that these young kids can do this as well.
FG: Well, we learn more and more about the ocean and its creatures and sharks every single year. There is a plethora of information out there. We will never run out of content to make around sharks. I think the fact that this is the longest standing franchise in cable history really speaks to that, like people love sharks. They’re gonna love them this year, they’re gonna love them next year, and they’re gonna love them in 20 years, and I think it’s amazing that there is still, in a day in era where traditional cable television is probably dying out, this goes to show you that our natural world, sharks, the ocean, good storytelling supersedes technology. It doesn’t matter if you’re a TikTok kid or a 70-year-old person with cable television, everybody loves Shark Week, and that’s what’s so great about it.
What is your all time favorite Shark Week moment, or something that you’ll never forget?
PDG: One of the greatest ones that I’ll never forget, that I never thought I’d ever get the opportunity to do, was diving in Australia with ABC. For anyone who knows Shark Week, they know ABC, one of the world’s best ocean cinematographers, and we dove to 100 feet in a cage surrounded by four 14-foot male great whites. And then we got out of the cage, and I was sitting 30-40 feet away from the cage on the bottom of the seabed, surrounded by great white sharks and one of them comes out of the murk directly at my face and swims at me. I got a GoPro on a stick, and I’m just thinking if he wants to eat me, he can kill me right now and he will never even think about it again, end my life. But Andy [ABC] told me, ‘Don’t act like food, they won’t treat you like food.’ And so I held my ground against old natural instinct and stood there and stared it down and it just swam around me and I could see its eyes looking up and down like it was thinking you know, ‘What is this? What’s it doing here?’ Just a moment in life where I could have been snuffed out by this animal that everyone is petrified of, but it gave me the respect because I gave it the respect and we got to share its environment. And that’s one of the most amazing things about sharks. They’re the only predator in the wild that will let you share their environment with them, if you treat them with respect.
FG: Oh man, I’ve had so many at this point, but one that just immediately popped in my mind was when we were in Papua New Guinea about four years ago filming Island of the Walking Shark, and for the first time in human history, we video-documented the Papuain Epaulette shark leaving the water and walking on land with its pectoral fins. The goosebumps are popping in right now. It was such a spectacular thing to see, a shark literally demonstrating its most incredible evolutionary adaptation right in front of our eyes, after weeks and weeks of looking for it. So that was a pretty big moment. The shark birth in Alien Sharks Japan is another one that I’m never ever going to forget, if you had given me a million guesses as to things I was going to do with sharks, I never would have said become a shark midwife. So delivering baby sharks in my hands right there, that was pretty spectacular, too.
Do you ever damage any cameras or shooting equipment on these dives?
PDG: Yeah, we lose a lot of stuff. I’ve lost limbs off of my arm. My legs have broken, we’ve had to weld parts of my leg together. The cameras get scratched when the sharks bite them and these are $5,000 domes on the front of these things. The cameras are worth $160,000 sometimes, so it’s a very expensive hobby and pastime to be a part of, but I don’t know. I think the biggest one is I lost a leg and I had to go diving with one leg, which is a challenge.
There’s Bruce from Jaws. There’s the Meg from The Meg and so many other iconic pop culture sharks out there. Do you have a favorite, and why?
TH: There is a taxidermied shark that was found in a disused museum somewhere out, I think in like Czechoslovakia, and it’s hilarious. I don’t know if it has a name. It’s probably called Klaus or something. But it is hilarious. It looks like if you’ve got a shark and made it eat half a lemon and then when it wasn’t looking, you smacked it on its ass. The facial expression on it is to die for, I don’t think that’s particularly well known, but that would be my pick. It keeps me giggling, that’s for sure.
PDG: Oh, my favorite is probably Emma or Gaia. And these are sharks that Shark Week fans will know of. Emma is a huge tiger shark in the Bahamas and Gaia is a huge Great Hammerhead in the Bahamas as well, but two separate areas, and they are the sweetest biggest beasts you’ve ever seen. They’re so polite and they come and they swim directly into your hands and you’ve got this 14 to 15 foot, 800 pound animal that just comes in to say hello and then moves away. And people are scared of these animals, and I understand why, but trying to break down some of those misconceptions is our job.
FG: Well, I have a four-year-old at home and he watches the show, that’s so bad, called Sharkdog, and it’s like a little yellow shark — half-shark, half-dog — so I’m gonna have to say Sharkdog right now.
Shark Week premieres on Discovery July 7 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
