'Shark Week:' How to watch, what to expect

UPI

2 days ago

Paul De Gelder stars in 'How to Survive a Shark Attack,' premiering Tuesday. Photo courtesy of Discovery
NEW YORK, July 18 (UPI) -- Shark Week -- the annual summertime celebration of the toothy sea creatures -- kicks off Sunday on Discovery and Discovery+.
The programming block contains nearly two dozen new documentaries.
Highlights include:
Sunday, July 20
Dancing with Sharks -- 8 p.m. EDT/PDT
Hosted by Tom Bergeron and Kinga Philipps, this competition show challenges five divers to create movement routines with hammerheads, tigers and nurse sharks.
"It's some of the world's best shark handlers, essentially dancing with sharks. This is going to be such a cool show because I think people don't really know to expect, so they're going to have to watch," Philipps told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.
"Shark Week is a phenomenon. It's been going on for 37 years and it's this wonderful hodgepodge of entertainment and information."
Air Jaws: The Hunt for Colossus -- 9PM EDT/PDT
A crew looks for Colossus, a great white shark that went missing 10 years ago from South Africa's waters.
Great White Assassins -- 10 p.m. EDT/PDT
Alison Towner teams up with Dickie Chivell to decode how killer whales take down great whites in New Zealand.
Monday, July 21
Great White Sex Battle -- 8 p.m. EDT/PDT
Male and female great white sharks compete in a series of challenges to determine which sex is the superior predator.
Jaws vs Mega Croc -- 9 p.m. EDT/PDT
Tristan Guttridge, Rosie Moore and Dr. Sora Kim construct a CGI fight to the death between the great white shark and Nile crocodile.
In the Eye of the Storm: Shark Storm -- 10 p.m. EDT/PDT
A rare outbreak of shark attacks along America's gulf coast were captured on video in the summer of 2024.
Tuesday, July 22
How to Survive a Shark Attack -- 9 p.m. EDT/PDT
Shark attack survivor Paul de Gelder provokes sharks to charge him in various scenarios in an effort to teach viewers life-saving tactics.
"My mom is going to kill me," laughed de Gelder, who lost his right hand and leg in a 2009 shark attack.
"A lot of people are going to be sitting on the edges of their seats with a lot of anxiety," he added. "We try and teach people what to do if they get bitten or someone they're with gets bitten, what are the emergency procedures you need to take and, obviously, being Shark Week, I'm going to get attacked by the shark to make it as real as possible, so that's pretty wild."
De Gelder said he hopes Shark Week viewers are inspired to explore the oceans themselves and that they develop respect for the creatures who inhabit them.
"I grew up watching it and now I get to walk in the footsteps of my heroes and I don't think many people really get to do that in life and so I'm so blessed."
Black Mako of the Abyss -- 10 p.m. EDT/PDT
Shark Tagger Keith Poe, and experts Paul De Gelder and Kendyl Berna want to learn more about an aggressive, 13-feet long creature that could be a mako, a mutant or a mako/great white hybrid.
"We came out to investigate why this shark looked so different than any other shark that any of us have seen out there and we came away with a few different theories," Berna said.
"We don't fully have the entire answer yet, but it's still a really fun episode that investigates it and moves the needle forward on even just the existence of a shark that looks like this," she added. "There is so much left to be studied in the ocean. There is so much opportunity to learn there and sharks are all so different from each other. Some lay eggs. Some are live bearing. They've been around for 400 million years."
Wednesday, July 23
Josh Gates solves strange and disturbing shark mysteries.
Josh Gates, Phil Torres and Heather Amaro track a 20-foot-long predator in the waters of Malpelo Island, 300 miles off Colombia's coast.
Forrest Galante injects himself with shark venom underwater to test the potency of the poisonous Port Jackson Shark and Ghost Shark.
Thursday, July 24
Tom "Blowfish" Hird and Michelle Jewell separate fact from fiction in the 1975 movie, Jaws.
Kinga Philipps hosts a clip show with hilarious and terrifying shark encounters captured on camera.
"We're actually breaking down what happened in a situation -- the shark behavior, the human behavior, what went wrong, what maybe should have gone differently," Philipps said.
Tristan Guttridge and his team use CGI to create the ultimate apex predator from a variety of shark species.
Friday, July 25
Ryan Johnson, Gibbs Kuguru and Andy Casagrande want to know why two people were recently killed by sharks in the relatively safe waters off the coast of South Africa.
Forrest Galante and his team explore why Florida -- specifically New Smyrna Beach -- has earned the title of "The Shark Attack Capital of the World."
Paul de Gelder and Dr. Craig O'Connell try to determine which are meaner -- Australian or American bull sharks.
Saturday, July 26
Kinga Phillips investigates why a rogue Tiger Shark attacked and killed a person in St. Martin.
Giant Trevally battle sharks for domain of a hidden underwater peak off Mozambique's coast.