Shark Week veterans Joe Romeiro, Dr. Neil Hammerschlag
Stefanie Brendl and Jamin Martinelli all agreed that the most dangerous part of diving with sharks while filming for Shark Week on Discovery Channel is the human element that goes into it.
“People are way more unpredictable than sharks are,” Romeiro said. “I kind of know what the shark is going to do. They eat, swim, react to things. Whereas people react to a whole flooding of emotions.”
The group took part in a Shark Week discussion panel during the 6th annual Shark-Con where they talked about their experience as biologists and conservationists while filming for the television phenomenon that will kick off for its 31st year on Discovery Channel starting July 28.
The panelists all agreed that sharing an environment with the apex predators is an awe inspiring experience. Under normal conditions, seeing a shark in the water while diving is a natural occurrence.
“Most of the time the shark is going to see you way, way before you see the shark,” Martinelli said. “I live in Florida and I go swimming all the time and I know that sharks are around me.”
In fact, most of the time, sharks want nothing to do with the divers in the water next to them. As long as the shark knows that the diver is aware of the shark’s presence, there is very little risk of a negative interaction.
“Predators know what the front of any animal is so if you turn away they have a chance to sneak up closer,” Brendl said. “If you are looking at them they have to think about whether you are a threat, or food, or a hunter. They have to think about it a lot more.”
“You can’t even look at them directly. If you stare at them, they get weirded out,” Hammerschlag said. “Sharks generally do their best to avoid people. It’s a constant battle of doing my best to lure in the shark and play kind of hard to get. I kind of pretend that I’m not looking at them, not interested in them so that they come in to get our attention.”
That shyness isn’t exactly beneficial when filmmakers are tryin to get the dramatic encounters that make for good television. In order to get those compelling shots, underwater filmmakers will often force the sharks into behaviors that they would not otherwise do.
“Many of these situations are under baited conditions where you are luring the sharks into us,” Hammerschlag said. “That’s a very unnatural condition for the sharks.”
“A lot of people, they want that shot of the shark with the teeth out,” Martinelli said. “Tiger sharks usually swim around like a toothless dragon until you either feed them or touch a little spot under their nose so they go full-on, teeth out lunge.”
By combining the chaos of an underwater film crew with a group of large predators that are acting outside of their comfort zone, potentially hazardous situations can emerge.
“I’ve found that the few times it was scary — and I do most of my diving and free diving with tiger sharks — it was always people related,” Brendl, who founded the conservation group Shark Allies, said. “It was people creating the problems. It means they were so preoccupied with their cameras or what they were trying to do, they forgot to be aware of what was happening around them.”
“You see it from afar and you have to bolt in to interfere and that action creates anxiety in the water. The sharks are like what’s going on do we need to bolt over there? It was always the human being creating that problem. It was never the sharks.”