National Geographic: The Fox and the Shark Page #4

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Down in Jacksonville, Florida,

Dr. Cliff Jeremiah is taking Vito's

fossil teeth and reconstructing

a megaladon shark jaw.

It will be the largest shark jaw

in the world

big enough to swallow a small car.

And it has an entire set

of properly matched teeth.

It has taken Vito 19 years

to collect the full set.

Some 200 fossilized teeth will line

the recreated jaw,

adding almost 300 pounds

in teeth alone.

Shark teeth, of course, stand out

so much that white pointy ivory

things knives against their gray body.

And of course, if you had somebody in

a room pointing a revolver at you,

you would look at the revolver too,

because it's the sharp pointy end,

the point that's going

to cause all the trouble.

Shark teeth are compelling.

It's difficult not to admire them

and react with a shudder.

The only part of the shark's

skeleton that's not cartilage,

these razor teeth are used

to dismember and devour prey.

But despite our worries,

only rarely is that prey human.

First of all, the word shark is such

an enormous pull on people.

Sharks three or 400 varieties

of sharks in the world,

all go together as one name shark

and that spells out fear.

Research was done and shows

that the word shark

had a higher reaction on the

nervous system of people

than any other word

in the English language.

And so the general public,

when they talk about sharks,

they talk about something they cannot

understand and something they fear.

I n fact, sharks are not all scary.

Only a handful are any

kind of threat to people.

What they are is

vitally important to the oceans.

As top predators,

they help maintain the entire balance

of the underwater world.

Rodney's fascination

with these great hunters

has taken him all around the planet.

His quest:
to learn still

more about sharks,

and it's quest that never ends.

Alright, we're gonna place the mask

on and the way to do that

is to put your chin in first and then

we'll pull this strap over the top.

Here at Walker's Ca in the

Northern Bahamas,

Rodney and Dr. Eugenie Clark have come

to swim with reef sharks in the wild.

On this dive, Rodney and Eugenie

are wearing special masks

that allow them to

communicate underwater.

No metal cages, no Lexan tubes,

just a swim alongside the sharks

to show that if you know what you're

doing, you have nothing to fear.

They've picked a dive center

where frozen fish remains are put out

to lure large numbers

of sharks for the divers.

It's just beautiful to

be here and watch them.

The nurse sharks

are the first to arrive.

They certainly don't seem to be paying

any attention to us, do they?

What sort of food or fish do these

nurse sharks normally eat?

The nurse sharks eat the

food on the bottom shellfish,

clams and any kind of fish

they can get ahold of.

Genie, he's eating your hair.

Watch out!

They're trying to eat your hair, Genie.

Trying to eat my hair?

I really like that, Rodney.

He just stopped then

and wanted to be scratched...

While the nurse sharks

are fairly docile,

the blacktips that follow

are much more aggressive.

That one just tried

to bite me on the camera...

How about staying close to me?

It's getting a bit exciting here.

How many species do you

think we're seeing, Genie?

Well, it looks like three species

for sure

the gray reef or the reef shark,

as it's called in the Caribbean,

a lot of these nurse sharks,

and then the blacktip.

I don't know if there are two species

or one of the blacktip.

Yet, even the blacktip

and gray reef sharks

seem more interested

in the food than the humans.

There are almost 80 sharks

feeding simultaneously.

And for the most part,

they simply ignore the divers.

Funny how when we're down here

with them, the way we are now,

we've both stopped feeling that

there's any danger at all

in the situation we're

just so fascinated with watching them.

I n fact today, people threaten sharks

more than sharks threaten people.

Sharks are being killed

sometimes purely out of

hate they don't even use them.

I n some of the shark tournaments,

they just go out and kill sharks.

But I think we're

getting away from that.

There's too much now on television

and magazine articles and books

and people like Rodney Fox who are...

telling people what good sharks can be

and who are living examples

of how, if you understand a shark,

you can go on swimming with them,

and they are not

to be feared and hated.

They're like puppy dogs, aren't they?

Some sharks you can swim with,

some you can't.

It takes some education, experience,

and common sense to figure out

which ones are safer than others.

Silkie sharks, for instance,

are on the safe list.

And with silkies, there's a twist,

as Bahamian Stuart Cove

will show Rodney.

And when we go down there,

you're going to twist its tail?

Yes. It's important when we're

swimming around with sharks

to keep our hands down,

because they do have teeth,

but when they swim by us, if we grab

their tails and twist them gently,

it will paralyze the shark

and when you do that,

you can actually roll them over

and stroke their bellies.

We use this maneuver to actually

remove fish hooks

and so we sort of do the sharks

a little bit of a favor

and we remove the fish hooks

and it doesn't seem to bother them.

Paralyze the sharks

and then release the sharks,

they'll come right back to you

and you can do it again.

Well, I'm game. Let's try it.

Silkie sharks are so called

because instead of the usual

rough shark skin,

theirs is smooth as silk.

Reaching up to nine feet in length,

they inhabit the waters off Nassau,

to the south of Walker's Cay.

Grabbing silkies by the tail

might sound tricky,

but divers in the area

have been doing it for awhile,

ever since they first set out to

remove the hooks of careless fishermen.

That's when they discovered

the silkies' special weakness.

It's called tonic immobility,

and it's a quirk of

the sharks' nervous system,

a kind of temporary paralysis,

brought on by twisting the sharks'

tails and flipping them over.

I don't believe that.

Those sharks are so friendly.

They're right behind you.

They're all around...

It's incredible.

I've never experienced

anything like that before.

So silkies are friendly.

Nurses are okay.

What about any others?

You got any others?

We've got no dangerous

sharks in the Bahamas.

Unfortunately, two weeks ago,

we had a longline boat come into our

area and target our shark dive,

up in the reef area on the

inland sites

and caught 35 of our shark population

and they had different names.

They were like our kids.

It was like having your pet dog killed.

And we had a great affinity,

a great affection for

all these wonderful sharks.

Well,

after that great white shark got me,

I really knew nothing about sharks.

This is one of 350 varieties

of sharks in the world.

And you just have to find out

which ones are potentially maneaters,

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