The Cage

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Speaker 8 This is Radio Lab. I'm Lulu Miller.

Speaker 1 I'm Loftif Nasser.

Speaker 4 And I'm Rachel Kusick.

Speaker 8 We're here with day two of our week of sharks, inspired by the 50th anniversary of the movie Jaws.

Speaker 1 And today, we're going to jump in the water with them.

Speaker 11 Well, I am. You two get to just sit in your cozy little offices and hear about

Speaker 11 it.

Speaker 4 Fair point. Fair point.

Speaker 11 But before we get into the water, I think we should actually start with the onslaught of shark movies that were inspired by Jaws.

Speaker 15 All right. So there are 180 or so monster shark films.

Speaker 11 Wait, 180?

Speaker 16 With our Monster Scholar from episode one.

Speaker 15 There are at least 180 that are listed on the Internet Movie Database.

Speaker 11 Jeffrey Cohen.

Speaker 4 I definitely know Sharknado. What else is there?

Speaker 15 You know Sharknado, but do you know Sharknado two, three, four, five, and six? Oh, my. Where in part six, they return back in time to Sharknado one.

Speaker 4 Well, of course.

Speaker 15 So, I mean, that deep blue sea

Speaker 4 open water.

Speaker 2 How big is that thing?

Speaker 15 The meg, followed by a cheap remake called Jurassic Shark, which is not nearly as good.

Speaker 15 The reef, ghost shark. In that one, even if you kill the shark, you're not done because its ghost will come back and get you.

Speaker 11 They've tasted human flesh!

Speaker 15 Two-headed shark is exactly what's advertised.

Speaker 4 No! Double the trouble.

Speaker 15 Followed, of course, by three-headed shark in 2015. five-headed shark in 2017, and then six-headed shark in 2018, at which point it looked like a starfish with all kinds of shark heads on it.

Speaker 4 Oh my God.

Speaker 15 There's almost every kind of shark movie, and what I love about the whole shark genre is that it looks to free the shark from the constraints of being underwater so that sharks can be everywhere.

Speaker 15 There's sky sharks.

Speaker 19 Sharks, but they can fly.

Speaker 15 Avalanche sharks.

Speaker 20 They swim through the snow like other sharks move through water.

Speaker 21 Bait.

Speaker 15 This is about sharks in a supermarket.

Speaker 4 Where are they in a supermarket? Well, the supermarket does flood.

Speaker 15 It's just movie after movie like this.

Speaker 14 So Jolly's like kicked off this world, like this universe of shark monsters, taken them out of their world and like dragged them into ours.

Speaker 6 And I, I kind of just wanted to go do what Rodney told us to do yesterday, like go and see it for myself.

Speaker 1 I mean, I know this works for your guy, that seeing it made him less afraid. But like, I mean, I think you're going to go down there and see, like, oh, this thing is bigger than me.

Speaker 1 It is capable of completely tearing me to shreds. Like,

Speaker 1 there is a possibility that you're gonna get down there and

Speaker 11 just be more afraid of it.

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 11 but

Speaker 11 I think I actually want to know.

Speaker 26 So, all right, as you exit the aircraft, please mind your head over there.

Speaker 14 I hopped on a plane to this town in South Australia called Port Lincoln, informally known as Tunatown. It's this little fishing town, and that's where Rodney's cage-diving boat leaves from.

Speaker 26 Okay, we got the shark on the side and everything.

Speaker 10 Got to the dock.

Speaker 27 We drop our bags. We do some paperwork.

Speaker 16 Basically like sign away our lives.

Speaker 5 And then we

Speaker 30 set sail.

Speaker 24 Where we will spend the next four days

Speaker 29 looking for great white sharks.

Speaker 1 Is there a lesser white shark?

Speaker 17 Well, sir, this is actually.

Speaker 32 It's a good question.

Speaker 28 No, there's not. It used to be like the white shark all along.

Speaker 28 And then once they started becoming scarier and scarier around the era of jaws, we started started calling them great whites to add fear to them.

Speaker 8 Yeah, what they just added, it's not like actually the scientific name, yeah.

Speaker 28 No, so all the scientists now you'll hear them just say white shark because they're it's like rebranding the shark, huh?

Speaker 1 Okay, so you're on the boat, yep, and how many people are there?

Speaker 14 I think it's like 15 passengers plus the crew.

Speaker 17 Okay, I come from France, Paris.

Speaker 12 These people are from all over the world,

Speaker 7 New York City, best place on Earth.

Speaker 28 I'm from Japan, and they're all so excited to see a white shark.

Speaker 19 I want to see the great white white shark.

Speaker 36 Which was just like a fascinating little world for me to drop into.

Speaker 37 I'm passionate with sharks.

Speaker 24 Because, you know, like most people hope they never see one.

Speaker 1 I want to meet the apex predators in their natural state.

Speaker 14 There were these two brothers.

Speaker 7 Who loves sharks more, you or me?

Speaker 17 Two were so into sharks.

Speaker 7 I think I do, yeah.

Speaker 10 They were competitive about it.

Speaker 1 I love them, but he adores them.

Speaker 16 The older one said that when he was in kindergarten, he did a presentation about sharks.

Speaker 7 And I even wrote it wrong on the board with a CH, so the

Speaker 38 sharks.

Speaker 7 Because I didn't know English, but I knew a lot about sharks.

Speaker 20 And he ended up getting in trouble because he had taken these books out of the local library.

Speaker 7 And I was so amazed by the shark pictures in the book. So I cut out the pictures with the scissors.
And I was like looking at the pictures in my room and being so obsessed with them.

Speaker 21 That's amazing.

Speaker 26 You just picture like the exact silhouette.

Speaker 11 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 14 So from Port Lincoln, we sailed for hours, like four, five, six hours to this remote group of islands called the Neptune Islands.

Speaker 39 There's a wild, rough sea bumping against the rocks.

Speaker 7 I will describe it as rough.

Speaker 19 Yeah, very rugged, like dark blue water, dark gray rocks.

Speaker 7 It seems sort of barren, but you feel that there's something around here.

Speaker 23 It's a feeling, you know?

Speaker 25 As soon as we anchored there, we noticed this intense smell, which is actually coming from us.

Speaker 39 I think that's called chunk. It's like minced up bits of fish guts and skin and heads and stuff.

Speaker 27 The crew is throwing like buckets of fish parts off the back of the boat.

Speaker 33 I have a hat with a ribbon on it that says Master Baiter.

Speaker 21 And I do see that white thing.

Speaker 10 What is that?

Speaker 27 All of a sudden, these colors start flashing across the water.

Speaker 4 What?

Speaker 36 White and grey and silver.

Speaker 8 And they look like little sharks if you don't see their mouths.

Speaker 11 No sharks.

Speaker 16 They're not sharks.

Speaker 15 No shark or sharkless.

Speaker 28 Which is kind of the point.

Speaker 27 The bait is supposed to attract the smaller fish, which attract the sharks.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 28 a day went by.

Speaker 10 Are we seeing anything?

Speaker 17 No, not yet.

Speaker 28 And then another day.

Speaker 25 And there was just nothing.

Speaker 9 It's wild to me. You're pouring like blood, meat, flesh, fish, corpses, all this stuff in, and it's like days.

Speaker 7 Days.

Speaker 9 I I would be like, oh, they'd be there. They'd go doot, doot.

Speaker 23 Exactly.

Speaker 9 You know, and they'd be there within 34 seconds.

Speaker 36 I know, I know, but that's not what happened.

Speaker 17 So two days have passed out of four, and we haven't seen a single shark.

Speaker 5 Wow.

Speaker 25 And so there's just this cloud like looming over the boat.

Speaker 16 And so we go to bed that night and we're like, we really hope that tomorrow, like, we'll see one.

Speaker 9 No, I'm sorry, though. I'm sorry.
I need, I need for the rest of us who aren't in this deranged epicenter of the world where you want to see a shark.

Speaker 9 You're like, I love knowing that you poured gallons of blood into the water and didn't see the sharks.

Speaker 34 Yeah. This is the best of the news.

Speaker 11 It's ever great news for you. Yeah.

Speaker 30 It's really, it kind of like you were in the sharkiest waters of all waters and they're not coming.

Speaker 28 And so like the next day, bright and early, the first cage goes down because they send the cages down even if they don't see a shark on the top just in case there's something down there.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 28 So I'm up on the top of the boat next to the skipper because he's the one that controls the crane.

Speaker 16 And then suddenly

Speaker 17 he pauses.

Speaker 35 I don't know, she just said five pulls there.

Speaker 22 He feels five pulls on this string.

Speaker 35 Oh, I thought it was five.

Speaker 31 The string that runs down to a cage they've lowered 60 feet to the bottom.

Speaker 14 And the people down there, they'll pull on the string to communicate with the surface.

Speaker 35 Five pulls for a shark, so hopefully,

Speaker 35 it is one down there.

Speaker 36 And eventually, I think they're coming up.

Speaker 31 The skipper winches the cage up.

Speaker 21 Okay, guys, can you report back?

Speaker 39 We did, we saw a white shark.

Speaker 30 And they had actually seen the shark.

Speaker 30 They were so excited.

Speaker 16 And then all of a sudden, it was my turn.

Speaker 17 Like, the crew was like, get your stuff on.

Speaker 21 We're going to start getting ready.

Speaker 32 We're going to do it, okay? It's go time.

Speaker 39 Okay, and how does that feel?

Speaker 7 I'm a little bit confused.

Speaker 28 I'm a little bit like, I'm so happy that we finally have a shark around.

Speaker 16 Like, it had been so long.

Speaker 14 But then I'm also kind of nervous when the reality of it set in.

Speaker 5 Like, oh, it's actually down there.

Speaker 16 It kind of feels like what you're in a lion to just go on like a terrifying roller coaster.

Speaker 28 And you've just seen all of these people with like shocked, smiley faces like tumbling off. And then you get buckled in and there's like no turning back.

Speaker 16 Like it feels both exciting and terrifying.

Speaker 16 Okay, guys, welcome to the cage.

Speaker 23 Is anyone in the cage with you?

Speaker 28 Four people fit. One of them is a dive master.
So you're with someone at all times.

Speaker 12 And once the four of us settle into the corners of the cage, our dive master signals to the skipper.

Speaker 29 We're ready to go down.

Speaker 29 So we get dropped down like we're taking an elevator deep into the ocean.

Speaker 29 And as we go, it gets darker and darker and darker.

Speaker 32 And you can see less and less because you're getting further away from the sun.

Speaker 31 And eventually we get down to around 60 feet, and the cage stops moving.

Speaker 36 And all I can see is this barren sand of the ocean floor.

Speaker 13 And above it is just this abyss of blue.

Speaker 29 I was bracing.

Speaker 32 It was just like so much fear building of what's going to come out of that blue.

Speaker 23 And like when is it gonna come out and which direction is it gonna come from

Speaker 12 all i can hear is the sound of my breath which was very heavy

Speaker 10 and then i hear this scraping sound

Speaker 27 and it's the dive master scraping this little metal knife against the side of the cage And the sound is supposed to get the sharks interested to come closer, but it kind of feels like a dinner bell.

Speaker 32 And then I feel a tap on my shoulder, and I like look over to the left, like behind my shoulder, and it's this the dive instructor.

Speaker 32 And she just puts her hand in the shape of a fin on top of her head, kind of like to signal shark, and then points into the corner.

Speaker 14 And as I turned, I remembered this thing Rodney had told me.

Speaker 37 Don't just look at their heads, at their teeth, because everybody's frightened of their teeth.

Speaker 37 Look at the rest of the body.

Speaker 14 And then out of the darkness, it comes truly out of the darkness,

Speaker 29 swims this white shark.

Speaker 32 It was a young one, so it was smaller, six and a half feet, gray top with this scraggly white line and belly halfway through it, little black tips on the front fin.

Speaker 32 But the thing that's most striking about it is the way it moved.

Speaker 14 No thrashing or or darting like in the movies.

Speaker 11 Just sort of floating.

Speaker 37 You know, they fly like aeroplanes, or aeroplanes fly like great white sharks.

Speaker 37 They have to dip a wing to turn.

Speaker 38 And their moves seem to be incredibly deliberate and relaxed.

Speaker 27 White shark researcher Greg Skomall.

Speaker 38 They don't do anything that's going to waste their time.

Speaker 30 The shark, it kind of felt like it was orbiting us.

Speaker 16 Like it kind of fades in and out of your view and goes in and comes out and goes beneath you and then it kind of comes towards you.

Speaker 38 It's just like, wow.

Speaker 10 It's beautiful.

Speaker 38 You're looking at a prehistoric beast, millions of years old.

Speaker 14 Like it was carved by time to be exactly where it is.

Speaker 40 Sharks are 465 million years old. You know, they've been on Earth for such a long time.
This is John Long, strategic professor in paleontology at Flinders University in South Australia.

Speaker 5 Now, that amount of time is hard to wrap your head around, but John helped me.

Speaker 40 They're more than twice as old as dinosaurs.

Speaker 40 They're way older than trees.

Speaker 41 Flowering plants.

Speaker 20 They were around before Everest was even a mountain.

Speaker 14 All of the continents that we live on today, they looked nothing like they do.

Speaker 40 They're even older than the rings of Saturn.

Speaker 27 And I mean, over these eons, sharks had to survive all five of Earth's major mass extinctions.

Speaker 40 Volcanic eruptions, a massive asteroid, ice ages, out-compete other major predators. Gigantic pliosaurs with banana-sized teeth and walking whales.

Speaker 40 And along the way, they just absolutely exploded in diversity.

Speaker 19 So that today, sharks fill so many different niches.

Speaker 27 According to Jada Elcock, a shark researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

Speaker 19 They are all over the place. There's sharks in the tropics.
There's sharks in the Arctic. I mean, a bull shark was found so far up the Mississippi River, it was in Illinois.

Speaker 24 There's all these different versions of sharks, carved in their own bizarre ways.

Speaker 16 It almost makes the white shark seem boring.

Speaker 19 If you love the white shark, no hate to you. I also love the great white shark.
But sharks are incredible. They are diverse.
I'll just go through a bunch of them.

Speaker 33 Take it for the duck.

Speaker 19 I mean, some sharks only get to be about eight inches long. Well, the largest whale shark was almost 62 feet long.

Speaker 19 So just the sheer difference in the size range, we have glow-in-the-dark sharks, like lantern sharks, that glow on their bellies.

Speaker 19 There's a shark species that spews bioluminescent goo from pockets near its fins, likely for avoiding and confusing predators.

Speaker 4 No way.

Speaker 19 The rig shark can snap its teeth together to make kind of a clicking sound.

Speaker 19 While the swell shark will swallow a bunch of seawater, blow up like a big sharky water balloon,

Speaker 19 and that makes it more difficult for predators to eat it.

Speaker 19 And of course, the Greenland shark can live literally hundreds of years.

Speaker 19 I'm sure there are Greenland sharks in the ocean right now that were alive during the time of Alexander Hamilton and the time that the musical about his life was written.

Speaker 19 Isn't that wild to think about?

Speaker 4 Yeah. Hundreds of years.

Speaker 22 and there's even a shark that might help us survive one of our greatest threats

Speaker 5 that's tomorrow

Speaker 27 okay we just got back and we saw our first sharks yeah we tried to kiss it but it wasn't far away actually yeah yeah

Speaker 1 but like keep an eye out because this episode was reported by rachel kusick and produced by rachel and simon adler it was edited by pat walters and fact checked by natalie middleton with mixing help and sound sound design by Jeremy Blue.

Speaker 11 And one more thing.

Speaker 8 We want to give a huge thanks to everyone who supports Radiolab, especially right now, everyone who's a part of the lab, our membership program.

Speaker 8 Your support makes big projects like this possible and we are so grateful.

Speaker 1 And if you aren't a member yet or are thinking about giving more,

Speaker 1 this is the perfect time to take the plunge. Because if you join or re-up now, you will receive a really cool gift.

Speaker 8 A limited edition Week of Sharks hat designed by the awesome Maine-based artist and surfer Ty Williams.

Speaker 8 It's so beautiful and fun, and it gives you a chance to show the world you support public radio in the form of Radiolab.

Speaker 4 And support sharks.

Speaker 1 It's available to everyone who joins the lab this month, even for as little as seven bucks a month.

Speaker 8 You can join at radiolab.org/slash join. Existing members check your email for details, and thank you so much.

Speaker 1 Day three of the week of sharks coming up tomorrow.

Speaker 10 See you there.

Speaker 43 Hi, I'm Jamie and I'm from Minneapolis. Here are the staff credits.
Radio Lab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 43 Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff include Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 43 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Rebecca Lacks, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyana Sambunda, Matt Kielti, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandbach, Anissa Vitza, Ariane Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, and Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand.

Speaker 43 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Puhol-Manzani, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 42 Hi, I'm Daniel from Madrid. Leadership support from Radiolab Science Programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Telpur Tol Foundation.

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