Baby Shark

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Speaker 1 Day five of our week of sharks.

Speaker 11 Back with our lead reporter slash lifeguard, Rachel Kusick. Hello, hello.
Wait, Rage, is this like our... This is our end of Week of Shark?

Speaker 13 This is the end of the Week of Shark, the final day, the final business day.

Speaker 15 Finally business day of shark.

Speaker 14 You might have some sharks in your weekend, but we won't be responsible for them.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 18 So today I want to end the week by circling back to the very beginning, which is to say, baby sharks.

Speaker 1 You can't even say the word without it.

Speaker 22 Without a dude.

Speaker 23 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 24 I wanted to know, like, you two both have little humans. Do you hate that song?

Speaker 23 Do you like listen to it daily?

Speaker 14 What's your relationship to that song? When did the song come out?

Speaker 26 2015, the Korean one one came out.

Speaker 16 Yes.

Speaker 1 So we had kids after that. And by that point, I knew that this was sort of weapons grade song.
So we kept it out of the house.

Speaker 16 Wow, it's like a zombie apocalypse.

Speaker 23 You're like, don't open the doors. That's right.

Speaker 28 Baby sharks coming.

Speaker 1 We'd seen other people go through it and we're like, it's not going to happen here.

Speaker 29 I don't have children.

Speaker 30 But, you know, it's like seeps into you just being in the world.

Speaker 11 It does.

Speaker 27 It swept the world. It is everywhere.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 14 So everyone has the same feeling about it.

Speaker 32 But then I was like, wait, what are baby sharks like? Like, how do baby sharks get born?

Speaker 1 How do baby sharks get born?

Speaker 16 Yeah, like, what, do you have an idea of like what shark birth looks like?

Speaker 22 I mean, man, I don't know. Well, like, they are really fishy.

Speaker 11 Like, you think they do have eggs? But, like, I want them to have labor.

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 34 So, I found someone to answer this question for me.

Speaker 24 I've always been like an ocean nerd, but science reporter Claudia Guy, who like most of the people we've had on this week, is a bit of a shark fangirl.

Speaker 35 So, by the time I got to this story, I was definitely fully a crazy shark lady.

Speaker 25 Um, I actually ran into her work because of an amazing article she wrote about baby sharks, and she kind of just introduced me to the very wacky world of shark reproduction.

Speaker 25 And I want to share it with you because it's just so fun.

Speaker 40 Okay, so the first category of shark birth is

Speaker 35 let me just make sure I get the term correct.

Speaker 15 I gotta look back.

Speaker 15 Yes, okay,

Speaker 24 so we have Vivi Paris.

Speaker 8 My name is Jeanie, me, my mama.

Speaker 15 Ooh.

Speaker 30 Yeah, viviparous.

Speaker 11 Like in vivo.

Speaker 23 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 35 Viviparis sharks give birth to live young, just like humans or like other mammals.

Speaker 33 Just like you and me and dolphins.

Speaker 19 The embryo develops in the mother's womb.

Speaker 35 They have a womb. There's a placenta.

Speaker 31 Some of them even make this sort of milk.

Speaker 35 Essentially, like secrete a type of milk into the womb.

Speaker 8 Like a little milk bath for babies.

Speaker 23 Yeah, they're in a little milk bath.

Speaker 11 So they're just like fully pregnant, fully.

Speaker 19 And they come out like little baby versions of the larger shark.

Speaker 14 Like how big?

Speaker 25 It depends on the shark.

Speaker 30 So white sharks come out like three or four feet long.

Speaker 15 Whoa. That's huge.

Speaker 1 That is enormous.

Speaker 38 But I mean, there's other sharks that come out like the size of your pointer finger.

Speaker 40 Cute.

Speaker 1 I'm not a grandma pixie troller.

Speaker 19 And like, God bless the hammerhead shark mothers.

Speaker 15 Oh, that's great.

Speaker 6 Like, it would be so hard to make it work.

Speaker 25 Yeah, so that,

Speaker 39 so that's the first category.

Speaker 28 Okay.

Speaker 32 And then moving on to category two, which is ovo viviparis. Ovo viviparidis.

Speaker 16 Okay.

Speaker 42 So it's like a live birth, but also eggs.

Speaker 27 A live birth, but also eggs.

Speaker 11 Yeah, what does that mean?

Speaker 35 So the embryo actually forms inside of an egg case, but that egg case hatches still inside mom.

Speaker 30 And then the baby comes out.

Speaker 31 So it kind of is combining the strengths of a live birth where you're protecting the young inside you, but it happens a lot quicker, and the sharks can make a bunch more eggs.

Speaker 29 There's one whale shark that was found, and it had 300 whale sharks inside it.

Speaker 7 Wow.

Speaker 25 And then there's sharks that can fertilize sperm from multiple fathers.

Speaker 29 So they kind of place bets on different sharks' baby daddies. Okay.
So they're just kind of like taking it all in. They're like, we'll consider your offer.

Speaker 14 And then they just like, just dole it out.

Speaker 13 That's a new take on take it all in.

Speaker 29 I think one of the nutsest of all nuts shark reproduction stories is the sand tiger shark.

Speaker 15 Okay. Okay.

Speaker 35 They create a bunch of eggs and the process that this shark has developed to get big and strong in the womb is to eat its brothers and sisters.

Speaker 43 What?

Speaker 12 It's like the Coliseum for baby sharks.

Speaker 14 There's a gladiatorial match in mom's womb.

Speaker 41 Inside the shark.

Speaker 29 So you'll see scientific papers where there's like a uterus that's been sliced open and there's just like one shark and then a bunch of empty egg cases and it's like

Speaker 8 I ate those

Speaker 37 so okay so that's the ovo viviparity and then the final category oviparis are just the plain old egg-laying sharks so the mom puts an embryo inside the sort of egg case thing and then she just releases all of those eggs into the ocean.

Speaker 35 It's feeding on a yolk sack just like a chicken and it has everything it needs inside this little egg case.

Speaker 38 So the mom will only do like one or two of these at a time.

Speaker 7 And they look like these little envelopes.

Speaker 25 You can sometimes see them wash up on the beach. Oh, yeah, dude.

Speaker 14 Oh, my God. The mermaid's going to be a mermaid's first thing.

Speaker 1 The mermaid's first thing.

Speaker 11 It almost looks like two boomerangs back to back.

Speaker 37 Yeah, but there's also a shark that lays an egg case that's shaped like a spiral drill.

Speaker 8 So it like screws itself into the rock kind of thing.

Speaker 38 So that nobody comes along and eats it because, you know, they're out there hanging out in the ocean by themselves.

Speaker 40 And those egg-laying sharks, those are the sharks that we are going to talk about today.

Speaker 25 That's where the story that Claudia had written about begins.

Speaker 14 Oh, cool. This wasn't even the warm-up.

Speaker 15 That was just

Speaker 15 sorry. I love it.

Speaker 11 And I was just, it was just too willy-wonka, like, come with me in the world of your imagination.

Speaker 45 And they're crazy little characters, you know, what they do.

Speaker 34 And so this story is one man's, possibly Sisyphian, but definitely sublime attempt to maybe just slightly rejigger the balance between humans and sharks.

Speaker 8 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 31 Can I just ask you to introduce yourself, say who you are, and

Speaker 32 what you do?

Speaker 8 Hi, my name is Greg No.

Speaker 46 What I actually do or what I do when I do.

Speaker 18 Greg has taught English as a second language.

Speaker 34 He's done quality checks on electrical circuit boards. But his life's work, I think he would say, is the shark conservation and education organization that he founded.

Speaker 47 Called Shark Lab Malta.

Speaker 44 Which is in Malta.

Speaker 1 And where is Malta again?

Speaker 26 Little island below below Sicily.

Speaker 19 Warm, Mediterranean.

Speaker 46 And it's just a really beautiful place to be.

Speaker 20 And so you were just interested in sharks because you loved being in the ocean?

Speaker 29 Or like, what was it about sharks that interested you in the first place?

Speaker 4 They were just kind of fascinating.

Speaker 46 They're very kind of mysterious.

Speaker 4 So I thought, okay, let's learn more about them.

Speaker 25 But when Greg moved down to Malta from Britain, this was in 2007, he...

Speaker 25 pretty quickly realized there was nobody really in malta focusing on sharks doing anything about sharks there wasn't a national aquarium at the time and there weren't even many sharks in the waters near Malta where you could scuba dive.

Speaker 48 So that was why I first started going to the fish market.

Speaker 26 He wanted to learn about sharks so badly.

Speaker 14 He's just willing to go look at them in buckets.

Speaker 52 Yeah, which I guess it's kind of strange, but it was kind of like, well, if I want to learn something about sharks, I need to go and find where I can see them.

Speaker 38 So Greg would get up early, early in the morning, head down to the coastline where this fish market was.

Speaker 30 It was in this old rickety building, and he'd start talking to the fisherman, saying, I don't know, you got any sharks?

Speaker 16 You mind if I check them out? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 38 And so he'd go back, see these bins filled with ice and dead sharks. He started measuring the sharks.

Speaker 25 With my tape measure and my camera, taking pictures, photographing them, learning more and more about the different species of sharks around Malta, and learning about the basics of their anatomy, checking whether it's male or female, just like gathering basic information for this organization that he was setting up.

Speaker 45 Sometimes we recover certain parts of sharks from bins.

Speaker 29 You're like, oh, I'll grab a jaw and I'll clean it up and I'll use use it as like a demonstration that I'll give at like a community fair when I'm teaching people about sharks.

Speaker 23 Wow.

Speaker 25 But a couple years into his fish market research, things started to get a little interesting for Greg.

Speaker 5 Yep, yep.

Speaker 25 One day in 2011, Greg's at the market doing his thing and he sees this small spotted cat shark.

Speaker 54 A small

Speaker 5 spotty little shark.

Speaker 29 Just kind of inspects it like he always does.

Speaker 34 But then he just like notices something coming out of the small spotted cat shark.

Speaker 55 Oh, what's that?

Speaker 49 What's that thing protruding?

Speaker 37 It's these tiny curly strings.

Speaker 47 These fibrous tendrils.

Speaker 31 Popping out of the shark's cloaca, which is like a shark vagina.

Speaker 26 Greg bends down.

Speaker 5 Kind of carefully took hold of him.

Speaker 25 And at this point, the fishermen nearby are just like giving him the side eye.

Speaker 7 Well, listen to that.

Speaker 45 There was a few kind of like craned necks looking across.

Speaker 50 What's he doing?

Speaker 13 But he just starts to...

Speaker 30 pull on it.

Speaker 5 Slowly pulled and pulled and pulled. And out came this perfect little four, four and and a half centimeter capsule with curly tendrils at the top, curly tendrils at the bottom.

Speaker 8 And he's like, oh,

Speaker 7 this is a shark egg.

Speaker 8 So is it almost like a ravioli?

Speaker 5 Let's imagine like a half a ravioli.

Speaker 36 Like a two inch by one inch rectangle.

Speaker 4 Pale greenish color, almost transparent.

Speaker 31 And he holds it up to the light and he sees this little bulge

Speaker 52 inside the ravioli shape capsule.

Speaker 7 So here he is holding this little ravioli in the middle of the fish market.

Speaker 37 What do I do now?

Speaker 42 Is it dead? He doesn't know.

Speaker 26 So it came out of a dead shark.

Speaker 37 Right. It could be dead, but it could maybe be alive.

Speaker 47 Just kind of thinking, well, at least we could learn something from it.

Speaker 52 So I took it back home.

Speaker 16 Put it in a little plastic aquarium that he had.

Speaker 47 The kind of thing that kids would have sometimes.

Speaker 50 So that was never actually used.

Speaker 47 Just happened to be kicking around the house. So then I'm kind of thinking, well, okay, obviously the shark would lay the egg in the sea, so I'll go and collect some sea water.

Speaker 16 With like a bucket?

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, just literally a bucket. Take it back home.

Speaker 23 Dumps the ocean water into this little aquarium.

Speaker 50 With a little air pump just to keep the water oxygenated.

Speaker 45 Dangle a piece of string across the width of the aquarium.

Speaker 8 Why?

Speaker 30 Just to replicate like some seagrass or something that the egg would hook onto.

Speaker 19 So he hooks the little ravioli tendrils onto the string and suspends it in the floating water.

Speaker 8 And then wait.

Speaker 49 Because I mean once you put it in there, what do you do?

Speaker 5 Apart from watch it every day or several times a day or many many times a day every time you walk past it you take a look to just see what's going on.

Speaker 52 It just became a little bit like a magnet.

Speaker 45 Day one day two every time I was in and out moving past it take a look take a look take a look day four five six seven nothing happening and after around about three weeks you noticed the little bump on the top right hand side of it So now each time I'm walking past, I'm now focusing on the little bump and the little bump slowly separates from the main yoke section itself with a tiny, tiny, almost thread-like connection.

Speaker 45 And it starts to move.

Speaker 15 Nope.

Speaker 5 Just kind of like wiggling a little bit.

Speaker 7 And it's like, oh my gosh.

Speaker 32 This shark, this baby shark that I brought home.

Speaker 4 A dead shark. A dead shark.

Speaker 13 Is still alive.

Speaker 16 Now, I should say, Greg is standing, if somewhat amateurishly, on a sort of scientific frontier.

Speaker 16 I mean, sharks had been bred in captivity and eggs had hatched in aquariums, but the thing that had never been done before was taking an egg from a dead shark and getting it to develop.

Speaker 25 Nobody had ever done that.

Speaker 5 Nobody, so this was a first.

Speaker 36 And now he's thinking, maybe, maybe

Speaker 20 I could even get this thing to hatch.

Speaker 1 Which is what Greg is going to try to do right after this short break.

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Speaker 24 We're back.

Speaker 11 All right, we pick up with the story of Greg with his little egg case in his little kid plastic aquarium. And the egg case has a bump, which has just begun moving.

Speaker 34 An egg case that Greg at this point has decided to name.

Speaker 5 Squiggle.

Speaker 50 Was squiggling in the egg case, and I didn't know what else to call it.

Speaker 47 It's squiggling around.

Speaker 48 That's how I described it to people.

Speaker 30 And now that he knew that it was alive and he'd given it a name.

Speaker 5 Now I'm thinking, maybe I need to actually get a slightly bigger aquarium and something a little bit, I would say, more professional, you know, made of glass instead of plastic.

Speaker 39 So he moves Squiggle into his happier, newer home.

Speaker 48 And so now we're like six weeks, seven weeks, to eight weeks.

Speaker 16 As squiggle is growing and moving more and more.

Speaker 31 It's still this sort of lump that's attached to a yoke in a thin thread.

Speaker 57 And then the yoke itself starts to appear to have blood vessels form on it.

Speaker 50 So you almost see like vein-like structures on the yolk sac. What?

Speaker 49 And they kind of snake their way up the yolk sac to this little placental connection, which then in turn is going into the shark.

Speaker 37 Like blood? Yes.

Speaker 41 So it's blood going to the head of the shark.

Speaker 23 That is wild. Yes.

Speaker 48 It is alien-like because it has no distinctive shape.

Speaker 58 It doesn't have the distinctive snout. There are no fins.

Speaker 57 It's, I don't know, how would you describe it? It's just like a

Speaker 5 little

Speaker 57 something.

Speaker 41 So you'd walk by Squiggle like a couple times a day.

Speaker 31 You'd be like, hey, Squiggle, what's up?

Speaker 5 I wasn't necessarily talking to Squiggle, but when people said, how's it doing?

Speaker 48 How's it doing? Oh, Squiggle. Squiggle's doing fine.

Speaker 26 And then one day...

Speaker 50 It just simply stopped moving.

Speaker 31 Squiggle stopped squiggling.

Speaker 15 Oh no.

Speaker 25 And it just never started again.

Speaker 19 That was the end of Squiggle.

Speaker 32 But Squiggle left behind this little bit of hope for Greg.

Speaker 49 This beautiful little piece of ravioli kind of proved it was possible.

Speaker 48 So there was this kind of

Speaker 53 this drive.

Speaker 34 So Greg heads back to the fish market, tries to get as many eggs as he can.

Speaker 19 Not even like pulling out the strings when he sees them. He now just starts cutting into the dead sharks.

Speaker 11 Whoa, the fishermen are just letting him do this?

Speaker 34 Well, Greg got very good at spotting which sharks had egg cases in them.

Speaker 13 But also these fishermen...

Speaker 46 They were curious too, to the point where we arrive.

Speaker 51 They now tell us, oh, I've got some of this and I've got some of this.

Speaker 25 And at this point, he has egg cases upon egg cases at home.

Speaker 46 Multiple aquariums, et cetera.

Speaker 26 And they're all starting to move.

Speaker 33 And they do a little bit of wiggling, just like Squiggle did.

Speaker 58 Going good, going good.

Speaker 16 Everything's going good.

Speaker 30 But then, just like Squiggle, they would all die.

Speaker 34 And Greg is like,

Speaker 51 what's happening?

Speaker 50 Why do they suddenly stop developing?

Speaker 38 So he starts tinkering with a couple things, like the aeration, the salinity.

Speaker 13 And then eventually he starts to drop the temperature of the tank.

Speaker 50 Lowering the temperature, lowering the temperature, lowering the temperature.

Speaker 47 And lo and behold, this mortality suddenly stopped massively.

Speaker 29 These eggs start surviving.

Speaker 56 Everything seemed to continue to develop.

Speaker 41 Past the day that Squiggle died.

Speaker 52 Slowly get bigger, bigger, bigger, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle.

Speaker 44 And then some weeks in, he notices that one of the embryos in the egg cases is starting to look like a shark.

Speaker 58 The fins developed, it seems to have a tail and a head.

Speaker 50 It's now starting to go into a position where it has its head at the bottom part of the egg case and the body is looped over to the top and the tail is now next to the head.

Speaker 16 And then one day he's cleaning the tank and he accidentally bumps into the string that's holding the tendrils and then all of a sudden all movement stops.

Speaker 8 I've just killed it.

Speaker 58 And then after a minute or so,

Speaker 48 oh no, it's all right.

Speaker 46 It's all right.

Speaker 51 It's all good.

Speaker 5 It's all good.

Speaker 30 And then it started wiggling again.

Speaker 31 It's this defense mechanism these little egg cases have to protect themselves from predators who want to eat them.

Speaker 36 Now, at this point, the little shark bodies, they're curled around the yolk sack.

Speaker 47 And Greg can see that that yolk sack is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.

Speaker 45 And after around about five and a half, coming up towards six months, that yolk sack has almost disappeared.

Speaker 18 And so he starts thinking, I bet when that yolk sack goes away, that's that's when this thing's going to hatch.

Speaker 50 Now, every time you go past the aquarium, you're looking, looking, looking.

Speaker 53 Can you see any yolk? Can you see any yolk?

Speaker 16 And then one day, oh, it's gone.

Speaker 18 And in the place where the shark used to attach to the yolk sack, there's just a little belly button.

Speaker 50 Literally, because it's like a placental connection.

Speaker 47 So you could actually quite happily say that sharks have belly buttons.

Speaker 45 And at that point, the shark is ready to be born.

Speaker 29 Wow, the belly button is the final touch, the master stroke.

Speaker 8 It is, it is, it is.

Speaker 40 So he's just sitting there, waiting for this shark to finally break out of this egg case.

Speaker 50 You can only spend so many hours with your eyes open watching a shark waiting for it to hatch. It's like the kettle, yeah? You go to bed, you think, okay, well, everything seems fine.

Speaker 45 But then one morning, he wakes up and there's a little baby shark sitting at the bottom of the tank.

Speaker 4 Just sitting at the bottom.

Speaker 39 Like a picture-perfect miniature version of a small spotted cat shark.

Speaker 20 Just sitting on the bottom of the tank?

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 23 He did it.

Speaker 11 Yeah, he has a baby shark in his aquarium that came from a dead mother shark yeah wow

Speaker 18 and so this baby shark is just sitting at the bottom of the tank and he's like i guess it's time to let it go release it into the sea back to the ocean

Speaker 17 So one afternoon.

Speaker 50 A group of us, I think it was seven or eight

Speaker 53 members of the organization.

Speaker 26 They pack it up into a cooler and they drive to the north side of the island.

Speaker 47 We get our wetsuits on, put our scuba gear on, transfer the shark into the box.

Speaker 30 Just like a little Tupperware you'd put your lunch in.

Speaker 53 Everyone got cameras. Yeah, yeah, got cameras.
Are the batteries charged? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The battery's charged.

Speaker 50 Okay, are we ready? We're ready.

Speaker 5 Let's get in the water.

Speaker 16 So they walk out into the water, dip down under, and start to dive.

Speaker 52 To a depth of, I don't know, maybe about 10, 12 meters.

Speaker 31 And they're swimming around the bottom, looking for a good place to leave this baby shark.

Speaker 5 Underwater with a little box, the little baby shark.

Speaker 57 You can see the beaming smiles behind the regulators.

Speaker 30 And the reality of what they're doing, what they've done, it starts to sink in.

Speaker 4 The amount of time, energy, effort, dedication, concern, worry built up over the year or so of development and then hatching and releasing.

Speaker 8 They're all just tearing up, like their masks just fill up with their tears.

Speaker 57 Seriously, it was just so super, super, super emotional. So

Speaker 49 when it came to this final kind of like, now we're going to open the box and take the lid off and see what happens.

Speaker 40 Greg's holding this little box and he starts to open it.

Speaker 5 Just very slowly, slowly take off the lid of the box and the little shark wiggles around a bit.

Speaker 57 And then it kind of lifts off the box and starts to swim.

Speaker 57 I don't know. There was just kind of...

Speaker 52 I don't know, there was just a very, very kind of like emotional but peaceful moment.

Speaker 53 It felt like many minutes, but it probably wasn't.

Speaker 49 The shark had disappeared.

Speaker 53 We weren't going to chase it.

Speaker 50 We had no idea where it was going to go next.

Speaker 39 That shark was the first,

Speaker 5 but it wasn't the last.

Speaker 56 The total number of sharks we've released to date is 371.

Speaker 8 Whoa.

Speaker 35 And one thing that the science reporter Claudia Guy from the beginning pointed out is that Greg had started this project in 2011 and I was reporting this in I think 2020, 2021.

Speaker 35 So he'd by then been doing it for almost a decade. He had published a paper on it in 2018 that essentially was like a how-to guide for taking egg cases and raising them to be re-released in the wild.

Speaker 8 And now there are other scientists in other parts of the world rescuing egg cases from these dead sharks.

Speaker 56 So it wasn't a question of, wow, we're stopping a species from becoming extinct.

Speaker 50 It was a question of putting them back where they belong.

Speaker 56 Let's let nature take its course.

Speaker 49 And if nature determines that this creature will have a long and happy, fruitful life, fantastic.

Speaker 50 If nature says something different, it's nature doing what nature does.

Speaker 6 I hate to say it.

Speaker 8 They're going to die.

Speaker 43 That's nature, red raw and tooth and claw.

Speaker 35 When I was reporting this story and I spoke to this one prestigious researcher, Nick Dulvey, professor in conservation biology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Speaker 35 And in his view, it's almost kind of pointless to put baby sharks back into the ocean.

Speaker 13 He says like these babies are just like a snack for another fish.

Speaker 60 This is probably the most important, least well understood fact in marine conservation that you should conserve the adults and not the babies.

Speaker 25 Nick says, just like put this all in a different context, just imagine you're a farmer.

Speaker 60 You want to start an apple farm. I'm going to give you a choice.
Would you like 10 mature apple trees or would you like 10 apple pips from my apple?

Speaker 60 And everybody, when they see it, they're like, oh yeah, of course, yeah, of course. Give me the adults because they can breed multiple times right from the get-go.

Speaker 19 Focusing on the babies instead of the adults, it's not only a waste of time, but also kind of a distraction away from conservation efforts.

Speaker 60 management or bycatch mitigation that do make a big difference. These kind of activities are described as what are called feel-good conservation.

Speaker 60 These are an action that make people feel like they're helping to save the planet, but they don't have a real impact.

Speaker 1 I had a similar question.

Speaker 17 I don't know.

Speaker 16 The more I talked to Claudia,

Speaker 13 The more I think they do do something,

Speaker 18 just a different kind of something.

Speaker 35 You know, one piece we didn't talk about is everybody spoke about how the people around them in their community responded to this project really, really

Speaker 38 positively and even beyond Greg's community.

Speaker 25 You know, there's there's even a classroom in Spain now.

Speaker 47 My name is Jaime Penal. I'm a biologist from Spain.

Speaker 44 Using Greg's methods.

Speaker 61 My name is Inmaríal.

Speaker 44 I'm 15 years old.

Speaker 18 To raise baby sharks.

Speaker 35 So instead of having like butterflies, you would have a baby shark in your classroom.

Speaker 9 My name is Ignacio, and I'm 16.

Speaker 35 Paolena, you're 17 years old. I'm 14 years old.

Speaker 25 And in a way, it's not what's happening inside those shark tanks that matters, it's what's happening inside those kids.

Speaker 9 Honestly, I was like

Speaker 9 concerned about how are we like going to take care of them.

Speaker 35 I used to think of sharks as like mainly dangerous.

Speaker 61 At first, I thought I thought of sharks as big and scary creatures, and now that I've been taking care of five of them, I'm pretty much relaxed.

Speaker 27 People have been taught to fear sharks.

Speaker 19 Chris Lowe, again, our shark scientist from the very beginning of this week.

Speaker 27 So the cool thing for me is if we've taught people to fear sharks, we can also unteach them to fear sharks, to appreciate the animal.

Speaker 43 The wonder of the complexity of their lives and the complexity of their biology.

Speaker 5 You know, we need to

Speaker 53 change our concept.

Speaker 46 Get away from the the monster image.

Speaker 50 They're not monsters at all.

Speaker 61 Butterflies or sharks?

Speaker 40 Sharks.

Speaker 61 Definitely sharks. They are more interesting.

Speaker 9 Yeah, same here. I think I would prefer sharks over butterflies.

Speaker 11 Well, that is a wrap for our week of sharks.

Speaker 1 Big giant whale shark size. Thank you to Rachel Kusick for bringing this wild idea to us and doing dozens of interviews to bring it to life.

Speaker 11 Thanks also to our editorial ground control, Pat Walters, for wrangling so many sharks.

Speaker 1 This episode was reported and produced by Rachel Kusick, edited by Pat Walters, fact-checked by Diane Kelly, with mixing help from Jeremy Bloom, and original music by Alan Gofinsky.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 1 if somehow you are still yearning for even more shark stories going into the weekend, Terrestrials, our kids' show hosted by Lulu, has such a beautiful episode on the Greenland shark, which is the oldest of sharks, like the individuals live impossibly long.

Speaker 13 It's pretty neat.

Speaker 11 You can go find that on the Radiolab for Kids feed. The episode is called The Sea Troll.

Speaker 11 And one more thing, 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 your support makes big projects like this possible and we are so grateful and if you aren't a member yet or are thinking about giving more uh this is the perfect time to take the plunge because if you join or re-up now you will receive a really cool gift a limited edition week of sharks hat designed by the awesome main-based artist and surfer Ty Williams.

Speaker 11 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 1 It's available to everyone who joins the lab this month, even for as little as seven bucks a month.

Speaker 11 You can join at radiolab.org/slash join. Existing members check your email for details, and thank you so much.
All right, that is that is really it. We're stalling.

Speaker 11 I don't want to end this thing, it's been so fun. Uh, but have a great weekend.
Stay equal parts open and curious as you are wary of the shadows in the water and beyond.

Speaker 62 Hi, I'm Michelle and I'm from Richardson, Texas. And here are our staff credits.
Radio Lab was created by Jad Appamrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and LaSipnasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 62 Dylan Keith is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

Speaker 62 Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Rebecca Lack, Maria Paz-Butierrez, Sundunyana Sambandan, Matt Kielti, Annie McEwen, Alex Niecan, Sarah Kari, Sarah Sandbach, Anissa Vita, Arian Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young, with help from Rebecca Rand, our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Bujel-Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.

Speaker 63 Hi, my name is Anna, and I'm calling from Somerville, Massachusetts. Leadership support for Radio Lab Science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.

Speaker 63 Foundational support for Radio Lab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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