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to Radio Lab.

Lab.

Radio Lab.

From

WN Weiss.

Hey, I'm Lotthev Nasser.

This is Radio Lab day four of our week of sharks.

Hello.

Hello.

And we're starting today with our shark guide in residence, Rachel Cusick, and this lady.

I'm Allison Koch.

I'm a marine biologist.

In South Africa.

At a car wash.

Oh my gosh, yes.

Today, Allison works for South Africa's National Parks, but back in the 90s, young, without a lot of money.

I was a student at the University of Cape Town working at that car wash that you mentioned.

It was a small little spot, not one of those drive-through car washes with those like flying sponges.

It was all by, yeah, by hand.

And my role was to check the cars for valuables and move the cars from the wash basin through to the dry basin.

I used to also love just being around water, so that was another draw card for the car wash.

Wow, You're like, I'll even take the soapy water of a car washes, even if it's not the ocean.

And one day, you know, Alison's doing her thing, wash, rinse, repeat.

When one car kind of changed her life, this car.

Where is this going?

How could a car in a car wash change someone's life?

Okay, keep going.

So she gets, she like kind of like checks for the front front valuables, nothing there, nothing in the backseat, but she then goes to the trunk.

Dead body in the trunk.

Dead body in the trunk, exactly.

And she opens up this trunk and inside the trunk are these photographs they just blew me away there in full color is this is this image of a shark this incredibly big massive great white shark soaring above the waves below completely out of the water flying fully in the air like an aeroplane it was unlike anything she'd ever seen.

Absolutely.

But I was quite skeptical.

Like you thought they were Photoshopped or something.

Well, at the time, Photoshop wasn't.

I just, I thought they were fake.

You know, I just, I, I couldn't believe that I'd spent three years at university studying marine biology and not one time did anybody mention flying great white sharks.

And so, you know, when the car owner returned to get his car, Allison asked him, like, what is this photo?

Is this fake?

And He said it's real that a friend of his takes these photographs.

And I just said to him, look, this car wash will be on me if you introduce me to your friend.

And a few weeks later, Allison is on a boat with that friend, Chris Fellows, and also one of his friends, a guy named Rob.

And was there any part of her that was like, they photoshopped this image and now they're kidnapping?

Well, that's what I was saying.

Like, very trusting of you to delete these men and go out on their phone.

Looking back, it probably was, yeah.

Anyhow.

I mean, it was a beautiful day.

It was a flat day and there was very little wind.

The sun hadn't risen yet.

The sky was totally black.

And they were headed out to a place called Seal Island.

About a 25-minute boat trip.

This massive breeding colony of seals.

And as they're getting closer, she starts hearing the sounds of 60,000 seals.

You just listen to the seals and you listen to the ocean and the seabirds, but...

No sharks.

So,

you know, Chris kept saying to me, keep your eyes peeled.

And him and Rob Rob were really vigilant and they staring and they looking.

And the whole time, I still was not believing it.

You know, I still remained very, very skeptical.

When suddenly, Chris shouts, Predation!

And right in front of my eyes, where this little helpless seal is floating, literally within 10 meters, the water seems to like open up as this giant, giant shark, this incredible animal, comes flying out from below in the sky.

And time kind of like slows down at this point for her.

Like,

I'm in shock.

Her eyes bulge out of her face, and it's just like this massive shark suspended in air.

It's like defying every,

not just gravity, it's like defying every version of any shark that she's ever seen, thought about, or learned about in her entire life.

It's just like right in front of her.

There was no fear.

I don't know if it was ignorance.

I felt all.

I just saw majesty.

I just saw this incredible beauty.

And then

the shark lands back in the water, actually moving the boat with the wave from the big splash.

And I'm still standing there in complete awe.

And I just went, okay,

this is me for the rest of my life.

I'm going to study these sharks.

And that's exactly what she did.

She went back to school, got her master's, then her PhD, and started making more and more trips out there.

And what she quickly discovered was, wow, this is an awesome thing to watch as a human being on a boat.

One of the days I saw 42 Great White attacks.

No way!

Yeah.

If you were a seal on Seal Island, this place was terrible.

I've seen great whites like flying out of the water with this seal in its mouth, and the seal is kind of like never giving up.

Until

crunch.

And I mean, you're just screaming when you see it happen.

That, by the way, is Neil.

Dr.

Neil Hammerschlag.

He's a marine ecologist and a shark researcher.

He was spending a ton of time out there, just like Allison.

If you saw like a lone seal coming back to the island and they're like a small kind of baby seal, which would have, you know, smaller claws and not as experienced.

Like you would watch it and pull out your camera.

I know it sounds terrible, but like you could pretty much be sure a great white would come flying out of the water with this seal in its mouth like minutes later.

And Neil started to wonder, like, do these seals register how awful this place is to be a seal?

Like, do they feel the fear that I can just see so clearly?

So I designed the study where we would actually go to the island, get up on the island and collect seal poop.

He did the same exact thing on other islands.

Islands where there weren't sharks, then analyze the seal poop for stress levels, stress hormone levels.

And what, like cortisol?

What were you doing?

Cortisol, yeah, like metabolized cortisol.

And what he found was that the seals that live on Seal Island have stress levels that are four times higher than the seals on all the other islands.

Wow.

Yeah.

Like quadruple levels of stress.

And Neil says you can kind of just see this with the naked eye.

Yeah.

I mean, in the shallow water, the sharks couldn't really ambush them so the seals would always stay within five meters of the island it seemed like the sharks were controlling their behaviors through just a landscape of fear they were causing these seals to not go and do whatever they want or hang out wherever they want or behave any way that they wanted

they were keeping them under

under control

The way that we imagine sharks, the way that we see them in movies.

Sharks, but they can fly.

Like, that is what they were.

Something following us.

To the seals on Seal Island.

However.

Now you've seen how bad things can get, and how quick they can get that way.

Well, they can get a whole lot worse.

For the seals and the sharks of Seal Island,

all of that was about to get flipped on its head.

And we're gonna find a way to get out of here.

And we'll get to that.

First, we're gonna seal out this movie

right after a break.

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Hey, I'm Letthev Nasser.

This is Radiolab.

We are back with part two of day four of our week of sharks.

Yay.

Okay.

Before the break, Rachel, you told us about some high-flying great white sharks, these colossal apex predators terrorizing some poor little seals on an island off the coast of South Africa.

Yep, that's right.

And we are going to get back to those great whites and those little seals in just a minute.

But first, you know.

There are other fish in the sea.

We'd been monitoring.

So

back in 2015, Alison Coch, that shark researcher who got her start because of a photograph photograph she had seen, she received another photo of another kind of shark in the bay.

But this one, it was different.

Absolutely.

Divers sent me photographs of these dead seven gill sharks lying at the bottom of the ocean.

These sevengill sharks, they're smaller than their great white cousins, a little narrower.

But what struck Allison was that on each of the sharks, there was this huge gaping wound, like the shark had literally been cut and sliced open and the slice was so clean it almost looked like a surgical wound i mean it was such a clean wound that my immediate suspicion was people that had did it yeah

i know and that's kind of where we had to leave it because all we had was photographs

but then

Just a couple months later, another dead seven-gill shark was found by a different diver.

And so she's like, please collect it.

Please collect it.

She wants to do like long murder shark VU.

Shark VU.

So anyway, they collected it for me and we did the necropsy at the dive shop.

And as she's poking around at it, she realizes again, it was.

It has the exact same wound as the last one did.

This clean wound between the pectoral fins of the shark.

And that weirdly.

On closer inspection, the liver was gone.

The liver had been taken out.

Just the liver.

It's like creepy, like Hannibal serial killer vibes.

Yeah.

Or maybe like poaching or some shady black market stuff.

Yeah, I didn't know.

But it doesn't end there.

And here is where those great whites on Seal Island spin back into the story.

In 2017, Allison gets a call from another Allison, who's another researcher who studies sharks down kind of like the coast of South Africa.

And she's like, Allison, there's this

great white shark that's washed ashore.

And guess exactly what it looks like, Latino.

Got the same slash.

The slash down the body, liver is missing.

Everything looked exactly the same.

Very weird.

I know.

And it's about to get even weirder because right around the time Allison hears about this one sliced open great white.

The sharks at Seal Island literally disappeared.

Again, Again, Neil Hammerschlag.

Like, they were gone.

So, again, I was like, gosh, you know, what could this be?

What's going on?

And finally, on the 16th of May, 2022, Allison gets her answer.

So

we were contacted by a drone pilot, and he captured the most extraordinary footage.

There's no sound, but the video starts with this big, wide shot looking straight down into this bluish-green ocean, maybe like 50 feet below.

And right in the center of the frame, you see this shark and this giant, giant white-spotted black orca.

For a while, the pair is just eyeing each other.

swimming in these tighter and tighter circles around and around

until slyly a second orca swims into the right of the frame and the white chalk can only keep its eye on one orca at a time the second orca starts to slowly glide towards them

until suddenly it darts slamming the shark rendering it motionless turning the water frothy white

A moment later, as the froth fades, the orca swims next to the motionless shark.

This time, baring its teeth, it slices out the shark's liver.

Before the clip ends, you can actually even see the orcas start feasting on this white, fleshy pouch, and the shark slowly starts to sink, fading into the blue depths of the ocean.

This was unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

Okay, so it's the orcas who are killing the sharks.

So yeah, so these livers of sharks, they're super nutrient-rich.

They're really fatty.

They actually take up like a third of the shark's body.

And so they are like the creme de la creme for these orcas.

They are just this massive meal for them.

So they go in and

they take the liver and then they actually just leave.

Huh.

Yeah.

I mean, even Allison found this hard to believe.

I was in denial for a very long time

because for me,

white sharks were always the apex predator.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So, so we're saying the orcas killed all the great whites at Seal Island?

Well, it seems like they definitely killed some of them.

And Neil is quick to point out that we humans killed some of them as well.

The nets, right?

A lethal netting program.

Government has had nets in the water to protect swimmers.

And something like 30 sharks get caught in these nets and killed every year, which is a lot for great white shark populations.

So that's definitely a part of their decline, Allison would agree.

But here is where things get even more shocking for our apex shark predators.

Allison says that for the orcas to clear all great white sharks at a seal island, the orcas didn't need to kill all of them.

No, this is the whole point.

Allison and our grad students and some researchers in the area had tagged a bunch of these sharks.

And when they looked at that tagging data, they found that after each predation event, you know, each orc attack, it took the sharks longer to come back and fewer came back.

Until eventually, after about four or five of these predation events that we knew of, the white sharks stayed away and didn't come back.

And so, you know, it's very possible that the fear of predation, the fear of being predated on, made the white sharks abandon Seal Island.

But like I can imagine an individual shark getting attacked and then leaving or even like if it sees a friend or family member or something getting attacked and then they leave as like a little family unit.

But like it's not like they have like a giant like WhatsApp group or something where they can like they're all gonna

you know leave en masse.

Like how does that even work?

Like a community watch program, but for yeah yeah like well actually they kind of do like

they have this very cool trick.

I mean, sharks aren't stupid.

Fear can spread through a population in much the same way as it can through

a group of people.

I spoke to this man named Colin Brown.

He's the head of this fish lab at Macquarie University in Australia.

I think one interview called you Dr.

Fish Fields or something.

Yes, I speak for the fish.

And he explained to me how fear can spread literally through the water.

So if a shark is injured or killed, it releases this chemical.

A very particular chemical, which in the German word is called Schreskoff, which literally translates to scary stuff.

Signaling like something bad is happening here.

Go protect yourself, like get away.

Whoa.

And if a situation is bad enough.

Schreskoff can set off a contagion, effectively, a behavioral contagion.

And an entire population could potentially develop a fear response.

Almost like

a scream

echoing through

a crowd.

Like, it's funny to me that, like, they are the like poster child for scary, especially these flying white sharks.

And yet, when you get to know them, they are just these little, these little fish that are scared of bigger fish.

That, like, as Colin says, there is always something scarier.

Yeah, there's always a bigger fish in the sea, right?

And that is virtually true of every animal.

The more we find out about fishes and sharks and these sorts of aquatic animals, the more we realize we're basically fish with some tweaks.

Of course, we've come quite some way, but nonetheless, our physiology and our sort of behavioral responses haven't really changed that much.

So, next time you're afraid of a shark, just remember

they have feelings too.

This episode was reported by Rachel Kusick and produced by Rachel Kusick, Simon Adler, and Maria Paz Gutierrez with production help from Becky Lacks.

It was edited by Pat Walters and fact-checked by Diane Kelly with mixing help and sound design by Jeremy Bloom.

And special thanks to Katie Ayers.

One more thing, we want to give a big thanks to everyone out there who is a member of the lab, our membership program.

Your support makes big projects like this possible, makes our entire show possible, and we are so grateful.

If you are not yet a member or you've been thinking about giving more, this is a perfect time to take the plunge.

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Tomorrow is our last day of the week of sharks and we are going from some of the biggest fish in the sea to some of the teeny tiniest.

Catch you tomorrow.

Hi, I'm Isa and I'm from Plano, Texas.

And here are the staff credits.

Radio Lab was created by Chad Avanrod and is edited by Thorne Wheeler.

Lugo Miller and Lajek Nasser are our co-hosts.

Dylan Keith is our director of Sant Sign.

Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Brusler, W.

Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Rebecca Lack, Maria Paz Putira, Sindhu Nyana Sumbundam, Matt Kilce, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Kari, Sarah Sandak, Anissa Vita, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster, Jessica Young.

With help from Rebecca Rand, our fact-trickers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazzini, and Natalie Middleton.

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