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A 15-year-old girl is bitten in half by a shark. A woman in Brazil dies following a shark encounter. And a vicious shark attack in New Zealand is caught on film. Enter Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, a highly-anticipated week of all-sharks-all-the-time programming that comes after a series of disturbing real-life shark attacks.
Discovery is planning to address the attacks of the past year with “Sharkpocalypse,” which promises to examine “the trend of sharks moving in closer to shorelines.
Michael Sorensen, who oversees the Shark Week programming at Discovery, said the network included the special in this year’s programming because there have been more shark attacks in recent months than ever before.
“We’ve seen a steep incline in the last 12 months of the amount of shark attacks around the world,” Sorensen explained. “We thought it was really timely to ask the question of ‘Why?’ What is driving great whites and other sharks closer to the shore than we’ve ever seen?"
Sorensen said the network’s research showed that though shark populations are declining, attacks are on the rise.
“Their feeding patterns have changed. They’re adapting to things that might not be natural to [their] normal diet. They’re evolving to almost be scavengers and eat what they can as populations are declining.”
Paul Matusheski, executive producer of “Sharkpocalypse,” said the show investigates other causes for the increase in attacks as well.
“When you see a spike in shark attacks anywhere in the world you can usually kind of put that spot under a microscope and start looking at what has changed there to cause the attacks,” he said.
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