Shark Week: Inside ‘Air Jaws: Night Stalker’
Shark Week’s most beloved franchise, Air Jaws, returns tonight for an eighth installment — this time, narrated by Game of Thrones’ Lena Headey — and it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. Why? The focus of Air Jaws: Night Stalker is on how the breaching great whites of South Africa hunt in darkness around Seal Island. It’s something Chris Fallows first witnessed in 2007, but only now has low-light camera technology advanced to the point that filmmaker Jeff Kurr can capture it clearly. “It allows us, as Chris says in the film, to be the invisible spectator to great white sharks hunting at night,” Kurr tells Yahoo TV.
We spoke separately with Kurr, Fallows, and Dr. Neil Hammerschlag (who makes his first Air Jaws appearance after studying white sharks with Fallows in South Africa for more than a decade) to get our burning questions answered.
Related: A Shark Week First: Watch a Great White Glide Into the Deep
How did Lena Headey come to narrate the film?
Jeff Kurr: I had David Wenham narrate [2012′s] Air Jaws Apocalypse. He, of course, was the guy who narrated the movie 300. I’m a big 300 fan. Lena Headey, she’s better known for Game of Thrones, but she narrated 300: Rise of an Empire. I loved her voice. It’s so compelling. It turns out that she’s a huge shark fanatic. She loves sharks. She wants to go diving with sharks, she told me. She supports shark conservation. It was amazing to watch her do the narration in the audio booth. I’ve told people it felt like she was reading the script from the back of the boat as it was happening. She really brings you in. I’m sure people will love hearing her voice. And it’s nice to have a female voice, because so many of our narrators are male.
One of the things studied in the special is if the moon affects predation: are great whites hunting more on a full moon, when the seals are silhouetted in the water? We see the seals very active on a moonless night, as if they don’t anticipate as much of a threat. Chris goes diving in the Launch Pad area, without a cage, to observe them. Why was that a good idea?
Kurr: His main objective in diving into the launch pad at night was to see the seal activity. You always have in the back of your mind that there’s a white shark in the area. You always have to sort of keep in a position where the white shark can’t ambush you. You see Chris in the film, he’s hugging the rocks along the bottom. He’s not splashing around on the surface. I dove that area in the daytime, and it was very scary — I was filming Chris in and among the seals, and I never put my back to open ocean. I always had my back to the island so I could see if a shark approached. They are known to come in very shallow into that area. Even though I was nervous about Chris diving in there at night, the fact is, he knows these white sharks better than anybody. He knows their behavior. He doesn’t take unnecessary risks, he takes calculated risks. I think he believed that by hugging the rocks and not splashing around too much on the surface that he would be safe. Thankfully, he was, but it was one of the tenser moments I’ve had in producing these Shark Week films in the last 26 years.
Topside, Jeff can see great whites launching attacks in the distance. Chris, were you aware of any of that?
Chris Fallows: Not really. When you are in the water, you are so focused on what is going on around you that you don’t put your head up and look around to see what is really going on in other areas. The seals did, on one or two occasions, get a frightened spook. It was very difficult to know if that was me, or the light [I was carrying], making them do that. At no point did I hear Jeff or anybody else in the boat shouting about the sharks hunting in the background. I was just very, very focused on the seals in front of me and trying to see what they were up to.
As you’re swimming, Chris, we can see your light catch a glimpse of a great white nearby. But when you get out of the water, you say you didn’t see any sharks.
Fallows: When you’re underwater, as you pan the flashlight around, you’re not exactly sure of what you’re seeing. These things just move into and out of the light so quickly. Then, when I got on board with Jeff and he told me that there had been a couple hunting in the area, obviously then, it made me realize that definitely was a shark. When I got out of the water, I was pretty glad that I wasn’t 100 percent sure the shark was there, because I probably would have been a bit more scared. … Well, to be honest, if i had known there was a shark there and I knew I was going to see it, I probably would have stuck around in the water a bit longer to have a good look.
Kurr: White sharks and people come in contact a lot more often than you’d think. This happens everywhere: They can sense us, but we have no idea they are even there. It kind of goes to show that they’re not really there to attack us. In most cases, the sharks will encounter a human and they’ll just swim off. I think in this particular case, with Chris diving with the seals at night, the white sharks were attuned to the seals. Chris probably was giving off some sort of visual cue in having the flashlight that made the sharks really wary of him. That’s the thing about nighttime, sharks have the advantage. They can see the things that they target and the things that they target can’t see them. That’s why they’re so active at night.
We do see in the footage that the sharks tend to swim away from Chris’s light.
Fallows: That is probably because these animals have got very, very light-sensitive eyes, and when their environment is completely dark and then suddenly this bright light is shining at them — I guess it is like you sleeping at night and suddenly somebody walks into your bedroom with a huge flashlight and shines it at you. The other thing is, these animals rely on stealth and ambush. Once you shine a light on it, the game is up for the animal and it probably just wanted to get back to a darker environment where it had the upper hand over its prey.
There’s obviously at least one cameraman down there with you, Chris. How many people are with you on a dive like that?
Fallows: There aren’t too many people that are crazy enough or stupid enough to get in the water with me most times. Generally, I work with very small groups of people because I need to have very experienced people in the water with me that have also had exposure to sharks, because you really need to pay a lot of attention to your own well-being and your own environment around you, and you need to be comfortable with the people that are in the water with you, that they don’t need much looking after. Generally, I dive with just one cameraman. In that case, it was a local cameraman and shark expert, Paul Wildman, but most of the time when we were filming Air Jaws, I dive with Andy Brandy Casagrande. We kind of look after each other’s backs. We’ve both been in a lot of interesting situations together before. I know Andy’s looking after himself and he knows likewise, and we get on with what we need to do when we’re down there.
Andy’s with you for a night cage dive in Sector 4, another dangerous area, where you seem to confirm a theory.
Fallows: The really interesting thing was that it was a completely new batch of sharks that we were seeing at night as opposed to in the day. I think that was a big surprise on its own. A whole new batch of animals moved into the area after dark. Are these individual animals nighttime specialists? That was an intriguing question for me.
Kurr: In Sector 4, there’s a very small area where the seals come and go from the island, sort of a transit path or a seal highway where they go out to open ocean. The white sharks know this. It often gets very crowded in this area when the sharks are trying to ambush the seals. It’s difficult to do when there’s 20 sharks in the same area. I think the sharks have figured this all out. A lot of times, during the day, there’s certain sharks there. Certain sharks in the morning, they just seem to disappear, and these other sharks arrive, sort of taking advantage of the fact that no one’s around — now’s my chance to actually be able to kill a seal and feed. It’s a very orderly thing the way these sharks interact with each other. They give each other space. It’s based on size. The biggest shark usually has the right of way, if you will. I think the sharks have figured out, if I go out there at night, I’m not going to have as much competition for the seals, so that’s my time.
I think that scene illustrated the fact that these sharks are active at night, despite the fact that you can’t see two feet in front of your face. They are still able to navigate the depths and still hunt effectively in total darkness and in terrible visibility.
Related: Shark Week Preview: A Dangerous Dive at ‘Tiger Beach’ and Uncharted Territories in ‘Isle of Jaws’
In the special, Chris says that over 20 years, you’ve recorded more than 10,000 predatory events — and the success rate is only 15 percent when the great white attacks a group of seals. It’s much, much higher when the white shark targets a seal returning to the island solo. Why?
Fallows: When they’re going for groups of seals, if you can imagine, it is like a lioness or a lion chasing a herd of zebra. When you have all these shapes criss-crossing and changing direction, it is very difficult to isolate a single prey item. What happens with the sharks is, they basically rush into these groups, mouth agape, trying to pick out a prey item, but just hoping like hell that they’re going to catch something. When it is a single seal coming back, they’ve got time to track the animal, time to pick the perfect time to actually launch their attack at the animal.
There’s a moment when Neil is at the edge of the boat, holding a sonar instrument down into the water. We’ve all watched enough Shark Week specials to know there’s not gonna be a Jaws “I think we need a bigger boat” moment, and yet, we’re still on the edge of our seat. Should we be nervous?
Kurr: You know, sharks are totally unpredictable. I remember filming Air Jaws 2, we saw a seal that actually dove underneath a colleague’s boat. The shark was chasing the seal, missed, and actually rammed into the side of the boat, right about where Neil was hanging the sonar over the side. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a shark can do that. We’ve seen sharks breach on us from just a few feet away from the back of the boat. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes in the middle of a hunt, we get in the way, inadvertently. You always have to be cautious when you’re in one of the top white shark hunting grounds in the world. Never lean too far over the boat. That’s rule number one.
Neil, you’re also studying whether the seals at Seal Island have higher stress levels than seals at other locations. Why is that important?
Dr. Neil Hammerschlag: Looking at their stress levels can be really important, because if they are stressed, that has population-level consequences. In humans, high stress can have all these consequences for your health, and your physiology, your well-being, and your reproduction. We weren’t sure if seals were experiencing stress — actual physiological and psychological stress — especially since sharks were targeting the young ones. Are they na?ve [to the danger], or are they not? These are things we’re looking at.
For me, it’s always been something I wanted to do research-wise. It’s the next step in the work that I’ve been doing for Chris. We’ve been studying the white shark hunting behaviors at Seal Island for 15 years. We’ve published papers, and we’re really learning about the things — what environmental, and what biological factors — affect a shark’s success rate of capturing a seal. We’ve always thought about what is happening at night, and how much risk these seals are under, how much pressure is on them. It’s logistically difficult to get out there, and this show provided us with the opportunity to go out there and start learning some things, and bringing new techniques and technologies, and then being able to show that to the world.
Chris, when did you realize you had nerves of steel?
Fallows: It has been a long progression to where I am now. I would say one of the greatest strengths for me, in terms of my knowledge of animals, is that I’ve always been involved with the right people and had a great team. As the saying goes, you don’t run before you can walk. You start off slowly, watching them from a cage, then picking the right animal to get out with, but staying close to the boat, eventually swimming away to where you’re comfortable. I’ve spent a lot of time in the bush, and I walk with big predators there as well. It is all about reading body language and doing something that you are comfortable with. These animals can pick up whether you are nervous, pick up your own body language. You have to be extremely comfortable with them. That comes over time.
Do you have a favorite dive?
Fallows: That’s a very hard one to answer. It’s been a long time. Especially working with Jeff Kurr, we both creatively come up with different ways to capture different behaviors of the white shark, trying to come up with some sort of different way to give meaning to their world that hasn’t really been done before. I guess two things really stand out for me: One is walking in the WASP [Water Armor Shark Protection] in New Zealand and having those really, really huge sharks, up to 16-17 foot, pushing and bouncing me around, and trying to get back up to my feet. That was an amazing experience.
Fallows in the Kurr-designed WASP in 2014′s ‘Air Jaws: Fin of Fury’
The other one that really stands out, is stand-up paddle-boarding with massive female great whites in shallow water and watching these huge animals come up to me. When we were out there, conditions were just perfect, and Jeff said, “Why don’t you go out and paddle with those sharks?“ You’re suddenly very aware of your balance and making sure that you stay upright. You realize just how insignificant you are if these sharks wanted to take us out. You are also pretty grateful for the fact that, for the most part, they’re not interested in us.
Fallows paddle-boarding with a great white in 2011′s ‘Great White Invasion.’
Will we see another Air Jaws?
Kurr: I’m going to say probably. Not sure what it is yet. We’re always thinking about ways to continue to tell this Air Jaws story. It’s been a huge part of Shark Week for so long. I think we have at least one more in us.
Air Jaws: Night Stalker premieres June 28 at 10 p.m. on Discovery, after Wrath of a Great White Serial Killer (9 p.m.), which investigates how great whites migrate from Mexico’s Guadalupe Island to the waters off Oregon.