Spoilers ahead for Shark Week 2023's "Monster Mako: Fresh Blood" special on Discovery.
Discovery is the place to be every summer for a week full of shark action, and 2023 is the 35th anniversary of Shark Week. The first few days of this year's event covered everything from orcas as great white serial killers to how shark cocaine was made for a Florida experiment, but "Monster Mako: Fresh Blood" looked at two large species in a new light. Great whites and makos were compared throughout the special, and Shark Week expert Dr. Austin Gallagher spoke with CinemaBlend to expand on "Monster Mako" comments about which species is more powerful.
In this special, Dr. Austin Gallagher and his team were on the hunt for some massive mako sharks that are big enough to feed on seals and sea lions, like the closely-related great white sharks. Any regular Shark Week viewer who was tuning in before Jason Momoa came on as host for 2023 likely knows that makos are known for their speed and breaching ability; what about their size in the waters off California?
Well, the scientists and divers were able to get the samples they needed to prove that some makos are indeed big enough to eat seals and sea lions, and "Monster Mako" ended after making the statement that "Many believe, pound for pound, the mako is the most powerful shark in the ocean." When I spoke with Gallagher at the Shark Week 2023 press junket, he elaborated and explained the importance of spreading awareness:
Mako sharks are, like I said, they're a pretty close cousin. They're close genetically, evolutionarily, very closely related to great whites. They're not as big, but they're really cool, because they are super fast and they're super powerful and they're really acrobatic. They can breach out of the water and have these really amazing circular patterns and things like that, which you see in the show. So yeah, I think it's just bringing more awareness to [the] species. Everybody kind of has heard the word 'mako' shark, I think, but they don't know anything about it, and it's cool to sort of bring some more awareness to them through the show.
Mako sharks may not be quite as blockbuster famous as great whites thanks to the Jaws franchise (which had an affect on real sharks that Steven Spielberg regrets) or even the megalodon that is – sorry, fans of The Meg – long extinct, but specials like "Monster Mako" raise awareness about the species. The special also made the point that it's tricky to fish for makos in a way that doesn't apply to great whites, as makos can breach all the way out of the water and onto a boat if they're hooked via rod and reel.
"Monster Mako" aired just days after Dr. Austin Gallagher's first special in Shark Week 2023, called "Belly of the Beast: Feeding Frenzy," which ended in a harrowing great white sequence that he shared "plays out just like a movie." When I asked about finding the focus for the mako production, he explained how the two were different:
The focus for 'Monster Mako' is really more trying to track down an animal that's on the move. In the white shark show, we're trying to find a shark that we don't know where it is. On the mako shark show, we know there are makos all over that area, big ones, but we just don't know where they were. We had to track them down, and that's what we did. We eventually got to them, and it's really more of a study where we were trying to figure out the tissue sampling, the mercury levels in the sharks.
Of course, trying to find particular kinds of sharks in a vast ocean doesn't have a guaranteed success, and species have been facing different kinds of threats in recent years. This notably includes orcas, with the two most famous shark-killing killer whales even making appearances in Shark Week 2023 despite seeming like a "terrible idea" to one expert. Makos face a different kind of threat, as Dr. Gallagher continued:
The mako shark population has also become fractured, which is interesting, because they are relatives of white sharks, but they have become fractured due to overfishing by humans and it has removed a lot of the middle size individuals. It's left a lot of small ones, and it's also left this kind of really small population of large monster makos that we just see every now and are really rare. So that's what we were trying to do with this one.
Dr. Austin Gallagher and Shark Week showed viewers just how makos can be considered the most powerful sharks in the ocean even compared to great whites, and that's something to take note of. In fact, if you want to revisit "Monster Mako: Fresh Blood," you can do so already with a Max subscription.
Plus, the Shark Week action isn't over yet. The event continues on Discovery on Friday, July 28 with "Tropic Jaws" at 8 p.m. ET, "Deadly Sharks of Paradise" at 9 p.m., and "Haunting at Shark Tower" at 10 p.m. before the week of specials ends on July 29.
