Cue the Scary Fish Music

There are only a few great television traditions to look forward to each year: the Super Bowl, A Christmas Story on Dec. 24, Duke losing in the NCAA tournament and Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

During Shark Week, the Discovery Channel runs programming devoted to sharks in some form or another (as they did again recently). Whether it’s stories about world record-setting catches, documentaries about the history of sharks, interviews with people who have been attacked, or the network’s regular shows adopting a shark theme for the week, the programs never fail to entertain.

A lot of times on these shows, people will intentionally get in harm's way for the sake of our viewing pleasure by jumping into shark-infested waters and begging the animals to attack them. I often wonder what these people’s health insurance premiums are like, or if they lie to insurance companies about what they do for a living and just hope none of the adjusters see them on TV. That’s probably a safe bet because I imagine a lot of insurance adjusters only watch Sean Hannity or historical accounts of Native Americans getting robbed of their land and stripped of all their natural resources.

Anyway, Shark Week programming also strikes fear into its viewers by offering evidence that, at the point of birth, most sharks are roughly the size of a subway car. On top of that, during the first week of its life, a baby shark is taught by its mother to crawl on land and hunt down small children as they stumble to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Shark Week even provides some comic relief because there’s always at least one documentary which says humans are more of a threat to sharks than they are to us. Yet these documentaries never show footage of a surfer emerging from the water, arms raised in victory, with a dorsal fin hanging from his mouth.

I know, I know, every year thousands of sharks are poached by hunters, but by and large the practice is limited to the eastern hemisphere of the globe. Not that that makes it right, I just personally don’t know anyone who’s ever had shark fin soup or has the complete set of a Great White’s upper and lower jaw mounted on their wall.

When I hear that we’re more dangerous to them than vice-versa, I don’t think about the reality of sharks being hunted, I instead think about the fantasy of a person wrestling a shark. It’s what we as American males do. We like to picture two creatures – human, animal or a mix of both – and imagine which one would win in a fight.

If you're factoring in strategy, sharks have multiple rows of teeth, and each tooth has a column of serrated “mini teeth” running vertically along its side. They clamp down on their prey, then whip their head back and forth, effectively sawing into their victim. My money’s on the shark.

I think we all went to high school with a guy who we thought had teeth like this (someone who probably repeated the 10th grade a number of times), only to learn he simply suffered from a severe lack of oral hygiene rather than being the product of some evolutionary man-fish crossbreeding. Whatever the cause, that guy was always in a lot of fights and he always won. It’s mother nature’s way – if you have shark teeth, you are winning most fights. You may not climb the corporate ladder, but that’s an issue for another day.

What was my point? Oh yeah, Shark Week is cool. And don’t get in a fight with a guy who has rows of teeth.