Have a listen to this. That is a short extract from AliHarrison’s upcoming documentary Britain's Whalesand Britain's Sharks. In it, the body of a nine-metrehumpback whale drowned and washed up on a coastis returned to the ocean to review how its death cansustain ocean life. And it resulted in the largestgathering of sharks ever recorded in UK waters. She spoke to the BBC.
There was two sides to me. The night before when my co-presenter had the opportunity to divefirst when there were just a few blue sharks on our whale. And then it was my turn. It’s sort of sixo’clock next morning. Conditions change quite a lot overnight, you know. Every single way youturned, there were blue sharks coming out from the darkness. Every single way you turned. It wasincredible.
Two hundred blue sharks. You didn’t sound scared in that clip. But I understand that one of thedivers who was with you actually got a bit of a nip from one of the sharks?
Yes, yeah that’s right. They’ve been there for a little while, so we had our cameraman and a reallyexperienced dive crew who were supporting all of our activities. Things sort of change. Once I gotin the water, I think what happened was there was a lot more talking. And it sends out a lot ofelectrical signals into the water which started to change the behavior of the sharks. And I think onceall that activities started, one of them got a little bit excitable and gave him a nip, which he wasactually delighted about it. This is quite a badge of honour to have.
I bet. He was trying to be polite to the shark. But let’s talk about the whale. Tell us about that. Imean, you’d never done this before obviously. And this has been the biggest number of sharks alltogether. What was that like? Describe it first.
It was incredibly difficult. It took us three years just to get to this stage because we have people onwatchout waiting for the right size. It has to be not too big and not too small. And eventually wegot this humpback who tragically died. But the logistics of getting a whale, it took the permissionsof fifteen different government agencies and then freezing experts to get this whale back out intothe sea. It hadn’t been done before, so it’s the first ever study of its type.
And tell us what did it tell you.
We knew that there were sharks in our waters. We knew that we had about thirty different speciesof sharks in our waters, but we’ve never expected that to be the numbers. Seeing that number ofblue sharks together has given a lot of academics a lot of behaviour that they are able to write upabout and not really knowing that they could congregate in numbers this big, that was probably ourbiggest finding.
