Shark Week episode guide

Air Jaws, courtesy Discovery

The best way to celebrate the 25th Shark Week is with education and preparation. So here is the episode guide for Shark Week 2012. Tune in or set those DVRs.

AIR JAWS APOCALYPSE
Sunday, Aug. 12, 9PM E/P

Picking up where 2011’s Emmy®-nominated Ultimate Air Jaws left off, photographer, author and shark expert Chris Fallows and legendary natural history producer Jeff Kurr embark on a quest to learn more about the great white sharks of Seal Island, South Africa – and one shark in particular. Colossus is a massive 14-foot great white that dominates all other sharks in the area. Kurr and his team push the envelope even further with a new camera specially designed for the shoot, new angles and new hair-raising encounters… even if it means risking their lives for the ultimate close-up with Colossus. And what they discover in this yearlong filming expedition is a true scientific breakthrough: dozens of great whites clustered in shallow water, feeding on smaller sharks and rays – with Colossus dominating the grounds and nearly eating the camera.

Shark Week: I believe in monsters

Air Jaws, courtesy Discovery

BY AARON SAGERS

I believe in monsters, and one bit me on the foot – a small one. I grew up on the beaches of Florida and was literally in over my head one day. It isn’t as if I was in that deep of water for an eight or nine year-old, but it was deep enough I was bouncing up and down, launching off the sand below, to keep popping my head up for air. Adults were all around me, but none of that mattered when I bounced down and something clamped on.

There was a tough, alien feeling below my feet immediately preceding the pain that sunk in. Right underneath the part of my brain that was processing that pain – a lot of it - was a thought of “shark, shark, shark!

This was happening probably two years before Discovery Channel launched Shark Week in 1988, more than a decade after Jaws made America afraid to go into the water – but still probably a year before Jaws 4 made it personal (and personally helped to ruin Michael Caine’s career for another decade).

A kid who wanted to be a marine biologist well into high school, and who attended “sea camp” with his eighth grade class, I have always been a bit of an ocean nerd, and specifically a shark nerd. And Shark Week, launching its twenty-fifth year on Aug. 12 on Discovery, has been one of my holidays. Referred to in my home as Sharkmas, Sharkmukkah and Shar-kwanzaa, it is a yearly celebration of Mother Nature’s ultimate predators.