Shark Week comes to the Coastal Bend

Mako sharks are the Ferrari of the shark world, according to Dr. Greg Stunz. They are sleek, slender and built for speed. 
But other than that, very little is known about them. 
“We know virtually nothing, relatively speaking, compared to other sharks,” said Stunz, the endowed chair for Fisheries and Ocean Health at the Harte Research Institute at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. “It’s a very understudied shark.”
Stunz and a team from the university set out to change that. Their efforts will be featured during the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week,” which begins July 5. 
At 28 years, “Shark Week” is television’s longest-running and most anticipated summer broadcasting event, according to the Discovery Channel. Stunz is making his second “Shark Week” appearance in as many years with “Monster Mako,” filmed about 60 miles off the coast of Port Aransas. Last year, he went in search of a mythical “Monster Hammerhead” off the coast of Florida. 
This year’s subject was just as elusive. Makos live far off the Gulf Coast shoreline, where they prey on some of the fastest fish in the ocean. Despite that, the team managed to attach a camera to a mako to record data and video  — something that had never been done before, Stunz said. They ended up with 17 hours of video while also documenting speed, depth and location data. 
Because the sharks live so far offshore, Stunz said, most people would never come in contact with a mako. You won’t see any in an aquarium, either, because they are too hard to capture.  
In fact, Stunz was told recording a mako shark at sea couldn’t be done. 
“They thought it was impossible. It was too fast, too elusive and that sort of thing to be captured on film,” Stunz said. “We have some of the first natural history footage. We got a bunch of it, hours on end.”
Stunz worked with the same Discovery Channel crew last year on “Monster Hammerhead.” During filming, he told them about makos, which led to their interest in this year’s subject. 
“In a way, we were very lucky but also very, very prepared,” Stunz said about capturing the footage and data for the mako shark episode. “A lot of work went into it. It was one of those deals where work meets preparation.”
All Stunz could say about the upcoming show, without giving anything away before it airs, was the crew captured “phenomenal footage.”
“Monster Mako” premieres at 9 p.m. July 5 on the Discovery Channel.