This offers new which means to the phrases Great White.
The new Discovery particular “Cocaine Sharks” investigates rumors of rampant leisure cocaine use by strung out sharks within the Florida Keys — getting excessive on tens of millions of kilos of nostril sweet dumped into the waterway by way of the realm’s illicit drug trafficking commerce.
“I firmly imagine, and it’s not simply an opportunity of likelihood, {that a} shark will come throughout a floating bale [of cocaine] and take a chunk,” Tom “The Blowfish” Hird, who hosts the present as a part of Discovery’s annual Shark Week, instructed The Post.
“What’s attention-grabbing is that the sharks we noticed … weren’t proper, they weren’t simply so, they appeared just a little bit off — now that was very attention-grabbing,” mentioned Hird, a famend marine biologist.
“One factor is for positive — we had a few sharks behaving surprisingly, and whereas it might not be cocaine … nothing means that it wasn’t.”
In the particular, premiering July 26 at 10 p.m., Hird and scientist Dr. Tracy Fanara dive into the waters off the Florida coast, attracting tiger sharks, hammerheads and lemon sharks — a few of which exhibit unusually aggressive habits. Others, as Hird says on-air, seem to “have the spins,” are “barely twisted” or are “tweaked” as a “junkie shark” is perhaps if it ingested cocaine.
To see if sharks will assault bales of cocaine dropped into the water from above, which is how the Florida Keys coke finally ends up there, Hird and Fanara toss bales stuffed with fish powder — akin to the stimulant Dopamine present in coke, into the water — then watch as “super-feisty” sharks of all sizes and styles greedily seize the bales and swim away, ignoring decoy [fake] swans.
It is, as Hird instructed The Post, a “siren name” for the beasts, who would quite seize a international object than feast on a residing creature.
“We know that cocaine acts as an analgesic and anesthetic to some extent, so actually, if a shark received a maintain of a giant lump of coke, similar to a human I believe the very first thing that will occur is that its gills could be numbed,” Hird mentioned. “But we do not know of what would possibly occur — if they could turn out to be very agitated and far more unpredictable or in the event that they get stoned, changing into torpid and disinterested in meals.
“There actually aren’t any tips to what might occur.”
While sharks haven’t (but) been examined for cocaine consumption, salmon have — and, as seen in “Cocaine Sharks,” they get extraordinarily hyper when uncovered to cocaine.
Meanwhile, Hird mentioned that research within the UK undertaken at 15 sampling websites alongside London’s River Thames confirmed some startling outcomes vis-a-vis fish and medicines.
“At every a kind of 15 websites they discovered shrimp, and every shrimp contained cocaine,” he mentioned.
“I used to be not conscious of native tales [in the Florida Keys] about sharks getting on cocaine and occurring a three-day bender, however the minute [the ‘Cocaine Sharks’ production company] introduced this concept to me — and requested me if it was legit — I mentioned, ‘Yeah, it completely is.’
“We knew then and there that we had an excellent story to inform that, at its finish, has an necessary conservation message and can hopefully spur a bit extra analysis on this space.”
