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MUMBAI:
The whole world believes that a great white shark's eye is black
in colour and that it is an emotionless and instinctive killer.
Michael Rutzen is one of the few people who have got close enough
to sharks to know that its eye colour is in fact not black but turquoise
blue. Featuring daring adventurer Michael Rutzen, Animal Planet
will now present an action packed thriller show Sharkman - the man
who has learnt to communicate with the world’s wildest predator:
the great white shark.
Sharkman
narrates the account of the unbelievable proximity between Michael
Rutzen and sharks, wherein some sharks return to him, time and again,
out of curiosity, with some even allowing him to take a ride with
them by holding their dorsal fins. All of this is only possible
because of Michael Rutzen’s innovative communication techniques
with the mammal. Catch this amazing human-shark tale on Animal Planet
on Wednesday, January 9th at 8 pm and its second episode on Thursday,
January 10th at 8 pm.
Michael
Rutzen is a South African diver who prefers his encounters with
the great white sharks to be up close and personal. He began free
diving with sharks in 1997, without the safety of a cage. Michael
decided to leave his job and family on a daring quest - to change
the public opinion to save these sharks before it's too late. In
Sharkman, he puts all his skills and knowledge of great white sharks
to the ultimate test.
Michael
believes that sharks are not mindless killers as we make them out
to be; in fact they are far smarter and more sensitive than popularly
believed. In Sharkman, he plans an extraordinary experiment: to
take a wild great white shark and place it into a trance like immobile
state called tonic. Then he places a large syringe into its lateral
line and retrieves a sample of blood. All of this is done while
free-diving in the open sea. The direct beneficiaries of his audacious
plan will be medical scientists who are studying the extraordinary
properties of shark antibodies, but there is also a deeper dimension
to this challenge, which drives Michael onwards.
To
date, Michael has logged hundreds of dives in the company of Great
Whites and in doing so he has initiated encounters that no one thought
possible. To achieve this degree of success Michael had to make
a breakthrough in understanding the Great White by learning to communicate
with them. Filmed in HD, Sharkman is a beautifully shot film that
captures sharks and their relationship with man in a way that is
never captured on camera.
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