Sharks (with Ocean Scientist David Shiffman)
What cold weather animals are making you happy today? What animal can bury 3000 nuts before winter comes? Hear Laura and Robert choose what cold weather critters are making them happy, a song where Rob sings like a squirrel, awesome animal clues from 10 year old Daisy, and an interview with special guest, eight year old Raven. What animal is making Raven happy today? Here are some clues: It is big, has big claws, has hollow fur and it lives in the Arctic.
The Happiest Animal Show (on Planet Earth) is a comedy podcast for kids and families who love wildlife, with original animal songs, stories, jokes and special guests from comedians to scientists to kids.
Here’s the full transcript below:
And now for an animal joke. What do you get when you cross a shark with a snowman? I repeat, what do you get when you cross a shark with a snowman? The answer is going to be revealed at the end of the episode. But first, get your ears ready because It's the Happiest Animal Show on Planet Earth, the Happiest Animal Show on Planet Earth. Do you want to be sad? No!
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Do you want to be glad? No! Wait yes. Well it's the happiest animal show on planet Earth. Hello and welcome to the Happiest Animal Show on Planet Earth, the podcast that asks the very important question. What animal is making you happy today? I'm Laura and I'm Rob, and we are a sister brother pair of zoologists, filmmakers and songwriters.
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We are here to explore the wonderful world of wildlife life and discover why animals make us happy. Today we are celebrating sharks. We have a new hilarious take on the song Baby Shark and we chat with David Shiffman, an ocean conservation scientist who studies sharks and how to protect them. Here we go. What animal is making you happy today?
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I want to know today we're talking about sharks. We love sharks. I could talk about sharks forever, but Rob had a face to face encounter with a rare, unexpected shark over the weekend. I haven't heard the story. I'm excited to hear it. And I'm sorry I'm giving away your chakra, but I know that it's what it's going to be.
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Rob. What shark is making you happy today? Well, okay, so the shark that is making me happy today is a shark that I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would see outside of an aquarium somewhere. I never thought I would see one in the wild. And it's a pretty big shark. I read that females, which get bigger than the males, the females have been measured up to like 18ft long.
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It's a that's a big yeah, it's a big shark. It's also a deep water shark. This shark. Here's the giveaway. It has six gills. Yeah. And most sharks only have five. That's right. Almost every other type of shark has five. So, Laura, do you have a guess what it was? The six. Gill shark. Yes. Ding ding ding.
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I saw a six gill shark. Six still shark. And wait, specifically, is this the blunt nose? Six Gill shark? Yeah, it is the blunt nose. Six Gill shark. Great. Tell me what happened. I just know that you saw one. Yeah. So I've always heard about them in the Puget Sound, which is in Washington kind of by. Yeah, yeah, it goes from, like, British Columbia down to Seattle, down to, Olympia, Washington, down the Pacific coast.
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Okay. What happened? So there's a spot. It's called the Hood Canal. There's a spot right off the side of the highway where you can just sort of pull your car off and, and go scuba diving. There's a specific place called the Octopus Hole. And I went there with my friend Jeff, and we jumped in the water and we swam down, and there's this rocky wall, that we were exploring.
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And Jeff right away noticed there was an octopus den. And we could tell because there were pieces of crab all over the place. So somebody was living in a under a rock there, and had been chowing down on crabs and just leaving chunks of crab everywhere. So I got down with my flashlight and I looked under this rock, and sure enough, I could see these big suction cups.
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We could see through the crack that there's this big octopus in there, and we were taking turns checking it out so Jeff would look, and then I would look. And then we were trying to see if we could see more of the octopus or see its eye peeking back at us. Yeah. And while Jeff was taking a look, I turned my head to the right and I suddenly realized there was someone else with us.
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Wow. I was I was face to face with a giant shark, and I just started screaming with excitement because I knew what it was. The only shark that I was going to encounter down there was a six gill. I'd heard rumors of it, but it always seemed like it was a shark. That you had to be the luckiest human on earth.
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You had to win the lottery to see it. The person. So I never expected that that that would happen. But it was just suddenly there, hanging out with this, almost like he was just wondering what we were doing. What's, what's in the, rocky place there? Yeah. What's going on, guys? You just looking for octopus? Me too.
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And I think, honestly, that's why maybe why he was there. Do they eat octopus? I think they do. And so I wonder if it was just kind of cruising past checking out spots that smelled good, like, because I assume that it could smell that there was an octopus nearby. I'm picturing you turning and seeing the shark and just screaming in your mask like a high pitched giggle scream like, oh yeah, yeah, I was it was like that.
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And, it wasn't afraid of us at all. It was just super curious. And it was as slow as you could possibly imagine. It just inched past us and we watched it just slowly go down. Wow. And you could count it. Gills. One. Yeah, two. Right. Three. Four. Yes, five. One more. Six. Yep. That's it. And then it just disappeared into the depths, into the murk.
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And it was gone and we never saw it again. And so the whole, you know, the whole encounter lasted maybe like, you know, less than a minute, but I couldn't stop screaming the whole rest of the dive because I couldn't believe what had just happened. Like, it just it just didn't seem like it was real when I turned.
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And it it was just staring at me, I could have put my hand out and touched its nose. Well, it was that close to me. And I was thinking later about how I've been in the water with a lot of different types of sharks in, just in, in the wild and in captivity. You know, I've been probably been in the water with like over 20 different types, 25 different types of sharks.
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But this was the most exciting of them all because it was completely unexpected. Like when I went to see whale sharks, it was amazing. But I went to a place because there were yeah, whale sharks were going to be there. Here you were looking for an octopus. You turned your head and there was a shark next to you.
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Yeah. So that's the shark that's making me happy, as it should. I'm going to talk about my shark in a moment. Right after this, it's time for everybody's favorite game show. Ray, that sound.
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What is making this sound? What? Oh, yeah, I can't really. What are you hearing me? Oh, is it a Rob seeing a six skilled shark underwater? B Rob seeing a six gill shark underwater, or C Rob seeing a six gill shark underwater. And the answer ls it doesn't matter. You got it right. It was Rob seeing a six skilled shark underwater.
Thanks for playing everybody's favorite game show. Great. That sound. And we're back. Laura, give us some clues. Tell us what shark is making you happy today. It is a small shark. It is named after a dessert. A dessert that I like to eat a lot. And I bake a lot. Sometimes with chocolate chips, sometimes without. Sometimes it's gingerbread, sometimes it's sugar.
These sharks, when they take a bite out of their prey, they leave a perfect circle bite out of the side of their prey, and they can glow. They glow in the dark. It's a pretty cool shark. Yeah, there's a lot of good clues there. Rob, what is it? Are you referring to the cookie cutter shark? I am, it's a cookie cutter shark cookie cutter, shark cookie cutter sharks.
What a great pick. Tell me, why is the cookie cutter shark making you happy today? It's such a funny name. I love to eat cookies, I really do, and also, it's a small shark that glows in the dark. Great. Like, that's just so awesome. Yeah, that doesn't seem right. Doesn't seem like that should exist. Yeah, I was just looking up a description of cookie cutter sharks.
I've never seen one personally in the wild, but the cookie cutter shark is pretty small. It has a darker top and then underneath is a little bit lighter, but that underneath will glow with bioluminescence, like a swimming flashlight. Like a swimming flashlight. It has small fins on the back of its body. It has large green eyes. It's usually in the deep water, like a six gill.
It's a deep water shark, and then at night it'll come up shallower, head up toward the surface to eat and get prey. And what it does is when it sees something, it's going to take a bite out of like a tuna. Let's say a big tuna fishes around. It will the tuna will see the cookie cutter sharks glowing underbelly, and it'll think it's a little fish.
So the tuna comes to be like, oh, I'm going to take a bite out of this little fish. But the cookie cutter shark is like baiting it. So when the tuna gets there, cookie cutter sharks like haha. And then instead it takes a bite out of the tuna. Really quickly, latches on and it spins its body. Wow. And that's like it spins its mouth, I guess, and then leaves this perfect circle bite that looks like a cookie.
Looks like it was done with a cookie cutter. Yeah, what a crazy way to eat. It's also a really dangerous way to eat. You gotta lure something bigger that could basically eat you. Yeah, the last minute. Go take a quick bite and spin, then get away. I'm glad that that's not the way that we think would be really hard.
Although restaurants be way more exciting. Yeah. So their size is interesting too, because when you talk about sharks with people, most people think about a big animal. But cookie cutter sharks are not that. So like, how big is a cookie cutter shark? Yeah, they look they look like a skinny little torpedo mail. Cookie cutter sharks grow to a maximum of 16.5in.
So that's not very big. Yeah, my cat is longer than that. Yeah. And if we did not name your favorite shark today on this episode, fear not. We will talk about sharks more on other episodes. We love sharks. We have a movie about sharks. Called The Shark Riddle. You can find it on iTunes. We will talk more about sharks and lots of episodes.
There are over 500 kinds of sharks. We're going to share more sharks and another time. So, Rob, you picked the six skill shark because one came up to you this weekend. I picked the cookie cutter shark because I love the cookies. Yeah, that's a good enough reason. Honestly, you don't have to overthink it. And those are our picks.
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And now it's time for a song. We all know Baby shark, right? It started as a simple and repetitive camp song that eventually took the entire world by storm. But we here at The Happiest Animal Show have always felt like Baby Shark was a little too vague. I mean, who is this shark anyway? There are over 500 different kinds of sharks in the world, so we decided to rewrite the song, complete with real shark names and we collaborated with our good friend and classically trained pianist, David Saffert to create this new and improved version of Baby Shark. Enjoy
Cookie cutter shark doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo. Cookie cutter shark doo doo doo doo doo. Cookie cutter shark. Pajama shark. Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. Pajama shark.
Winghead shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo, winghead shark, doo doo doo doo doo doo, winghead shark. Goblin shark, Do do do do do do do do do do do do do Goblin shark.
Wobbegong Shark,. Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. Wobbegong shark, doo doo doo doo. Bignose shark, Do do do do do do do do do beep. Bignose shark, do doo doo doo doo doo doo.. Bignose shark. Cookie cutter.
Pajama, winghead, Goblin, wobbegong, big nose, and so many more. There are over 500 different kinds of sharks. Before we get on with the show, here's a quick message for the grownups and we are back. It's that time in the show for the Happiest Animal, where a fan like you gives us clues for what? Animals making them happy. Today's submission is from eight year old Leonard from Portland, Oregon.
Here are Leonard's clues. Clue number one. They are social animals. Clue number two. They swap their shells. Clue number three. They are not true crabs. Clue number four. This animal can be a pet. What animals? Making Leonard happy today? It's, hermit crab. Hermit crabs are making Leonard happy because they're cute. They have cool shells, and Leonard wants to get to to have his pets.
Why have one when you can have two when it comes to hermit crabs? All right. Thanks, Leonard, for your submission and Grown-Ups. If you or your family would like to submit a happiest animal, visit our website at Happiest Animal show.com. Today's special guest is David Shiffman, an ocean conservation scientist who studies sharks. Thank you for joining us. Hi, David.
Hi. It's good to see you guys. And good to be here. David. Big question. What animal is making you happy today? So one that I'm really excited about that I got to see just last week, was a great hammerhead shark. Great hammerhead shark. I absolutely love sharks. As anyone who knows me knows, my favorite shark is the Sandbar shark.
But my second favorite shark is the great hammerhead. And this past week, I took my Georgetown undergraduates down to Florida over their spring break, and they lived on a research vessel with me for a week. And they got to go snorkeling and they got to fly research drones. And we got to do some shark research. And we caught an eight foot long great hammerhead shark
And people just went absolutely nuts. I love these animals. They're so weird. They're so cool. They're they're of significant conservation concern. They're considered critically endangered. And some of my graduate school work led to improving their protections in the state of Florida. So it was really cool to get to see that, see it, and to get to show it to my students.
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That's amazing. How big was the shark you caught? It was just over eight feet long. So I'm a pretty big guy, and this shark was way bigger than me. A great hammerhead shark. Yes. When I think of those, I think of huge dorsal fins. Yeah. Do they have an absolutely enormous dorsal fin? The dorsal fin is the fin on top that cuts, that sticks out of the water.
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Yeah. And they also have that the what's called the cephalopod phobia, which is the hammerhead part. And the greats are particularly dramatic, for both of those things. And that separate file, the hammerhead shape. It's useful for a few things. One of those things is sharks have this whole other sense that we don't have at all.
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I mean, we can't sense this at all, and they have a sense for it. They can sense electromagnetic fields. And why that's helpful is hammerheads eat prey animals that bury under the sand, which means they can't see it. They can't hear it, they can't smell it, but they know it's there because they can sense the electricity given off by it's beating heart.
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Which is very cool. So you will often see hammerheads sweeping their heads across the sand, much like someone at the beach with a metal detector. Right. And it has metal workers sweeping over the sand. That's pretty fun. They also use that to pin flat prey against the bottom when they can munch on it. Right. So it's it's really cool I think of them going after stingrays.
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That's what I think is exactly right. Oh, they like to eat stingrays. And I once saw a hammerhead shark that had 44 stingray barbs in its face. Water. So the stingray. I don't know if any of you or your listeners have ever stepped on a stingray and gotten stung. It's no fun. I hope it doesn't happen to you.
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But, it does not deter hammerhead sharks because they just keep going. Yeah. Wow. That's. Oh, that's like, you hear about, you know, a dog going after a porcupine and getting your fine quills in the face. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the equivalent. The shark equivalent. That's not amazing. So you said you were out with your team and you caught a great hammerhead last week.
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Did you release it back into the ocean? We did? Yes. And we have specialized tools for working them up safely, among other things. A water pump that goes in their mouth so their gills are still receiving oxygen during the whole process. You are out doing research. You catch a shark, you bring it on to your boat, you're out sometimes alongside the boat, depending on the size of it.
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But the boat has a platform off the back that's under about a foot of water, which means the animal is still in water and can breathe. Okay, we have something we can stand on. Yeah. And then what do you what kinds of things are you hoping to learn from a shark that you bring? We learned lots of things from sharks, and there's so much we still need to know.
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Generally trying to understand very basic things like where do they go? What do they eat? What do they do? What where what are their habitats? Yeah, what what doing, what are you putting tags on them to follow them and track them? For some species, yes. For this great. Hammerhead did get an acoustic telemetry track tracker tag on it that allows it to when it passes near receiver stations.
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And we have receiver stations set up throughout Biscayne Bay and South Florida. We can track where the animal goes within that area for about. So it's listening for them. You have stations that are listening for it when it passes by. Yes. It's a tag that just says over and over again, this is shark number 217. I'm here.
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This is shark number 217. I'm here. I want to pass this near a listening station that gets recorded. And we download that about every three months. And it's a it's a really cool process. And then you're like shark number 217 was here. Exactly. So we also draw blood, which can tell you a lot of things about the health of the animal and what they're eating.
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We take a muscle plug, we take a skin sample. There's a lot of different things that can be banned from it. There is a new student in the lab that I work with who is doing a really cool thing. In. This gets gross really quick, but kids love gross stuff, so I love gross stuff. So let's do it.
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Sharks do not have a butt in the way that people and that mammals do. They have what's called a cloaca. And that's that is where kind of like this. Where the waste. Yes, that is where the waste comes out. And we're taking Q-tips, swabs of the cloaca to try to tell from DNA what the animals were eating and pooping out.
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So you're testing shark poop? Yep. With a Q-Tip to see what they're eating. I love it. We also catch, there's a new student in the lab who studies shark parasites. Oh, so we caught a lot of different parasites off of this, particular great hammerhead. Larger animals. Older animals tend to have more and more interesting parasites.
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One was the biggest leech I've ever seen in my life. I fear, sometimes when I close my eyes, I'm going to. I'm going to see this leaf. You just pluck it. Did you just pluck it off of the shark? Oh, the shark must have been so grateful. If they. Yeah, I think of shark. This hammerhead out. You, those stringy looking parasites that there's some of that on the dorsal fan.
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This was, a lot thicker, and it looked a lot more like a thing. Those stringy looking parasites that look, it could just be like fuzz if you're not looking closely. This looked like a thing. And it's, well, it, I, it looked back at me, and I wish it hadn't. And a parasite is defined as,
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What? A creature who's feeding off another creature. Yes. Without really eating them. Okay. So a parasite cannot want its host to die. Okay. They have a bunch of different types of parasites, including some that are only found in sharks and including some that are only found in some species of shark. Wow. Horrifying. Yeah. So, kids, if you're listening, you can grow up to study sharks.
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Figure out where they go. You could also study their poop to figure out what they're eating. Oh, yeah. Everybody. Everybody poops. Even sharks. Even sharks. And you can study the parasites, the little creatures that are living on their bodies and sucking on them. Well, great. Hammerhead is an incredible choice for what's making you happy today. Thank you.
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David. Oh, it was wonderful. Yeah. We're so happy to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. And now the time we've all been waiting for the answer to the joke of the day. What do you get when you cross a shark with a snowman? Do you have a guess? The answer is frostbite.
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Thanks so much for listening. And before we go, remember, we live on a beautiful planet. So go out and find what makes you happy today. Oh.
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Hey, Grown-Ups, we know you're busy, but if you like our show, we'd love for you to tell your friends and family about it. It is the best way for our podcast to grow and Grown-Ups. You can also follow us on our social media accounts at Happiestanimalshow, or check out other fun things on our website like how to submit an animal or how to get merch.
Visit Happiestanimalshow.com. The Happiest Animal Show is created by Laura Sams, Robert Sams, and Dave Cain. Produced by Sisbro Studios, hosted and directed by Laura Sams and Robert Sams, and written by Laura Sams, Robert Sams with story editor Dave Cain, and with only a little help from our cat walking across the keyboard. Now let's talk music. Original music is written and performed by zero time Grammy Award winning songwriters Laura Sams and Robert Sams.
Except for the end credits, music which was written by Laura and Robert’s Grandma Max and the joke answer suspense music written by David Schultz. The theme song was written and performed by Laura and Rob and mixed by Jason Wells of Audio Wells. Thanks for listening. You’re the best.