Savage co-hosting ‘Shark Week’

Sat., July 26, 2008

By Becky Krystal The Washington Post

On the air

The schedule for this year’s “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel (cable channel 9 in Spokane, 28 on Coeur d’Alene):

•“MythBusters: Shark Special” (Sunday, 9 p.m.): The team tests a new batch of shark myths.

•“Surviving Sharks” (Monday, 9 p.m.): “Survivorman” Les Stroud shows how to protect yourself.

•“Day of the Shark” (Monday, 10 p.m.): Scientists look at which time of day sharks are most likely to strike.

•“Dirty Jobs” (Tuesday, 9 p.m.): Host Mike Rowe hunts the Greenland shark, whose size rivals the great white.

•“How Not to Become Shark Bait” (Tuesday, 10 p.m.): Shark attraction theories are investigated.

•“Mysteries of the Shark Coast” (Thursday, 9 p.m.): Sharks are disappearing off Australia’s coast.

Adam Savage has gotten the “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” to do Shark Week twice.

The “MythBusters” co-host watched Discovery Channel’s annual homage to the finned creatures for years before first participating in it in 2005.

Now he, Jamie Hyneman and the rest of their urban-legend testing team are back for a second go on Sunday in a two-hour special that kicks off the 21st Shark Week.

To choose new myths to test, the show’s crew keeps track of news stories, research findings and viewer questions.

“We started to cull through them and, sure enough, found some really good stuff,” Savage says, citing as an example the possibility that habanero chili peppers might repel sharks. (It didn’t work.)

He hopes the week’s popularity carries over into a push for conservation.

Sharks “are not as dangerous as you think, and they are really beautiful,” Savage says, adding that millions each year “are killed to make soup, and it’s really, really sad.”