This is Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast. More what you hear weekday afternoon is on the Drive. It is Shark Week, one of the more exciting and fun weeks on television when it comes to the Discovery Channel. John Cena is not disappointing this week with Shark Week, but a lot of what you're going to be seeing is brought to you by Kendall burna documentary filmmaker and environmental scientist from southern California who specializes an adventure in wildlife TV productions.
Welcome Kendall Burna. Hi Lee, thanks for having me. I am a dive master in my own right and have done a lot of swimming with sharks, whether it's nurse, white tip, black tip, gray reef. One of the things that I've learned in particular about sharks is is if you leave them alone, they'll leave you alone. Yes, I would agree with that. I always say very cool. By the way that you're a diver,
that's awesome. But I always say that if I have a mask on and can make eye contacts with a shark in any way, I'm always very vugerable knowing that I can read its behavior, and it can also know that I'm a predator. I think when people are scared of sharks, it's usually more a case of mistaken identity. Yeah, if they're splashing around and looking like prey. So anyone who's ever gotten a chance to swim with sharks in a snorkel or scuba diving way like you just described, I think has been
able to see really how cool of animals they are. I was my most interesting encounter, if you will. I was diving Molikini Crater in Hawaii, and that is where the oxygen content of the water is such that they don't have to swim to breathe, and so many of the white tip females will wait on the bottom for the male's to come along. And I encountered one just waiting calmly on the bottom, and I was trying to get some good video of her, and the closer I got, of course, the more
she moved away. And it was when those pec fins went down and she went into a deep swath of a swim. I said, all right, I'm aggravating her. I'm backing off now. So if you if you give them the space they need, they will leave you alone and Curiously, I've noticed similar behavior in fresh water bass. Yeah, this sounds like a really cool trip that you got to do. That's actually really interesting. I've never seen that where they just are in such a high oxygen environment that they didn't
have to swim to that level. But you're so yeah, you're so right, You're so right. Sharks generally don't like, especially something like a white tip, something kind of size like that reef sharks or pelgics out in in Hawaii. Yeah, they really don't like when you come towards them. You
know. I think because our eyes are at the front of our head, we're very clearly a predator, and when we put a mask on like we usually do underwater, our eyes look eager, and then if our bodies are going straight down in the water, call and we look even bigger to them. So I think sharks are also very scared of us when they see us in that environment. But I've also had some sharks be more curious if if it's a shark week thing where I've positioned myself closer to bait, But usually
they know what is and is in pray for them. And there's actually a really cool thing that I've noticed that the make ups have done when they're going to get the bait is they don't fully close their eyes. So a shark that's going to attack something would close its eyes knowing that that it might get scratched or there might be a fight back. The sharks didn't close their eyes when they went to bite the bait, so they knew it was dead.
They knew it was bait. They knew what we were doing. I've come to learn that sharks, especially some of these bigger ones like macOS in the episode that I just did, are very intelligent and they know what is and is not their food. Kendall burnas with us, she's in the belly of the beasts, both literally and figuratively when it comes to a great white sharks and feeding and monster hammerheads some of the episodes of Shark Week on Discovery Channel
all week long. And she's also the founder of a conservation nonprofit organization, Beyond the Reef, which tell us a little about that organization. Yeah, So, Beyond the Reef is an ocean conservation nonprofit based out of the British Virgin Islands. It was formed after Hurricanes Irma and Maria really devastated the islands
and a lot of the Caribbean region after twenty seventeen. So we initially formed it as a response to some of the underwater devastation that happened, but also there were a lot of garlic vessels on the coastline after the hurricanes, like a large steel ship and even airplanes, and we decided that it would be really cool to turn them into underwater art projects and recycle them as artificial reefs. So the hundred foot ship we turned into an underwater pirate ship and brought
it out to an area of the reef that needed some revitalizing. And the airplanes we actually turned into sharks, because if you think about it, some airplanes look a bit like sharks. Might be hard for you to visualize now, but we called them the Shark planeos, which is a very silly name. But the next time you see an airplane, think about how much it looks like a shark, especially if you just add a few extra fins onto
it. So we created these these really cool art project artificial reefs and sunk them in the British Virgin Islands, where they still are, and that then led to other ocean conservation work there. We realized that there were a lot of humpbacks migrating through the region that no one knew about. We realized that it was also a hot spot for sharks pupping and breeding grounds and really important to the Greater Caribbean region. We realized that lemon sharks were actually going back
to a particular island there called Anagata to have their pups. They think that lemon sharks might be like salmon, where they returned back to where they were born in order to have their pups, which is really fascinating and I don't believe any other shark species does that. So we just are trying to get baseline research in order to have an understanding to then lead to conservation. It's really hard to protect things if you don't know anything about them. I'm sorry,
I didn't know. Didn't realize there were humpbacks and that part of the Caribbean. Certainly I knew they were in the Pacific and migratory in the Pacific. Yeah, it's there are so many humpbacks actually on the backside of this island called Anagata, And what beyond the reef has been doing is taking tail fluke IDs. So if we can get a photograph of a whales' tail fluke. We upload it into some AI software and it will match it with any
other sales fluke that's ever been photographed for science. And it is actually crazy. Lee. We did not think. We were like, Okay, we're going out into the middle of the ocean taking a photo. What are the chances that someone's photographed it before. We are finding that it's almost like half of the whales that we get a proper tail fluke idea on, which can be tricky. It requires the right lighting and it requires the whale to do
the right show at the end before it goes down. But we're finding that almost half of them have actually been photographed before, and a lot of times it was last seen in like two thousand and three Iceland or wow, two thousand and five Greenland, so it's been you know, twenty years nearly since it's been seen before. But what that helps us do is track its migration
patterns and also see that maybe there's certain pods that return each year. If we collaborate with other scientists in the Caribbean, we're finding that, you know, in the Turks and Caicos, they're getting a pod that's often coming from Canada. Our pod is often coming from Iceland, Finland, so it's really really cool, instant gratification signed to see with a lot of this, And same with the sharks. You know, we get to put satellite tags on
them and just on our phones track their whereabouts. So you know, I now have a Tiger sharks friend on my phone that I can wake up in the morning and see where it's at. That's that's great, and that's my next dream vacation is a live aboard where we can do some diving with some of the humpback whales. No matter where that may be Pacific Atlantic, I don't care, but that's that's on my list, as should be yours. To watch Shark Week with the video and commentary of Kelly of Kendall, Berna
tonight and all this week on Discovery Network. I could talk to you all day, but thanks for joining us. Thank you, wee appreciate it. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation