Media News
New Delhi, January 04, 2007
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.
For further information, please contact:
Discovery Networks India
Associate Director - Marketing and Communications
Tel: +91-11-4149 1164
Mobile: +91-098109 99796
Email: rajiv_bakshi@discovery.com
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