Shawna came over tonight to hang out and brought over the Discovery Channel's DVD of Shark Week. Holy crap, I might never get in the ocean again. The first bit was saw was on the history of the sinking of the Indianapolis, a WWII navy ship. It was in the Philippine Sea when two Japanese submarine torpedoes hit it in the middle of the night. It only took 12 minutes for the ship to completely submerge, taking down 300 men with it. The other 900 that made it off the ship preceded to then fight off a list of the following: - being sucked under with the boat from the pressure of the massive ship going down - burns from the fires on the ship as well as critical injuries during the attack - drowning from lack of life vests - dehydration - sunburn (prevented by covering themselves with oil that leaked from the ship) - corneal burns from the sunlight - no food - oh yeah, SHARKS picking off the dead at first then the living - although the men knew better, a number of them drank the salt water which caused them to frawth at the mouth, suffer from diarrhea, their faces and throats to swell and cause suffocation, and death in about 2-3 hours (5 at most) - then dudes started going crazy around day 4 after drinking the salt water. It took 5 nights and 4 days of floating and fighting off sharks before they were rescued. Only 317 of those men made it out of the ocean and back to land.
The second part we saw talked about the top 5 eaten alive stories. We even got to see some actual footage. One chic just completely lost her lower leg and recalled a popping sound when it happened. Her shark was a 16 ft great white caught on camera and flipping gigantic! Another guy was snorkeling for a type of rare sea food (I can't remember what they called it) and the shark bit him so that his whole upper body was in the shark. It was the ole eyeball poke that saved him. Another dude snorkeling for the same reason, got bit once and was able to make it back to the boat. While trying to climb into the ship, he dropped his cutter and instinctively reached down for it. The shark then took the opportunity to eat his arm. The best one, was with this "scientist" (I use quotation marks b/c I don't like it when absolute morons call themselves scientists) who even had the Discovery Channel film crew with him filming the attach. He's in the water with some television host to prove that like a dozen sharks aren't going to bother you so long as you don't bother them. The beauty of it: one nasty shark comes sniffing around his leg and then eats his calf. They have footage of the guy coming out of the water with the help of people and his leg is just shredded with flesh hanging off of it. Hey, be glad I didn't post any of
those pictures!
I'm probably going to have a ton of nightmares tonight, but it was worth it to learn so much. I'm on an information high and have to get it all down before I can possibly go to sleep. Next week: more Shark Week and Plant Earth. This is what we science geeks do on a Thursday night ;)
