Shark Week Season 19 Episode 6

Dirty Jobs: Jobs That Bite Harder

Mike Rowe is back with another hour of dirty jobs with the men and women who work with sharks. In this hour-long premiere, Mike travels to an unlikely place — the desert of Las Vegas — to Mandalay Bay’s two-million gallon aquarium, home to some 15 different species of shark. Here, Mike gets dirty with marine biologists as they prepare a nutritious assortment of frozen fish for the sharks’ lunch, and climbs into the aquarium’s filter system to make sure it’s operating properly — finding himself navigating between hundreds of pounds of sand and a mess of shark excrement. Next, he rolls up his sleeves to dissect a nine-foot tiger shark that was found dead off the coast of South Africa. These dissections are done to help humans better understand shark behavior, evolution, health and current environmental factors that may affect the shark population. Finally, Mike heads to the Bahamas with Jeremiah Sullivan, the inventor of the Neptunic shark suit — a chain mail armor to protect divers from shark attacks. After helping Jeremiah weld hundreds of small metal rings together to make a suit, Mike suits up and dives 30 feet underwater amid a feeding frenzy of Caribbean reef sharks to test out the suit — on himself.