Netflix Movie Crew Attacked By Sharks During Filming Of Our Planet II: ‘It Was Like A Scene From Jaws’ | outside

Nature documentaries create amazing images of our planet and the mighty animals that live on it. And they go so far with those sharp shots that we sink into our seats and say, “How do they do that?”.

But sometimes things go wrong. This is also the case during the recording of the well-known documentary series Our Planet II, which, like the first part, is voiced by Sir David Attenborough. The film crew was attacked by tiger sharks measuring 4.5 meters long while filming in Hawaii, and it is now known.

The shark attack occurred in the sea around Laisan, a very remote island in the northwest of the Hawaiian Islands, about 1,000 miles from Honolulu. The Netflix team had to navigate for five days before reaching their location; A place no one has ever seen before.

The setting: Albatross chicks that, after five months of being completely dependent on their parents, are preparing to flee and find their own food. If they hadn’t already choked on a piece of plastic their mother mistook for food, because despite the fact that Laysan Island is far from civilization, it’s full of plastic that washes across the ocean.

Baby albatross chicks are so vulnerable on their first trip to the sea that tiger sharks enter the story. Tiger sharks that travel more than 1,000 kilometers to spot here are precisely there, for that feast where they can fill their bellies with unlucky young. Literal.

“The plan was to get underwater footage of tiger sharks waiting in the shallows off Laysan,” film producer Hugh Cordy told Forbes. “On the first day the tiger sharks were there, the film crew got into big inflatable boats to film the sharks.” But it appears that some copies were not made through this. “The crew was attacked. It was like a scene from ‘Jaws,'” says Cordy.

“Suddenly there was a big ‘v’ in the water rushing at us at full speed,” says director Toby Nolan of the Radio Times. “Then there was a tiger shark that jumped loose onto the boat and poked huge holes in it. The boat exploded.” He continues: “We tried to get the shark out quickly, but it kept coming. It was terrible. And this was indeed the second shark that attacked us that day.”

So brazen was the attack that the party had to make an emergency halt on the shore in panic, while their canoe fled mercilessly. Fortunately, they only had to walk about 100 meters before they were on the sand. “Obviously, they weren’t able to take pictures underwater at the time,” says Cordy.

look. The trailer for Our Planet II, out now on Netflix, features footage of tiger sharks in action off Hawaii

Tiger sharks typically grow to be 3.25 to 4.25 meters in length, and up to 5.5 meters in length. It is one of the few species besides the white shark and bull shark that are also dangerous to humans.

Director Toby Nolan calls the behavior of sharks off Hawaii “extremely unusual.” “These sharks were incredibly hungry. So there might not be a normal natural food there. They might just be trying to grab what they can in the water…”

News of the incident comes just a month after Newsweek reported on a surge in tiger shark numbers off Hawaii following a series of attacks. While the odds of being bitten by a shark in Hawaii are less than one in a million, according to the Hawaii Department of Aquatic Resources, tiger sharks are particularly dangerous due to their size and “indiscriminate” feeding behavior.

Recently, a young Russian man was bitten to death by a tiger shark in the Egyptian resort of Hurghada. Egypt’s environment minister has asked experts to investigate the possible causes of shark “abnormal behavior” there.

After 934 days of filming in 21 countries on 7 continents, the new four-part documentary series “Our Planet II” has been available online on Netflix since Wednesday. The focus is on researching how and why animals travel and migrate around the world, often over very long distances.

The filmmakers follow buffaloes in Botswana, walruses in the Arctic, Asian elephants in China, armies of anteaters in the Amazon rainforest, Tawaki penguins in New Zealand, and thus also tiger sharks in Hawaii. The British newspaper “The Guardian” described “Our Planet 2” in a commentary as “simply amazing”.