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This is Later with Lee Matthews,
the Lee Matthews Podcast. More what you

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hear weekday afternoon is on the Drive. It is Shark Week, one of

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the more exciting and fun weeks on
television when it comes to the Discovery Channel.

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John Cena is not disappointing this week
with Shark Week, but a lot

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of what you're going to be seeing
is brought to you by Kendall burna documentary

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filmmaker and environmental scientist from southern California
who specializes an adventure in wildlife TV productions.

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Welcome Kendall Burna. Hi Lee,
thanks for having me. I am

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a dive master in my own right
and have done a lot of swimming with

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sharks, whether it's nurse, white
tip, black tip, gray reef.

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One of the things that I've learned
in particular about sharks is is if you

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leave them alone, they'll leave you
alone. Yes, I would agree with

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that. I always say very cool. By the way that you're a diver,

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that's awesome. But I always say
that if I have a mask on

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and can make eye contacts with a
shark in any way, I'm always very

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vugerable knowing that I can read its
behavior, and it can also know that

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I'm a predator. I think when
people are scared of sharks, it's usually

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more a case of mistaken identity.
Yeah, if they're splashing around and looking

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like prey. So anyone who's ever
gotten a chance to swim with sharks in

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a snorkel or scuba diving way like
you just described, I think has been

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able to see really how cool of
animals they are. I was my most

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interesting encounter, if you will.
I was diving Molikini Crater in Hawaii,

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and that is where the oxygen content
of the water is such that they don't

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have to swim to breathe, and
so many of the white tip females will

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wait on the bottom for the male's
to come along. And I encountered one

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just waiting calmly on the bottom,
and I was trying to get some good

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video of her, and the closer
I got, of course, the more

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she moved away. And it was
when those pec fins went down and she

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went into a deep swath of a
swim. I said, all right,

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I'm aggravating her. I'm backing off
now. So if you if you give

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them the space they need, they
will leave you alone and Curiously, I've

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noticed similar behavior in fresh water bass. Yeah, this sounds like a really

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cool trip that you got to do. That's actually really interesting. I've never

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seen that where they just are in
such a high oxygen environment that they didn't

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have to swim to that level.
But you're so yeah, you're so right,

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You're so right. Sharks generally don't
like, especially something like a white

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tip, something kind of size like
that reef sharks or pelgics out in in

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Hawaii. Yeah, they really don't
like when you come towards them. You

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know. I think because our eyes
are at the front of our head,

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we're very clearly a predator, and
when we put a mask on like we

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usually do underwater, our eyes look
eager, and then if our bodies are

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going straight down in the water,
call and we look even bigger to them.

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So I think sharks are also very
scared of us when they see us

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in that environment. But I've also
had some sharks be more curious if if

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it's a shark week thing where I've
positioned myself closer to bait, But usually

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they know what is and is in
pray for them. And there's actually a

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really cool thing that I've noticed that
the make ups have done when they're going

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to get the bait is they don't
fully close their eyes. So a shark

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that's going to attack something would close
its eyes knowing that that it might get

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scratched or there might be a fight
back. The sharks didn't close their eyes

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when they went to bite the bait, so they knew it was dead.

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They knew it was bait. They
knew what we were doing. I've come

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to learn that sharks, especially some
of these bigger ones like macOS in the

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episode that I just did, are
very intelligent and they know what is and

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is not their food. Kendall burnas
with us, she's in the belly of

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the beasts, both literally and figuratively
when it comes to a great white sharks

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and feeding and monster hammerheads some of
the episodes of Shark Week on Discovery Channel

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all week long. And she's also
the founder of a conservation nonprofit organization,

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Beyond the Reef, which tell us
a little about that organization. Yeah,

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So, Beyond the Reef is an
ocean conservation nonprofit based out of the British

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Virgin Islands. It was formed after
Hurricanes Irma and Maria really devastated the islands

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and a lot of the Caribbean region
after twenty seventeen. So we initially formed

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it as a response to some of
the underwater devastation that happened, but also

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there were a lot of garlic vessels
on the coastline after the hurricanes, like

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a large steel ship and even airplanes, and we decided that it would be

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really cool to turn them into underwater
art projects and recycle them as artificial reefs.

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So the hundred foot ship we turned
into an underwater pirate ship and brought

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it out to an area of the
reef that needed some revitalizing. And the

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airplanes we actually turned into sharks,
because if you think about it, some

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airplanes look a bit like sharks.
Might be hard for you to visualize now,

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but we called them the Shark planeos, which is a very silly name.

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But the next time you see an
airplane, think about how much it

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looks like a shark, especially if
you just add a few extra fins onto

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it. So we created these these
really cool art project artificial reefs and sunk

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them in the British Virgin Islands,
where they still are, and that then

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led to other ocean conservation work there. We realized that there were a lot

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of humpbacks migrating through the region that
no one knew about. We realized that

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it was also a hot spot for
sharks pupping and breeding grounds and really important

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to the Greater Caribbean region. We
realized that lemon sharks were actually going back

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to a particular island there called Anagata
to have their pups. They think that

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lemon sharks might be like salmon,
where they returned back to where they were

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born in order to have their pups, which is really fascinating and I don't

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believe any other shark species does that. So we just are trying to get

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baseline research in order to have an
understanding to then lead to conservation. It's

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really hard to protect things if you
don't know anything about them. I'm sorry,

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I didn't know. Didn't realize there
were humpbacks and that part of the

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Caribbean. Certainly I knew they were
in the Pacific and migratory in the Pacific.

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Yeah, it's there are so many
humpbacks actually on the backside of this

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island called Anagata, And what beyond
the reef has been doing is taking tail

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fluke IDs. So if we can
get a photograph of a whales' tail fluke.

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We upload it into some AI software
and it will match it with any

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other sales fluke that's ever been photographed
for science. And it is actually crazy.

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Lee. We did not think.
We were like, Okay, we're

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going out into the middle of the
ocean taking a photo. What are the

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chances that someone's photographed it before.
We are finding that it's almost like half

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of the whales that we get a
proper tail fluke idea on, which can

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be tricky. It requires the right
lighting and it requires the whale to do

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the right show at the end before
it goes down. But we're finding that

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almost half of them have actually been
photographed before, and a lot of times

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it was last seen in like two
thousand and three Iceland or wow, two

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thousand and five Greenland, so it's
been you know, twenty years nearly since

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it's been seen before. But what
that helps us do is track its migration

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patterns and also see that maybe there's
certain pods that return each year. If

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we collaborate with other scientists in the
Caribbean, we're finding that, you know,

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in the Turks and Caicos, they're
getting a pod that's often coming from

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Canada. Our pod is often coming
from Iceland, Finland, so it's really

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really cool, instant gratification signed to
see with a lot of this, And

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same with the sharks. You know, we get to put satellite tags on

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them and just on our phones track
their whereabouts. So you know, I

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now have a Tiger sharks friend on
my phone that I can wake up in

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the morning and see where it's at. That's that's great, and that's my

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next dream vacation is a live aboard
where we can do some diving with some

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of the humpback whales. No matter
where that may be Pacific Atlantic, I

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don't care, but that's that's on
my list, as should be yours.

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To watch Shark Week with the video
and commentary of Kelly of Kendall, Berna

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tonight and all this week on Discovery
Network. I could talk to you all

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day, but thanks for joining us. Thank you, wee appreciate it.

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Thanks for listening to Later with Lee
Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and

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remember to listen to The Drive Live
weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation