‘My great white sharks are missing – I’m determined to track them down with my ground-breaking all-female crew’ -Adam Miller-Entertainment – Metro

Alison is on the hunt for six of her great whites (Picture: Getty/Discovery+)

If like me Shark Week is your Christmas come early, Alison Towner will likely be one of the most impressive people you’ll see across the seven days, popping up on several ground-breaking new shows for the Discovery Channel’s annual celebration. 

Born in Lancashire, UK, after being inspired by her late father, another shark buff, who died when she was just five-years-old, and watching Jaws ‘under the recommended age’, Towner is now one of the leading great white shark experts in a very male dominated world after moving to South Africa 15 years ago.

In Shark Women: Ghosted by Great Whites, however, she’s joined by two more wonder women to complete an all-female triple threat team of, and this is no exaggeration, superheroes of the deep blue sea. 

Shark diver Leigh de Necker is fearless and totally unshakeable as she explores murky waters packed with fish – aka the main food supply for great whites – in shark infested waters, which is about as dangerous as it gets, and ‘Black Mermaid’ Zandile Ndhlovu can hold her breath under water for four whole minutes. 

Their chemistry is unbeatable and together they achieve extraordinary feats on the hunt for six great whites close to Towner’s heart. 

In 2017, great whites began to mysteriously disappear from the region and the team need answers. 

Metro.co.uk caught up with Towner ahead of the premier of Shark Women: Ghosted by Great Whites who told us more.

So how did the premise for Shark Women: Ghosted by Great Whites come about? There’s so much shark content out there and this is so unlike anything else.

I’ve lived in South Africa for 15 years studying great white sharks in the town of Makhanda, two hours east of Cape Town, which has historically always been the great white capital of the world and for good reason – there’s nowhere else you could get so close to white sharks and so many of them so close to shore. 

So our main aim was to find where the great white sharks have vanished to because that the main hot topic right now.

And can you tell me about assembling that team? 

Leigh, Alison and Zandile make up the Shark Women (Picture:

It was a dream of mine for many years to have South African women as co-hosts for Shark Week. It’s a very male dominated field but there are some incredible women doing incredible things so I’m thrilled I could put this team together. 

How did you find Zandile and Leigh? Who are both actual superheroes by the way…

We go way back, Leigh and I were colleagues and friends and we actually swam Robin Island together for charity, where obviously the late Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. It’s 7 kilometers off shore, quite sharky waters off Cape Town, but she’s a seasoned marathon swimmer so we had that connection

Then Zandile came to this town hoping to see white sharks – we were able to show Zandile her first ever white shark together. How insane is that? She’s South African and lives in the water more than she lives on land. 

That’s how this came about, I heavily pitched this idea and that’s how it came forward. I’ve been lucky enough to work on shark shows for many years but it’s always been with male co-hosts.

So it was very much your ambition to work with an all-female team on this?

There needs to be more representation, particularly to have south African women, that was a big deal for me. It’s their coast line, it’s their waters, they’re doing incredible work so that was the idea, to have them in the show but more because of their skill set. 

Leigh is an incredible researcher in shark nutrition and Zandlle can hold her breath for four minutes! She’s amazing – Africa’s first female free diving instructor. Not only that but she’s an amazing person anyone who meets her is bowled over immediately. So what a pleasure to have the opportunity finally.

The sharks are described as being like ‘your family’ – can you talk more about your history with these six animals?

I guess scientists, we often get put down if we name an animal, it’s not seen as very scientific, but the reality is after years of working with these sharks they all have personalities. 

Some are highly recognisable, they go on these epic migrations and sometime don’t return for years but when you recognise the same animal returning, I am so thrilled to see them return again, especially given the amount of threats they receive. 

And where did your fascination with sharks come about? 

When Jaws came out it illicit two responses from the public – either fear or fascination and for some fear turned into fascination and it made white sharks iconic. When I watched it I was definitely under the recommended age, about six or seven, but I was totally unfazed by the blood – just fascinated by the sharks

And then my dad lived in South Africa as a journalist and wrote a novel that was never published but I read his novel when I was 11 and it really rang home that marine biology was in the blood. 

He wrote it in a very Hemingway-style, it was a story of depression in the north, this boy fishing and catching a huge salmon and it’s the story fo the salmon as well. So my dad had a real fascination with great whites but never actually saw one in South Africa, funnily enough. 

I had every shark book, I used to type articles and type out facts about sharks and give them out to people but it also connected me to my dad. I lost him when I was five so I used to draw pictures of sharks and put them on my window so my dad could see. 

Lancashire doesn’t have many sharks to study! So I moved to South Africa in 2007, and on 19 January saw very first white shark.

You just said there how Jaws brought on a mix of fear and fascination with people, with this documentary how important was to encourage people to be fascinated by sharks rather than fear them?

Jaws partly inspired Alison’s fascination with sharks (Picture: Universal/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)

That a great question, I’m an advocate for people doing them justice by telling the truth – you don’t need to tell anything different. They’re the most threatened carnivores! They’re under constant threat from the meat trade, fish trade, climate pressure changes. 

In some regions they’re doing ok such as in developed countries where there are restrictions in place, but in South Africa white sharks just are in decline so it’s doing the sharks injustice if we don’t report on them properly.

The show also highlights how important sharks are for the eco-systems and the really alarming new threat they face from orcas. 

So my PHD is on the movement of white sharks but in 2017 I had to change my thesis to include orcas. We now have another pressure and it’s huge.

There are so many threats and Shark Women is all about that and we’re starting to learn what happens when sharks leave an eco system, they have a very important role. 

We’re seeing what happens when white sharks aren’t around, every other species is affected – right down to our critically endangered African penguins. I always say what’s more scary than an ocean full of sharks is an ocean without them because every species suffers, including humans. Sharks are meditaors of the sea and without them everything collapses.

When did you become aware of this new phenomenon?

In 2017, which might sound like a long time ago but ecologically it’s like yesterday. 

It’s a recent phenomenon and also a world first, nowhere else in the world have white carcasses been washing up post killer whale predation, torn open and missing their livers. It’s mind-boggling to see that first hand – incredible but extremely sinister. I don’t think anyone expected the effects of these events to be so profound so we need to act now because population of sharks are not in good shape.

At one point you describe one of your sharks as having a ‘fun personality’ which might come as a surprise to some viewers, can you elaborate?

It’s animal behaviour, right? This is one of the newer fields in predator behaviour but they do legitimately have their own personalities. 

We tend to see that juvenile sharks, both male and female are extremely curious, you get the individuals that are extremely skittish as well, so bolder individuals, shyer individuals, but as they get older – and this is what I love about the –  the females get an attitude.

Big female white sharks, when they arrive at the boat and there’s only youngsters around everyone knows their place. She’ll be very dominant and everything is on her terms. Then you get these sharks that are super inquisitive and what a joy it is to be in the water with that! It was hard for me to get my head around when I saw them in the wild for the first time.

Through our active tracking programme we stalked sharks for hours without any boat effect, without chumming and that’s why I was really able to go into the life of a white shark on multiple occasions.

I think we did 500 hours tracking what they do naturally, almost getting in the mind of them and it is incredible to see they’ve got their own hunting strategies even favourite locations to stay in a bay. 

One of the sharks seen on the show, Dale, he had a man cave he would return to and spend all of his day there. I wonder if we dived down there if we’d see a little bar, a TV and a beer fridge because he didn’t move from his spot and then he’d hunt seals but he’d always come back to his little piece of ocean.

What do you want people to take away from Shark Women? 

I’m really pro women in science, especially young females wanting to enter the field. 

Especially in the UK, there’s pros and cons, it’s not a paying field and the reality is it’s massively underfunded. You have to move to remote locations with a weak currency so there’s a lot to make a young female question it. But what I want to do is highlight the rewards of doing this work and I live for sharks. 

Hopefully, if you’re a young female and you see this show you can think, “I can do that!” They’re going to see a lot of men on Shark Week and might think, “Where do I fit in to this?” I want young females to be inspired.

Shark Women: Ghosted by Great Whites, has its world premiere on July 29 at 10pm ET/PT on Discovery and Discovery+ as part of Discovery Shark Week. Available on Discovery+UK shortly afterwards. 

Got a story?

If you’ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we’d love to hear from you.

Entertainment – MetroRead More