SHARK WEEK 2025 | ©2025 Discovery Channel

SHARK WEEK begins its annual programming on Discovery Channel on Sunday, July 20, and runs through Saturday, July 26, with episodes thereafter available on the network’s streaming platform.

Paul de Gelder, now a regular SHARK WEEK fixture, is on four of this year’s programs. De Gelder’s SHARK WEEK colleagues describe him as “fearless.” Watching SHARK WEEK: HOW TO SURVIVE A SHARK ATTACK, which premieres Tuesday, July 22, one gets the sense that the descriptor may be not figurative, but literal.

When de Gelder was in the Australian military, he spent five years in the Army Airborne Division and then became a Navy bomb disposal “clearance” diver, for the following five years. Then, in 2009, on a dive in Sydney Harbor, de Gelder was attacked by a bull shark and lost his right forearm and right calf.

Surprisingly, although de Gelder had previously loathed sharks, he became fascinated with the animals and a great advocate for their protection.

His experience as both a shark expert and a diver, combined with the prosthetic limbs on his right arm and leg, put de Gelder in a unique position for HOW TO SURVIVE A SHARK ATTACK. However, it’s hard to imagine that, even if other people had similar resumes, they’d want to do what de Gelder did for this program.

Specially-designed, realistic-looking artificial limbs, outfitted with both cameras and fake blood, were placed over de Gelder’s regular prosthetics. De Gelder then dived into a swarm of tiger sharks and let them pull off and swim away with the fake arm and leg. All of this is captured by not only the production cameras, but by the cameras that entered the mouths of the sharks who took the limbs.

Even though viewers know from the start that de Gelder is not being physically harmed and emerged no worse for wear, it’s terrifying to witness, not to mention imagining what it would be like. It does have the educational and morale-building value of demonstrating that someone can live through this if they don’t panic and correctly handle what follows.

De Gelder gets on a Zoom call to talk about HOW TO SURVIVE A SHARK ATTACK and his three other 2025 SHARK WEEK programs: AIR JAWS: THE HUNT FOR COLOSSUS, which premieres Sunday, July 20, BLACK MAKO OF THE ABYSS, which premieres along with SHARK ATTACK on Tuesday, July 22, and BULL SHARK SHOWDOWN, which premieres Friday, July 25.

HOW TO SURVIVE A SHARK ATTACK begs the question – does anything scare De Gelder, and if so, what is it?

“Having children,” de Gelder quips. “They’re terrifying little monsters.”

He hasn’t experienced parenting directly. “I’ve got eleven nieces and nephews, and I feel like that’s enough for me.” He laughs. 

Then de Gelder provides a more serious answer. “I’ve come so close to death in the most painful and horrific of ways, and once you’ve faced it like that, it kind of loses its glimmer. And so now, I’m not really afraid of death.

SHARK WEEK 2025 | ©2025 Discovery Channel

“I’m afraid of not going to my deathbed having missed opportunities and not fulfilled dreams of things that I’ve always wanted to do. I think that’s what people need to worry more about than death and being afraid of things. Worry about going to your deathbed having missed out on those opportunities and those impossible dreams that you always wished you could have fulfilled.”

De Gelder says that, while he’s excited about HOW TO SURVIVE A SHARK ATTACK, he’s likewise enthused about his other 2025 SHARK WEEK programs.

“Everyone wants to talk about [SHARK ATTACK], but I really like BULL SHARK SHOWDOWN, because I don’t think it’s been done before. This is a really tongue-in-cheek, kind of funny, kind of scary show where we have American bull sharks face off [in a simulation] against the Australian bull sharks to see who is the biggest, baddest shark. It was a lot of fun to make. But HOW TO SURVIVE A SHARK ATTACK, yeah, that was pretty scary. It was very exciting. I’m pretty sure [while watching it] my mother is going to have a heart attack.”

De Gelder explains there were no concerns that having tiger sharks rip off fake human limbs from him might encourage the animals to try it with real ones. “Think about it like training a dog. Does your dog learn to sit and lay down and shake hands and roll over by getting one treat? Absolutely not. And we’re not doing this over and over and over again with the same sharks. We’re not programming them, we’re not training them. We’re doing it once, just to show how to survive, and that’s it.

“Honestly, when I’m feeding the prosthetic to the shark, the shark can’t even actually see what it’s biting, because I have [the limb] under its nose. The shark is detecting the 360 camera that I have in my hand that the sharks seemingly like to chew on and steal from all the divers.”

Why do sharks chew on cameras? Surely they can’t taste very good.

“They don’t,” de Gelder laughs. “Too crunchy as well. It’s because sharks, when they’re in close, use their electro-stimulation to detect the food that they’re going to bite. They have these things in their nose and down their bodies called the Ampullae of Lorenzini, which pick up on electrical signals, and the cameras emit these signals, and so, they think it’s a fish signal, and so they go and chomp on it. They’re constantly trying to eat our GoPros and grab big, hundred-thousand-dollar cameras by the lights and run off with them.”

This is far from the first instance of de Gelder putting cameras in his prosthetics. “I do it all the time. I strap them to my body, my head, my prosthetic arm sometimes, my legs and my fins. We put them everywhere, because we’re trying to get every angle, we’re trying to get every shot.”

Filming sharks isn’t as easy as SHARK WEEK can make it seem. “People think that you turn up on a boat and you throw some bait in the water and the sharks turn up. And let me tell you, that is not always the case. Sometimes, we’re waiting weeks for the sharks. There’s a lot of patience and a lot of frustration in making these shows sometimes. But it’s vitally important to us to share all of this, and so we put in the hard yards.”

From the scenarios presented in SHARK ATTACK, it appears that the best defense is to dive as part of a group, instead of swimming solo.

De Gelder confirms this. “When you’re scuba diving, you are trained to always have a dive buddy. That is very, very important. In the Navy, we don’t always do it, because we have specialized tasks and specialist training. But recreational divers, spear fishermen, snorkelers – even swimming – you should never go into the ocean by yourself, because if the unthinkable happens and you’ve got no one to help you, no one to report [you need help]. So, one of the great things you could do is certainly go diving with a group.”

Was having tiger sharks pull off his prosthetic limbs triggering for de Gelder, or did he have completely different feelings about this?

“There was definitely a lot less pain, that’s for sure,” he observes with a laugh. “When my incident happened with the bull shark in Sydney Harbor in 2009, that was unexpected. We didn’t see the shark. No one had been attacked in Sydney Harbor in around fifty years. And also, you throw in the pain, the fear – this was a very different scenario.

“We’d factored in as many safety protocols as we could. We knew that the sharks were there. It was crystal-clear water, so we could see everything really well.”

Even so, “Hand-feeding the tiger shark was one thing. Falling out of a kayak into a pool of pretend blood, and then having sharks bite me when we didn’t plan on that happening, that got a little scary. So, I got attacked six times in this show – four times on purpose, two times not on purpose. But it’s a great show with a really good purpose behind it. And so, we’re all very proud of it.”

De Gelder has now seen the final cut of HOW TO SURVIVE A SHARK ATTACK. “I think it’s a really fantastic show, as the others are. We’ve got AIR JAWS: HUNT FOR COLOSSUS – there are so many good shows from all of my mates I’ve been working with all year, so hard, to bring you SHARK WEEK.”

How does de Gelder get involved with the various SHARK WEEK offerings? “I get a call from production companies that I usually work with a lot, and they say, ‘Hey, Paul, we’ve got this show, you interested?’ And I say, ‘Yes,’ and they haven’t even told me the idea yet, and I’m like, ‘Where are we going? What are we doing? Let’s go and do it.’ I love an adventure. It doesn’t matter what it is – I’ll figure it out when I get there.”

The programs often involve seeking a particular species of shark. In the case of AIR JAWS: THE HUNT FOR COLOSSUS, de Gelder and company are searching for a single specific Great White. “We’re looking for a twenty-foot male Great White shark that hasn’t been seen in ten years. The last time he was filmed was in South Africa, but there was evidence that he’d transited to New Zealand. And Great White sharks have been tracked making that journey before, so we had the amazing Dr. Alison Towner in South Africa trying to drum up Colossus, myself, Andy Casagrande, and SHARK WEEK OG Jeff Kerr. We went down to New Zealand to see if he was in a new home, and that was a lot of fun. They’re using me as bait again.”

And what does de Gelder most hope people get out of this year’s SHARK WEEK?

“The same thing we want everyone to take away from SHARK WEEK [every year] – share our love, share our respect. Knowledge dispels fear. If you respect and love something, you want to protect it, and sharks need our love and respect, because they’re being decimated around the world.

“People are jamming big steel hooks in their faces and dragging them around the ocean for hours and hours on end, just to get a selfie. And that’s not fair. If we did that to a land-based animal, we’d be thrown in jail, but for some reason, just because you can’t hear a shark scream, [some people think] it makes it okay. So, stand up for sharks. They need our help.”

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Article: Exclusive Interview with Shark expert and survivor Paul de Gelder on HOW TO SURVIVE A SHARK ATTACK

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