Huge global audience anticipated for SA doccie

Johnson, a doctoral student and one of the scientists-in-residence at the Mossel Bay-based South African Marine Predators Laboratory (SAMPLA), departed on Monday afternoon, 21 July 2008, for New York City to promote the show.

“I'll be meeting the National Geographic public relations people and appearing on the TV news shows Good Morning America, The O'Reilly Factor and Fox And Friends, as well as on various radio programmes,” he said.

“I'll be talking about Sharkville as well as our research, our discoveries, Sharklife (a shark conservation group) and SAMPLA.”

Asked whether he'd be mentioning Mossel Bay, he said “Sharkville IS Mossel Bay: Mossel Bay is the centre of my discussion and it made this movie possible.”

He said that Mossel Bay provided perfect research grounds because it had a resident seal population and was relatively untouched by cage diving as it has only one shark cage diving operation.

Although the great white shark - the subject of Sharkville - is well known as a formidable predator, much of its life and many of its habits in Mossel Bay were unknown until Johnson began the six-year-long study that he's documented in the film.

Although Johnson has been involved in one way or another with the production of some 22 films - including appearing as a co-host for the Discovery Channel on a show based in Papua New Guinea called ‘Shark Tribe' - it was only last year that he began hosting documentaries for National Geographic.

“My next show will be a remake of an earlier documentary called ‘The Secret Shark Pit,'” he said. “We travelled to Mauritius where grey reef sharks tend to aggregate in underwater caverns termed ‘pits' - and we conducted research to try and understand what makes these pits attractive to the sharks.

“This will definitely be a conservation-orientated programme, and we've sworn ourselves to secrecy regarding the location of the pits. The previous programme gave the location away, and those pits were quickly fished out.”

Johnson said that he was hoping to show Sharkville to local residents at a private screening in the local Dias Museum Complex on his return.

For more information, go to http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/wild/3657/Overview#tab-Overview, www.ryan-johnson.org, www.sampla.org, www.sharklife.co.za and www.visitmosselbay.co.za.