A sea change for Discovery’s Shark Week

As Shark Week turns 25, Discovery tries to keep the annual fest relevant with audiences by building alliances with conservationists.

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For much of its 25-year history, Discovery Channel's Shark Week has focused on the gorier aspects of shark strikes. Here, a great white shark goes after a seal decoy on the "Air Jaws Apocalypse" segment.

Chris Fallows / Discovery Channel

Under executive producer Brooke Runnette, who has run Shark Week since 2010, the event has incorporated conservation themes more frequently into its programming.

Bill O'Leary / THE WASHINGTON POST

A worker cuts a shark fin at a fish market in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This year, Shark Week mentions the global shark fin trade, which kills between 26 million and 73 million sharks a year, to meet the demand for the Asian delicacy shark's fin soup.The global trade in shark fins totals hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Kamran Jebreili / Associated Press

One segment, "Great White Highway," looks at the work of Stanford University marine biologist Barbara Block, who tracks the movements of white sharks and other top predators in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast.

Scot Anderson / Discovery Channel

Mike Coots, a shark attack victim, still surfs in Hawaii. Although this year's event has plenty of shark strike reenactments, Shark Week also chronicles the push for shark conservation by men and women who have been bitten by sharks.

/ Discovery Channel

Kydd Pollock, a science specialist for the Nature Conservancy, survived being bitten multiple times on the head by a gray reef shark in the remote atoll of Palmyra. Amanda Meyer comforts Pollock after the attack.

/ Discovery Channel

Pollock, shown surveying the ocean floor off Oahu, Hawaii, is an underwater photographer. He has chronicled the rich diversity of marine life in the waters off Palmyra and returned underwater three weeks after he was bitten, on the first day doctors allowed him to reenter the ocean.

Discovery Channel

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