'Shark Whisperer' Magical Trick to Hypnotize Sharks

 "Challenging the Impossible" is a super-large project launched by CCTV with the power of the whole station. Through ordinary players, they challenge the limits of ordinary people on the stage and show the ultimate performance of ordinary life. The program is a journey of exploration with human beings as the object, and it is an exploration of the potential of life. It starts from the most primitive "brave" of human beings, and shows people's courage and spirit to challenge themselves, rather than simply showing the wonders and limits themselves.

On the show aired on August 9, 2015, 44-year-old Italian diver Cristina Zenato performed "60 Seconds of Shark Hypnosis" with success. Although sharks are one of the most ferocious predators in the ocean and are known as "wolves of the sea", in Christina's hands they can enter a "hypnotic" state of confusion. The audience opened their mouths in surprise and broke a cold sweat for her. It was an incredible challenge to hypnotize such a potentially aggressive two-meter-long ocean "overlord".

Christina's hypnotizing the shark is more than a stunt, the real challenge is to show the love of the challenger. By hypnotizing the sharks, she helps them remove the hooks that remain in their mouths, the brutal killing weapons humans have left on them. When the challenger opened her "jewelry box" and presented a whole box of fish hooks in front of the judges and the audience, the audience was shocked, followed by thunderous applause, and the true "Shark Whisperer" Showed great respect.

Christina's ability to "hypnotize" sharks has attracted the attention of TV stations and documentary filmmakers around the world, including interviews with the BBC, Discovery Channel and ABC. Christina's thrilling "Hand on Shark" performance in the Caribbean on August 17, 2013 is still unforgettable. She intimately touched and stroked a 3-meter-long Caribbean reef shark in the water, and finally put it into a "hypnotic" state, obediently pointing her nose down and standing vertically in her palm. The whole performance was exciting, and the audience was amazed.

Matthew Mayer, a 42-year-old commercial photographer from San Diego, USA, once went into the water on the Caribbean coast and used a camera to record Christina's magical process of "hypnotizing" Caribbean reef sharks. "It was the first time I had the opportunity to witness Christina feeding the sharks, and it was amazing to see her interact with the sharks," he recalls. "I followed her into the water. The whole process was not like me. As exciting as I imagined, it felt very peaceful and quiet. I was both in awe and delighted that the sharks slowly circled us so peacefully, waiting to be fed.”

Meyer pointed out that every year, a large number of sharks are killed by humans, they are finned alive and thrown back into the sea, where they die slowly and painfully. If this kind of tragedy happened to dolphins or other cute marine animals, it may cause more sympathy and protest. He hopes that his "hypnotic" footage of sharks will shed more light on the plight of sharks.

"tender baby"

Christina was born in Italy and grew up in the rainforests of Congo, Africa. At the age of 22, she went to the Bahamas to learn diving, and she never expected to have an indissoluble bond with sharks. In March 2011, Christina, who was over forty, was inducted into the Women's Diver Hall of Fame to learn training skills from her mentor. She now lives in the Bahamas, where she is a diving instructor for a diving tour company. She served as the head of diving for the Bahamas Underwater Adventure Society and became a globally renowned shark conservationist.

Christina is fluent in 5 different languages ​​including Italian, English, German, French and Spanish, but the most surprising skill is not just her diving ability and language talent, but her ability to "deal" with sharks. According to statistics, there are very few "shark whisperers" in the world, only more than 20 people. In fact, it's very difficult to get up close and personal with animal lifestyles in an underwater environment. In more cases, sharks at the top of the biological chain often swim to people suddenly as marine killers.

But as soon as he saw Christina, the most ferocious carnivore in the ocean lost its wildness in the past, but swam by her side meekly, like a "docile baby". They were "willingly" petted by her, entering a state similar to "hypnosis". The sharks cooperated as Christina put her hand in the mouth of the shark. After the hook was taken out, he swam away contentedly. However, despite having worked with sharks for more than a decade, Christina still wears a "chain mail suit" when she goes underwater to "hypnotize" sharks to prevent shark bites.

According to Christina, she uses a little-known "shark taming" technique. By stroking and rubbing the hundreds of sensitive pores called "ampulla of Lorenz" around the shark's nose and mouth with the palm of his hand, the shark is put into a sort of hypnotic state. As sensory organs in sharks, these pores act as electron receptors. Sharks use them to sense subtle changes in the surrounding electromagnetic field so they can detect the location of their prey. For some reason, however, rubbing those pores around the nose and mouth with your hands can also throw the ferocious shark into a paralyzed state of immobility.

This sleep state is the famous shark tonic immobility phenomenon, which can last up to 15 minutes. Putting sharks into a tonic still state is an effective means of subduing sharks, and was stumbled upon by Samuel Gruber of the Bimini Shark Laboratory while studying baby lemon sharks in Bimini's mangroves. Research has shown that nearly all sharks enter this state of tonic immobility after being turned over, stop struggling, and lie still. When they try to correct their upside-down visual world, their brains secrete large amounts of the neurotransmitter serotonin, a chemical used to avoid panic. When the concentration of serotonin increases, the shark will enter this "sleep" state, in a trance, which is equivalent to losing consciousness. In this position, it is defenseless. If the tonic resting state is not long, the shark will quickly regain consciousness and swim quickly after flipping back. Christina has tried this method to "hypnotize" several types of sharks, most notably Caribbean reef sharks.

In fact, taming sharks is not without precedent. In recent years, American scientists have used the principle of conditioned reflex in experiments to successfully tame certain species of sharks, making them willing to make friendly actions such as hugging with divers. According to experts, Christina's method has a distinctly personal touch, unlike taming sharks using reflexes. Instead of stimulating the shark with sight and sound, on the contrary, she tried to avoid stimulating the shark and rubbed the shark's sensory organs into a quiet sleep state. Because of this, Christina couldn't get the shark to do the prescribed movements like a circus animal, only to keep it quiet.

Linguists believe that the "conversation" between humans and animals is not necessarily the level of speech, because the thinking process is based on the brain. If the research of cognitive science and brain science can make people clearly know the pattern and working mechanism of brain activity, and know the corresponding relationship between brain activity pattern and thinking and conscious activity, from this perspective, it is possible to achieve "dialogue" with animals.

Protect the "sea wolf"

Christina first attempted this skill at the age of 23, and she discovered her talent for it entirely by accident. "Once while I was feeding, some sharks approached me. So I subconsciously reached out and pushed them away. Strange things happened and I noticed that instead of swimming, some sharks stayed on my hand." She The introduction said: "Since then, I have continued to explore and gradually mastered this skill."

Christina has taught other student divers how to remove parasites from sharks or help remove hooks from sharks' mouths. These hooks may have been the sharks' bite into the nets that the fishermen used to catch fish, or they could have been left behind when they broke free from the lines of the shark-catching boats. She also cooperated with the Global Shark Conservation Organization to use the tonic resting state of sharks to help shark researchers collect DNA from sharks more easily without causing more pain and damage to sharks.

After "hypnotizing" the shark, Christina often encourages tourists and student divers to touch the shark's skin, hoping to take this opportunity to re-recognize sharks and learn more about the secret world of these marine "predators". "According to the CITES report, 73 million sharks are fished each year and their fins are cut off to make shark fin soup, which has resulted in a significant decline in shark populations worldwide. And This decline is irreversible, and some shark species have even become nearly extinct in recent years." She urged, "We should help and educate people not to be afraid of sharks, but to be curious about them and love them, save and protect them. "

For the most part, sharks are at the top of the marine food chain and are considered by scientists to be a "cornerstone" species. In the past 400 million years, sharks, as "aggressors", maintained the health of the invaded groups by expelling and preying on the small, weak, sick and disabled marine creatures in the ocean, thereby maintaining the ecological balance of the ocean.

Experts say the loss of the apex predator, sharks, from the food chain could lead to the collapse of entire structures, meaning that more species will come to an end. Studies have shown that dramatic declines in shark populations can have cascading effects across the ocean, leading to the loss of commercially important fish and shellfish, such as tuna and other species important for maintaining coral reef health. As many as 11 species of sharks have disappeared from the U.S. East Coast, causing a surge in 12 of the 14 species of marine life they prey on, ravaging local ecology. Take the bullnose rays, which multiply without sharks to devour their favorite food, bay scallops. The century-old scallop fishing industry has been hit hard, with less than 13 percent of the catch at its peak. The scallops help filter and purify water, and the plummeting numbers have had an impact on ocean water quality.

Sharks are also the most vulnerable group of marine life to overfishing, and the rate of reproduction of the group has not kept up with the technological development of human fishing. Sharks produce small numbers of pups and grow slowly, taking on average about 10 years to grow into an adult shark. The shark, which has grown up with great difficulty, has lost its life due to over-hunting in some areas, so it is likely that it will become the first marine life to become extinct because of human factors. If consumption of shark fins continues, sharks will be caught within a generation, twenty or thirty years. One-third of shark populations in the high seas are currently threatened with extinction, and some shark populations have even declined by 99%.