Televizzle.org

This 2-hour special aired during Shark Week 2005. In it, the team tests a battery of myths centered around the classic movie Jaws. In the movie, the shark is advertised as a 25-foot long, 6000 pound monster that performs a series of feats, and naturally, the team wants to find out if any of them are feasible. So without further ado, off we go.

Shark Strength: Barrel Pull Down. One of the things that happened in the movie was the shark grabbing a line with several flotation barrels attached and pulling them (and holding them) under the surface of the water. To replicate this, similar barrels are attached to a military vehicle and a force gauge attached to measure what it would take. With some 1200 pounds of force required, it's determined that even a 3000 pound shark, which is determined as a reasonable size estimate, would be unlikely to be able to do so. Busted.

But what if the shark was really a 6000 pound beast? The team visited the Bahamas and determined that these smaller reef sharks could regularly pull about a third of their body weight. So it seems to me that a 6000 pound shark would have no problems pulling 1200 pounds to get those barrels under the water. You can decide for yourself. If the decision is to go for the movie values, you'll get one thing. If you want to go for reality, you'll likely get another.

Shark Strength: Boat Pull. Very similar in scope to the barrel experiment, but pulling a boat backwards until waves crest over the stern. Of course, a boat is on top of the water, and not being pulled underneath - except for just a bit at the back. The boat is heavier, however, than the barrels. Even if you think the 6000 pound shark could pull the barrels under, it's unlikely it could do so with a boat - it took somewhere between 4000 and 8000 pounds of continuous force to pull the boat, which is a lot higher than what was needed on those barrels. Busted.

Shark Strength: Cage Ram. In the movie, the shark tears apart a shark cage meant to protect the diver inside. In the test test, Adam builds a replica cage and the "Sharammer" (a large steel tube with a cast shark head attached) is pulled at 25 miles per hour into the cage to see what happens. This may not be an accurate test, as in the movie the shark actually swims up and essentially bites the cage into bits, but nonetheless, the cage is destroyed. But it's up to you whether it is accurate or not. Confirmed.

Shark Strength: Boat Ram. The Sharammer was used again, this time to see if the shark could bust a hole in the side of the boat. What do you know, get that thing up to speed and run into the side and you get a hole! Do it more than once, and you've got a sinking boat. Confirmed.

Shark Punching. Rumor has it that if a shark comes up to you and you need to get it to go away, you should punch it in the nose. So first they set up Buster with an air-driven (similar to the driver used in Break Step Bridge) set of hands to punch sharks. The problem is that Adam has to run Buster from above the water, so it doesn't work well. So then Jamie dons a Neptunic chain mail sharksuit (as seen on Jobs That Bite Harder) to see if it works. That works better, but Jamie realizes that the shark's head is pretty hard, so it doesn't work very well. Punching in the softer gills works well. Plausible.

Exploding Scuba Tank. For the finale, a scuba tank in the shark's mouth is shot with a high-powered rifle, and it explodes spectacularly to end the film. Will it really work? There are stories of these aluminum tanks rupturing and having problems that cause explosive results, but these invariably are due to structural imperfections. What happens when you shoot them?

As it turns out, not much. The rifle doesn't have much trouble going through the soft metal, but the structure is such that it lets the air out without collapsing - similar to the results in the Explosive Decompression myth. The air comes out, but the structural integrity is intact. Luckily, the FBI is on-hand to blow it up with some spare C4.