UWindsor researcher gets down and dirty for Discovery

A University of Windsor researcher and his team became the subject of an episode of Dirty Jobs - one of Discovery Channel’s top-rated programs.

Aaron Fisk, an associate professor in UWindsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research, studies the feeding habits of Greenland sharks in the high Arctic to help measure the effect of climate change on the region’s ecosystem. His appearance on Dirty Jobs was prompted by the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, when many of the network’s most popular programs took a shark-related theme. Approximately one million Canadian viewers tune in to Shark Week programming.

Dirty Jobs is a show featuring occupations with particularly unpleasant aspects. The program’s popular host Mike Rowe usually takes a comical hands-on approach - rolling up his sleeves and jumping into the mess, while a camera crew records his adventures.

Rowe and a camera crew spent several days with Dr. Fisk and his team in the sub-zero temperatures near Cumberland Sound, Nunavut, as the UWindsor group tagged and released the sharks, which can grow up to seven metres long and live an estimated 200 years.

Fisk appeared in a 60-minute episode that aired in July 2008. Discovery reaches 97 million households in the U.S. and has 240 million international subscribers.