UC Merced professor to appear on Discovery Channel’s Shark Week as megalodon expert

What was it like when gigantic megalodons patrolled the oceans? What was on their menu and how did they interact with great white sharks as two of the most fearsome underwater predators?

UC Merced professor Sora Kim will help answer those questions during Discovery Channel’s popular Shark Week.

Kim will be featured on an episode titled “Jaws vs. The Meg,” which will be shown at 9 p.m. Sunday, helping kick off the annual weeklong tribute to sharks.

“If white sharks and megalodons lived at the same time, how were they interacting, what were they doing, we’re sort of thinking and talking about that,” Kim said.

Kim discusses with other experts how megalodons compare with great whites.

“This show is really different than other shows the Discovery Channel has done on megalodons because this show was based on science and was really interested in and excited about featuring the research that had been done about megalodons,” Kim added.

Megalodons are the largest species of sharks that have lived, measuring up to 60 feet long and weighing up to 60 tons. They roamed oceans for 21 million years before going extinct 2.5 million years ago.

For the past four years, Kim has been researching megalodons — with a group of colleagues at universities across the country — by using stable isotopes in fossil teeth. The research has helped her discover what the creature ate and its physiology.

“I didn’t grow up loving sharks,” said Kim, who’s worked at UC Merced for five and a half years. “I didn’t want to become a marine biologist necessarily or even a paleontologist, but I got involved with this method in college of doing research and I found it really interesting because you could apply it to a lot of different systems.”

“When I went to grad school, I realized nobody was really using it for ancient sharks or modern sharks,” she added. “Now I see my role as using the method to look at both modern shark ecology and ancient shark ecology.”

Kim’s research revealed megalodons fed off of the top of the food chain similar to great white sharks. Her recent research also revealed megalodons had elevated body temperatures unlike most sharks, which are cold-blooded.

“With a higher body temperature and high metabolism, it actually needs to eat more probably,” Kim said. “Being at the top of the food chain, and also needing a lot of energy sort of made it susceptible to extinction.”

Kim said a global climate change that led to changes in the megalodons’ ecosystems contributed to the end of the enormous species.

“I think megalodons just captures people’s imagination because of how big the teeth are, but we lack a lot of other information about it,” Kim said. “There have been a lot of ideas about what it ate and why it went extinct. It’s been very exciting working with this group because we’ve developed actually new techniques to look at diet.”

Kim says she hasn’t seen the finished project so she’s excited to watch the show for the first time. She’s even letting her two young kids stay up on Sunday night.

“It’s a very different kind of job than what I do usually because I usually do my research in the lab, I teach classes and I work with undergraduate students and graduate students to help them with their research,” she said. “This was like being on film.

“There has been a lack of representation in Shark Week, Discovery Channel and National Geographic programming so there’s renewed effort to have more representation in their programming,” Kim added.

Kim was proud to represent UC Merced and the Central Valley in doing the project.

“I came to UC Merced because I really believed in their mission for the student body and helping students who come from less resourced areas. ... I want to let people know that here in the Central Valley that you can actually be a marine biologist, or a paleontologist,” Kim said. “There’s access to this type of research even at UC Merced if students are interested.”