Adventurer Forrest Galante On His Shark Week Show And Conservation During COVID

Forrest Galante is the wildlife biologist and conservationist the world needs right now. He’s engaging, he builds his conservation work on a solid foundation of science, and he truly loves all animals in a way that echoes Steve Irwin — gleefully swimming with sharks and gators. Galante is also an adventurer who spent his pre-COVID time globe-trotting around the world working in animal conservation while also trying to locate extinct species on his Animal Planet show Extinct or Alive.

To celebrate this year’s Shark Week, Galante teamed up with elasmobranchologist Dr. Dave Ebert to track three sharks off the coast of southern Africa — all thought to be extinct. The result, Extinct or Alive: Land of the Lost Sharks, is engaging, escapist TV that feels perfect for this moment in history. You get to travel with Galante to far-flung lands while also scoring great information about a group of fish that have suffered greatly at the hands of humans.

This week, we chatted with Galante over the phone about his new show. After talking about tracking sharks, we veered into the ever-changing world of animal conservation, hunting, and poaching in an unstable era. We had so much fun that we decided to drink a few drams of whisky with the man, too — check out last week’s UPROXX LIFE Expression Session below.

So before we get into the shows, let’s talk just a little bit about how you became a conservationist.

I grew up in Zimbabwe, which is a very wild place. But look, lots of people grew up in Zimbabwe and didn’t go on to be conservationists. In Zim, I was the son of farmers and safari business owners. So I spent my whole life in the bush and as I grew to become an adult, I decided that I love animals.

The way I like to describe it, Zach, remember when you were a kid and you flip something over like a log and you see an earthworm, right And you’re like, “Oh my God, how cool is that” Well, most people grow out of that. I did not. As I grew up, I wanted to know everything about that earthworm. I wanted to know what it ate, where it lived, what made it tick, what ate it, and so on. So as I got older, I turned my just plain love of wildlife, animals, and the sciences and went on to become an academic and got a degree in my passion to become a conservationist. I started as a biologist and realized my talents were really in communicating science far more so than academia. And so I began to communicate science on different platforms and ended up on television and been here ever since.

So, your new show, Land of the Lost Shark, is set in South Africa and Mozambique where you’re looking for lost sharks. How do you approach finding animals that are believed to be extinct

I’ve made a niche in my world as being the guy that finds these animals — the animals that others can’t find. So in Land of the Lost Shark, I had the amazing privilege of teaming up with Dr. Dave Ebert, a world-renowned elasmobranchologist (AKA shark scientist) who’s named over 40 species of shark himself. He’s actually known as the “Lost Shark” guy. Dave and I are buddies. He’s awesome, man.

So, I reached out to Dave and I said, “Hey Dave, There’s a couple of regions in the world that are hotspots for lost sharks. One of them is my old backyard, southern Africa. Why don’t we go down there and work together and see if we can actually scratch up a couple of these things” And Dave said, “Forrest, I’d love nothing more.” And so we took that to the network and said, “Hey, I know last year we found a lost shark in Sri Lanka, the Pondicherry, but this year, Dave and I — combining our expertise — him on a very academic level and mine on a more physical level — we think we might be able to be successful in finding even more than one lost species in these waters, off the coast of South Africa and Mozambique. What do you think” And they’re like, “We love it. Good luck.”