At last, a line of wetsuits has been developed that will protect surfers and swimmers against the threat of shark attack. Or can there ever be such a product?
Two Australian businessmen believe their line of Shark Attack Mitigation Systems, notably wetsuits developed with the help of a university research project, will protect those who wear them.
If this is true it's great news, coming in the aftermath of a two-year period during which five people were killed by sharks in Australia.
But only time will tell if these wetsuits and other SAMS products (surfboard and kayak stickers, etc), in fact, will serve as a level of protection... or provide a false sense of security.
One of the wetsuits is the blue and white Elude suit (pictured at top), which is designed to make surfers and swimmers practically invisible to sharks.
The other is the black and white Diverter (pictured, immediately below), which is supposed to give surfers and swimmers the appearance of poisonous critters sharks generally avoid.
New research suggests that sharks are color blind, a line of thinking that went into the design of the wetsuits and other products.
Shaun Collin, a researcher with the University of Western Australia, told the BBC: "Many animals are repelled by a striped pattern which indicates the potential prey is unsafe to eat."
One series of tests, deploying decoy dummies dressed in the striped wetsuits and traditional black wetsuits, involved tiger sharks.
The large predators avoided the former, while attacking the latter.
That shows promise, but great white sharks are not tiger sharks. They're ambush predators, which strike from below, violently.
On a sunny day, a surfer wearing an Elude suit or Diverter suit might still look like a dark silhouette. More testing will be done in the next several months, off South Australia and South Africa. Craig Anderson, one of the entrepreneurs, said demand is already growing.
"Everyone's looking fore a solution, everyone's nervous about going in the water a round the world now," he said.
The Australian firm isn't alone in wanting to develop products to keep people safe from shark attacks. Surfboard leashes that emit electronic pulses are also on the market, and a small company recently producede a rash guard that has the pattern of a poisonous lionfish (see photo). Boatstogo.com states on its website:
"The unique color pattern of our Rash Guard mimics the features of highly venomous lion fish, therefore minimizing your chances of being mistaken for a sea lion or any other type of favorite food on the menu of local sharks."
The company does not guarantee that these will guard against attack, which is smart. Especially considering that lionfish, as pointed out by shark ecologist Bradley M. Wetherebee to National Geographic, do not typically encounter lionfish, so they're not conditioned to leave them alone.
Besides, Wetherebee added, "People spear lionfish and feed them to sharks some places where they are trying to reduce the number of lionfish since they are invasive species." The developers of the Elude suit and Diverter, likewise, are not ready to make any guarantees.
Stated Southern California shark expert Christopher Lowe: "One of my favorite stories is when [famous diver] Valerie Taylor tested out the sea snake colored wetsuit, thinking that sharks would avoid sea snakes because they are so poisonous.
"Well, apparently [developers] hadn't read the tiger shark literature... turns out the No. 1 prey item found in tiger shark stomachs from Australia were sea snakes! So, imagine what that tiger shark would be thinking as it rounded the reef and bumped into the giant, fat sea snake! Yum, yum!"
--Images are screen grabs from SAMS video
--Find this post and lots more on GrindTv Outdoor
@Mike
As a threshold matter, it is intellectually dishonest to even intimate that "sharks prefer specific prey" when, in reality, the Oceanic Whitetip/Tiger/Bull and even White shark are very much "generalist feeders"- particularly when out in the open ocean ecosystem where just about anything and everything edible is viewed as prey. Google "shark takes woman's leg" for DIRECT EVIDENCE that human beings are not only "on the menu", but is also definitive evidence that it is the post-attack conduct of the prey (H. sapiens) that more plausibly "explains" why the shark doesn't finish the job, i.e., human beings come to the aid of other human beings as a function of Kin Selection and other selective forces upon our species. To be sure, you are divining another "explanation" altogether, i.e., the "reason" sharks do not "finish the job" ("whatever that means" - Lloyd Skinner) is because (the misguided argument goes) sharks are attacking humans out of "mistake" and, well, once they "realize what they did after doing it for the 1,000,000+ time" they decide to depart.
Taken to its illogical conclusion, a shark has to eat an entire human being (a la Lloyd Skinner at Fish Hoek) for it to be "actual predation"? That is a farce. Bears routinely prey on only a limb or two when engaging in human predation but, alas, nobody asserts "they bear only ate the bottom half so, as you can see, it wasn't feeding"...much less, "see! the bear must have thought the human was an Elk calf and then left when it realized it was 'mistaken identity'". That's how absurd the modern dogma in Shark Sociobiology has become.
And everybody keeps parroting the same pseudo-science, hoping the larger public will uncritically adopt it in order to help "save the shark". Such non sequitur logic- much less social conditioning- has no place in modern Science.
Perhaps a more plausible explanation as to why why apex predator sharks engage in a "hit and run" predation strategy with human beings might be as follows: sharks are wary of injury and human beings have the technological means to injure them. As such, the sharks that had the greatest "flight response" from an initial attack (a la "hit and run" predation strategy) were more likely to pass genes on to the next generation than those that lingered. Or do you deny that the factual record tends to show human beings killing sharks after such instances of human predation?
In this regard, I'm not sure how you can credibly contend there is "clear evidence" that "hommins [sic.] are nothing more than a foreign invader at best"? Certainly there is no dispute we have had an unbroken, continuous course of dealing in their ecosystem...so, whether or not any human deems humanity to be a "foreign invader" or a naturally occurring, seafaring primate is really immaterial to the threshold issue of whether or not sharks "know what humans are". Either the two species have an unbroken course of dealing, or they do not.
Conspicuously, human beings have engendered indirect [e.g., commercial fishing/spear fishing/whaling] feeding opportunities and, of course, we are also a tertiary prey item [e.g., USS Indianapolis attack and maritime disasters]. To even suggest that we are somehow "foreign" to sharks is as silly as suggesting "cage dives associate people with food". Sorry, those associations were made 10,000+ years before the Bible was written...much less when JAWS was first released.
As long as Hominids have been rafting to new environments to exploit, sharks have been waiting, in every sense of the word.
Notably, even today- after such maritime disasters (a la USS Indianapolis)- a myriad of what we are conditioned to believe are "relatively harmless" shark species [e.g., Silky sharks] will nonetheless realize a feeding opportunity at our expense.
Why?
Because they are generalist feeders. As such, the distinctions you cite are merely in the human mind. There is no actual evidence that proves what you assert to be true, i.e., that apex predator sharks only eat "specific prey"...or that we aren't a naturally occurring prey item- even a tertiary one.
"Opportunity makes a thief." - Francis Bacon
Posted by: drudown | Jul 23, 2013 at 07:08 PM
@drudown. The evidence shows that sharks prefer specific prey and that is not us. Most of the time a stark strikes and then doesn't finish the job for that very reason. Of course they are opportunists as well but there is no clear evidence that hommins are nothing more than a foreign invader at best.
Posted by: Mike q | Jul 21, 2013 at 09:42 AM
While I respectfully take no position on the purported efficacy of these products, I find it humorous that they are placed into the stream of commerce on the commonly misguided premise that, well, we are somehow "alien" or "relative newcomers" in the marine ecosystem. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Our Hominid ancestors have always domiciled along the coastline and harvested the marine ecosystem. Conspicuously, the only shark with freshwater adaptations (Bull shark) thrived along the major waterways (e.g., Zambezi river; Tigris river; Amazon river; Ganges river, et al.) that sustained some of the earliest civilizations... to this very day...to say nothing of H. Erectus and early H. sapiens rafting and colonizing the very ends of the Earth.
So, explain to me again how a creature with arguably the most sophisticated array of perceptive faculties doesn't "know what we are" in the marine ecosystem we have been competing in for hundreds of thousands- if not millions (i.e., if you count our nearly identical H. habilis progenitors) of years?
Just curious.
Posted by: drudown | Jul 19, 2013 at 07:40 AM