Let there be mild!
That’s what shark researchers are saying after discovering that LED lights on surfboards may very well be the important thing to stopping nice white shark bites.
The Australian scientists have revealed the outcomes of a six-year shark research that might result in a revolution in surfboard design.
“What we’ve been trying to do is understand how sharks see their prey. And with an understanding of that, see if we can create some shark deterrents, which protect people and also sharks,” mentioned Macquarie College Professor Nathan Hart.
The researchers went to the shark-infested waters of Mossel Bay in South Africa to check out how lights influence nice white sharks.
Whereas driving a ship, the researchers put out on the water a seal-shaped foam decoy — and noticed how the sharks responded to that decoy.
“What we found out is if you put lights on the bottom of the decoys, the sharks leave them alone,” Hart mentioned. “And so we think this tells us a lot about how sharks see the world, and how they detect and target their prey.
“But it also potentially gives us an insight into how we can develop a non-lethal shark deterrent, especially for surfers,” he added.
This mild technique is predicated on the counterillumination phenomenon within the ocean.
Some animals emit mild from the underside of their physique — which breaks up their silhouette to a predator that’s them from beneath.
“We have shown these lights break up the silhouette of the surfboard into smaller pieces, and that’s clearly something that the shark doesn’t recognize as prey,” Hart mentioned.
“It’s sort of like an invisibility cloak but with the exception that we’re splitting the object, the visual silhouette, up into smaller bits so it doesn’t all disappear,” he added. “And the lights need to be fairly bright to have this effect.”
Macquarie College Dr. Laura Ryan’s earlier analysis discovered that sharks are presumably colorblind. Her analysis group additionally found that sharks don’t see as a lot element as people.
“They’re really good at detecting an object from far away, but not so good at seeing the fine detail of that object,” Ryan mentioned.
“What we’re trying to do now is move from seal decoys to a surfboard prototype by embedding LEDs into the bottom of a surfboard,” she added.
Shark bites on people are very uncommon, nevertheless it’s a threat that folks settle for once they go into the ocean.
“What we don’t want to see is people getting hurt, and we don’t want to see sharks getting killed as a result of that,” Hart mentioned. “So we’ve very hopeful with this technology, along with others, could be used to reduce the risk of getting a shark bite and make it safer for people to go into the water.”
