Covering your surfboard with bright lights may sound like an unsuspecting invitation to great white sharks, but a study published by Australian scientists on Tuesday found that it may actually deter them. attack.
Biologist Laura Ryan said the predator often attacked its prey from below, and in some cases it did. Get the silhouette of the surfer wrong to the outline of the seal.
Ryan and his fellow researchers showed that seal-shaped boards with horizontal bright lights were less likely to be attacked by great white sharks.
This is probably because the silhouette of the sea surface was distorted by the light, making it look less appetizing.
“There’s been a long-standing fear of great white sharks, and part of that fear is that we don’t really understand them very well,” said Ryan, from Australia’s Macquarie University.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, was conducted in South African waters. moss baya popular feeding ground for great whites.
We attached different configurations of LED lights to seal-shaped decoys and towed them behind the boat to see which ones attracted the most attention.
The study found that bright lights were more effective at deterring sharks, while vertical lights were less effective than horizontal ones.
One of the study authors, Professor Nathan Hart from Macquarie University, said the light caused a “complex interaction” with the shark’s behavior.
“It’s like an invisibility cloak, except it’s dividing the object, the visual silhouette, into smaller parts,” Hart said.
The study’s authors published a video showing some of their research in action.
Ryan said the results were better than expected and he is currently building a prototype for use on the underside of kayaks and surfboards.
Australia has one of the most comprehensive shark management measures in the world, including surveillance drones, shark nets and a tagging system that alerts authorities when sharks are near crowded beaches.
Ryan said her research may allow the use of less invasive methods of relief.
The authors said further research is needed to see whether bull sharks and tiger sharks, which have different predatory behaviors, respond to light in similar ways.
Ryan et al. / Current Biology
According to official data, there have been more than 1,200 shark incidents in Australia since 1791, 255 of which resulted in death.
Great white sharks were the cause of 94 of those deaths.
The total number of fatal shark attacks worldwide in 2023 will remain relatively low, but will still exceed the previous year’s total, according to the latest version of the International Shark Attack File, a global shark attack database run by the University of Florida. It was twice that.
The report said there was a “disproportionate” number of people. Died after being bitten by a shark in Australia compared to the rest of the world last year.
