Utilizing LED lighting on the underside of surfboards or kayaks might deter nice white shark assaults, new analysis suggests.
In an Australian-led examine utilizing seal-shaped decoys, underside lighting disrupted the flexibility of nice whites to see silhouettes in opposition to the daylight above, decreasing the charges at which the sharks adopted and attacked the unreal prey. The brighter the lights, the simpler the deterrent was.
The examine’s lead writer, Dr Laura Ryan of Macquarie College in Sydney, mentioned white sharks appeared to depend on the visible cues of a darkish object silhouetted in opposition to a lighter background.
“When you flip that to a light-weight object on a darkish background, then it doesn’t appear to be one thing they recognise as prey,” she mentioned.
Ryan’s earlier analysis on nice whites means that assaults on people could also be a case of mistaken identification. The animal has a far decrease visible acuity – the flexibility to see shapes and particulars – than people.
Her work has recommended that juvenile nice white sharks, from under, are unlikely to have the ability to clearly inform seals aside from swimmers or folks paddling surfboards.
Different analysis has proven that sharks are colour-blind or at greatest have solely restricted color notion skills.
The brand new examine, performed in Mossel Bay, South Africa, concerned towing decoys behind a ship for dozens of hours.
The researchers initially discovered success by overlaying the underside of the decoy completely in lights. “However for those who’re truly going to give you one thing to guard folks, [entirely] overlaying a surfboard … is simply not sensible as a result of it’s an enormous quantity of lighting, which wants an enormous quantity of battery energy,” Ryan mentioned.
The researchers experimented with extra sparse lighting choices, discovering that horizontal stripes of LED lights had an analogous deterrent impact. “Once you do horizontal stripes, the silhouette [appears] wider than it’s lengthy, so it’s much less like a seal,” Ryan mentioned.
Longitudinal strips of sunshine, nevertheless, weren’t efficient, nor had been strobe lights, which gave the sharks momentary glimpses of the decoy silhouette. “Curiously, simply that small glimpse of your complete silhouette was sufficient for the white sharks to begin biting the decoys,” Ryan mentioned.
The scientists towed the seal decoy to encourage the white sharks to breach – one type of searching involving fast acceleration to the floor to catch prey. They are saying extra analysis is required into shark behaviour with static decoys, which might resemble surfers ready to catch a wave moderately than actively paddling.
The group is testing a surfboard prototype with fitted lighting. “Surfers is usually a little bit fussy with their surfboards,” Ryan mentioned. “As a surfer, I would like it to be usable.”
Globally, most shark bites are related to folks browsing or collaborating in different board sports activities. Deadly shark bites, although uncommon, are principally resulting from nice whites.
The examine, printed within the journal Present Biology, famous it could be vital to check whether or not lighting was additionally efficient in deterring different speciesthat assault people, together with bull sharks and tiger sharks, as these have completely different predation behaviours.