ex-kayaker:
Anyone else watching last night? I think it was the survivorman guy, Les Stroud (I think), doing a show on "what if I was stranded in shark infested waters" kind of thing. He was experimenting on color preference, taste, heart rates etc. It wasn't exactly scientific and I'm not sure how much editing was done to the actual footage but these were the results.
Threw a caged dummy wearing a wetsuit into the water with GWS to see how they react to color. Dummy wearing black wetsuit (the most common color wetsuit)yielded little to no interest from gws circling beneath. Dummy wearing red wetsuit, shark showed immediate interest and made a couple non aggressive passes to investigate. He concluded that red drew the interest cause of it may have interpreted it as blood in the water but did not show signs of agression cause the smell was not present. 3rd color, yum yum yellow....he referrenced the navy studies where the color earned its name....results, shark took an imeediate interest then did a swim by the cage and mouthed the cage. Yum Yum yellow lives up to its reputation.
He then tossed out meats on a line to see if they got eaten....apparently they're not into ham, they'll mouth a turkey but not eat it and the gws actually ate the big slab of fatty ribs they tossed in. I'm not quite certain what these tests were to conclude, he mentioned that a big slab of fatty mammal flesh was more likely to get gobbled.
He did a blood taste test, human vs. fish. The bio guy that was with him said the "they can smell a drop of blood in the water a mile away" fact was a little overblown. They tossed out a slow drip of fish blood and one of human, result; shark swam around the tuna blood for a bit and ignored the human blood, then it went deep and swam to the surface and attacked the human blood. Conclusion: blood is blood, no preference.
Heartbeat test was interesting. He had a device that mimicked a normal heartbeat, a rapid heartbeat and a panicking heartbeat. Shark picked up on the panicky heartbeat real quick and came in to check it out and showed minimal interest in the normal and semi-fast heartbeats.
PISCEAN:
So, if you're in the water with a white shark, keep your heart rate low. Good to know. :smt044
ex-kayaker:
Yeah...that and be sure to separate yourself from the slab of ribs you were carrying with you.
bsteves:
I'm starting to like my gray kayak even more these days. They need to start making kayaks that are dull colored on the bottom for fish/shark stealth and bright on top for visibility of other boats.