Speaker 1: Get in test with technology was tex Stuff from How
Speaker 1: Stuff Work, stat com Eiser and welcome to text Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren bob Obama, and today
Speaker 1: we're going to celebrate and the glory that is Shark Week.
Speaker 1: This is this is completely our own decision that we
Speaker 1: wanted to do a Shark Week episode because Text Stuff
Speaker 1: has not done a Shark Week episode since July two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, two thousand nine, shortly after podcasting was invented.
Speaker 1: That was that was how were you even alive then?
Speaker 1: I know? And the fact there was so little shark
Speaker 1: tech back in two thousand nine that the subject we
Speaker 1: chose to cover was Bruce, also known as the mechanical
Speaker 1: shark that was used during the filming of Jaws, which
Speaker 1: which now now that you say that, I kind of
Speaker 1: I kind of wish that we could go back in
Speaker 1: time and make you not do that episode, because I
Speaker 1: really want to do that, especially since Chris had revealed
Speaker 1: that he had never seen the film Jaws. He could
Speaker 1: not quote any of the movie with me. That when
Speaker 1: you put it that way, it's not necessarily a bad thing, um,
Speaker 1: but but I was I was about as speechless as
Speaker 1: you are right now, Lauren. That's how I was. I was.
Speaker 1: I could not believe it. I couldn't fathom it. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's an amazing movie. Jaws, by the way, is easily
Speaker 1: in my top ten films favorite films. I mean it
Speaker 1: just I think that movie is almost perfect, and part
Speaker 1: of it is because the Shark didn't work so well.
Speaker 1: But if you want to hear all about Bruce and
Speaker 1: the trials and travails of the Jaws shooting schedule and
Speaker 1: how that machine that didn't work so well actually made
Speaker 1: the movie better, go back and listen to that podcast.
Speaker 1: Go to the Tech Stuff rss feed, search for that
Speaker 1: old file and listen to That's the only one that
Speaker 1: pops up so until today. So today today we wanted
Speaker 1: to talk a little bit about, um, the biotechnology that
Speaker 1: sharks have inside of them right now, cyborg sharks when well,
Speaker 1: actually some sharks, if you really wanted to, you know,
Speaker 1: have a little bit of robotic components that humans have
Speaker 1: put in them. But naturally, sharks senses are really cool
Speaker 1: and you can't really call it technology, but some people
Speaker 1: have been developing technology to counteract it in order to
Speaker 1: help prevent shark attacks, which is pretty grad and some
Speaker 1: people have started working on technology that would give us
Speaker 1: a similar set of senses that sharks have. I'll talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about that, but it's it's something we're
Speaker 1: gonna cover in greater detail in the future episode of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, so we won't go too far in there.
Speaker 1: But yeah, when you look at what sharks are able
Speaker 1: to do and and how their senses work, it's almost
Speaker 1: like they are super natural creatures. I mean, it's because
Speaker 1: they are able to sense stuff that we pathetic little
Speaker 1: humans are incapable of sensing without some sort of augmentation. Right.
Speaker 1: This is why they are on the top of their
Speaker 1: food chain without having fancy things like guns to help
Speaker 1: them hunt. When when you hear I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: Jaws again, when you hear them described as eating machines,
Speaker 1: which they are called in Jaws, that's very, very true.
Speaker 1: And they are really well I hesitate to use the
Speaker 1: word designed, right because that that's just one sort of thing,
Speaker 1: but they're really well suited. How about that for eating?
Speaker 1: I mean, they're just great at hunting down and eating stuff,
Speaker 1: and all of their senses kind of pretty much tie
Speaker 1: into that. You know, find food and eat it, or
Speaker 1: if you see something that is bigger than you that
Speaker 1: will eat you, go the other way. Those are essentially
Speaker 1: the two things that guide to sharks life, you know,
Speaker 1: and occasionally find another shark to make little sharks. That's
Speaker 1: also that's important too. But let's start with let's start
Speaker 1: with talking about their ability to smell things, because this
Speaker 1: is one of those things that everyone has heard, right,
Speaker 1: that have an incredible and very sensitive sense of smell. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: The statistic that gets are not statistic, but that little
Speaker 1: factoid that gets tossed around a lot is that a
Speaker 1: great white can detect a single drop of blood in
Speaker 1: an Olympic sized pool. Now, rule number one, do not
Speaker 1: put great whites in your Olympic size swimming pool. Do not.
Speaker 1: And rule too don't bleed in it. Bad plan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't do that. Um. I love that, that's the idea
Speaker 1: that that within an Olympic size swimming pool. Because of course,
Speaker 1: the first thing I think of is like, something, did
Speaker 1: you put that shark there? It does raise James Bond?
Speaker 1: Why did you hang out with that James Bond villain?
Speaker 1: Don't don't hang out with the James Bond villain. It
Speaker 1: does make you think of some potential amazing updates to
Speaker 1: the Olympics. But yeah, I think that's I think that's
Speaker 1: the Hunger Games, not the Olympics. Could be separate, separate categories.
Speaker 1: Certainly be the Hunger Games for the shark anyway. But
Speaker 1: so so, the way that sharks shark's sense of smell
Speaker 1: works is that as as they're swimming through the water,
Speaker 1: they've got two forward facing nostrils um provide for bidirectional smell.
Speaker 1: This is what really blows my mind. They can actually
Speaker 1: detect where a smell is coming from, right because they're
Speaker 1: the nerves and their noses are so sensitive that they
Speaker 1: can um calculate in their brains how how quickly a
Speaker 1: smell reached one nostril versus the other, and used that
Speaker 1: to decide which direction it's coming from. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of like our sense of hearing, even though and and
Speaker 1: our hearing is not that great either. You know, it's
Speaker 1: very easy to fool a human being into thinking that
Speaker 1: a sound is coming from a particular direction when it's
Speaker 1: really coming from another one. But in general, if you're
Speaker 1: in a situation where you allow noises coming from one side,
Speaker 1: that sound hits one side of your your you know,
Speaker 1: hits one year before it hits the other, and you
Speaker 1: can think, oh, that sounds coming from this direction. It's subconscious.
Speaker 1: It's not you know, it's not something that you're thinking
Speaker 1: about the shark is. The shark isn't floating in the
Speaker 1: water thinking, ah, yards away to my left is a
Speaker 1: tasty morsel and I shall now go and snap up.
Speaker 1: It just things turned this way. Um, so yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's these cells are incredibly sensitive and the fact that
Speaker 1: it can take that information into account that it has
Speaker 1: hit one side before it hit the other and know
Speaker 1: that this is the direction it needs to move in
Speaker 1: is pretty phenomenal. Uh. Yeah, So so that's smell right, yeah,
Speaker 1: smell um. Sound They hear incredibly well. To be fair,
Speaker 1: sound travels faster and further underwater than it doesn't end right,
Speaker 1: sound always you know, we talked about the speed of sound,
Speaker 1: but the speed of sound depends upon the medium through
Speaker 1: which it travels. So sound travels at a different speed
Speaker 1: through solids than it does through uh the atmosphere or
Speaker 1: through water, as it turns out. So yes, sharks are
Speaker 1: pretty good at hearing stuff, huh, especially things in the
Speaker 1: in the low pitched sound range. Which helps with that um,
Speaker 1: that kind of flopping motion that anything that's going to
Speaker 1: be easy to catch, it's gonna make right. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: if it's an injured fish or a say fish or
Speaker 1: something that that's not able to swim very effectively, it's
Speaker 1: going to be making noises through its its motions through
Speaker 1: the water that the shark can detect, even from pretty
Speaker 1: far away. Uh. And in fact, sharks are able to
Speaker 1: hear at a range that's I believe below human hearing levels, right. Um.
Speaker 1: They can hear sounds with frequencies ranging from ten hurts
Speaker 1: to eight hundred hurts, and are particularly responsive to sounds
Speaker 1: lower than three hurts. UM. For comparison, UH, ten hurts
Speaker 1: is one point five octaves below the lowest note on
Speaker 1: a piano. So so sharks could appreciate some really groovy
Speaker 1: music that we just wouldn't even be able to hear,
Speaker 1: would not no no register at all. We might feel it, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we can. We We can only hear uh sounds ranging
Speaker 1: from about twenty five hurts to a sixteen thousand, so
Speaker 1: so starting at twenty so, I mean, you know, we
Speaker 1: have a good scale too, but it's just way up
Speaker 1: in the other direction. I see, so our scales overlap somewhat,
Speaker 1: but the extremes on either end one of us is
Speaker 1: able to hear when the other one is not capable
Speaker 1: of hearing them. So, if you're going to be swimming
Speaker 1: in the ocean that's filled with lots of sharks, swim
Speaker 1: in a high pitched way. Yeah, if you were playing
Speaker 1: some sweet Mariah Carey for the shark, that shark would
Speaker 1: not even notice. First of all, I take a shoe
Speaker 1: with the term sweet Mariah Carey. But fair enough. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, of course we're joking, and we should also say,
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking a lot about sharks, and we'll
Speaker 1: be talking more in the second half about the technology
Speaker 1: we've developed to kind of foil the senses that sharks have.
Speaker 1: But in general, remember, shark attacks very rare. These are
Speaker 1: not animals that are out to get you. They actually
Speaker 1: have a lot more to worry about from us than
Speaker 1: we do from them, statistically speaking, right now, there of
Speaker 1: course can be situations that a person is in where
Speaker 1: they are more danger of a shark attack than others,
Speaker 1: but it's still a rare thing. I just think it's
Speaker 1: responsible to say that now all the time. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about other ways that sharks can find you and kill you.
Speaker 1: What's another sense site they've got? Um? Okay, so you
Speaker 1: know how cats eyes reflect light in photographs or or
Speaker 1: or in the dark, if alligators or alligators. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is caused by I didn't look up the pronunciation there
Speaker 1: you go, which I think is Harry Potter speak for
Speaker 1: open the door. I don't. I don't think that's correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's a little more on now you mention
Speaker 1: it all right? At any rate, this is a this
Speaker 1: is an organ that's located behind the retina um and
Speaker 1: it's made up of reflective crystals and when so so
Speaker 1: when light travels through the retina and hits them, um,
Speaker 1: it's reflected back out onto the retina. So you know,
Speaker 1: this is fascinating. This is the same sort of approach,
Speaker 1: by the way that we are trying to mimic when
Speaker 1: we create solar panels. So solar panels, you know, it's
Speaker 1: not just create something that's dark that absorbs a lot
Speaker 1: of light. We actually are trying to create solar panels
Speaker 1: using nanostructures that reflect light back down in so it
Speaker 1: absorbs as much as possible and reflects as little as possible.
Speaker 1: To make the solar panel very efficient. It's the same
Speaker 1: kind of concept of um, you know, having, for example,
Speaker 1: a candle holder that has mirrored sides, like a lantern
Speaker 1: that has mirrored sides, so that it will end up
Speaker 1: producing more light for the viewer. Now, in the case
Speaker 1: of sharks, what this means is the shark is able
Speaker 1: to see even in really dark situations, which makes sense.
Speaker 1: I mean, if a shark is swimming towards the bottom
Speaker 1: of the ocean, depending upon how deep that is, there's
Speaker 1: very little light there to take advantage of, and from
Speaker 1: what I understand, they're able to see well I guess
Speaker 1: ten times better in dim situations than a typical human
Speaker 1: being would be able to, which which means that yeah,
Speaker 1: never never be alone in a dark room with the sharks.
Speaker 1: So alright, so dark Olympic sized swimming pools filled with
Speaker 1: blood or bad places to be if there happens to
Speaker 1: be a great wet shark in there. And also don't
Speaker 1: make any like low booming noises tips good tipsy. Next
Speaker 1: next we come to um they're superpowers, right that the
Speaker 1: really cool superpowers. I'm going to save my favorite one
Speaker 1: for last um and and go to the lateral line
Speaker 1: and okay, this is a system of tubes that run
Speaker 1: up and down a shark's body just under the skin.
Speaker 1: They're lined with these little um hair like protrusions that
Speaker 1: are connected to sensory cells, and so when something comes
Speaker 1: near the shark, it causes the water to stir through
Speaker 1: these tubes, moves the hairs, and alerts sensory cells that
Speaker 1: something's going on. So this is almost like hearing. It's
Speaker 1: very similar to the way we hear, only this time
Speaker 1: you're kind of feeling motion. So it's very similar to
Speaker 1: to hearing. I mean, if you look at the human ear,
Speaker 1: then you'll see that when when we the way we
Speaker 1: perceive sound is that we have these molecules that are
Speaker 1: banging together. I mean, sound is a very physical thing.
Speaker 1: Molecules bang together and it ends up impacting our ear drum,
Speaker 1: which in turn moves some tiny little bones inside our
Speaker 1: ear that then end up making this uh, this kind
Speaker 1: of a sack of fluid. Uh. Move within that are
Speaker 1: these little bitty hair like structures, and when they they vibrate,
Speaker 1: that sense the electrical signal that we then interpret as sound.
Speaker 1: This is similar except they're not necessarily hearing it they're
Speaker 1: kind of feeling like it's it might be it might
Speaker 1: be a little bit like a like a cat's whiskers
Speaker 1: and in the way that yeah, you get that motion
Speaker 1: or that contact, and and it's a big clue off
Speaker 1: that's something something is nearby. You see. This is really
Speaker 1: tricky for us to to translate into something that we
Speaker 1: can identify with because this is outside of our ability.
Speaker 1: It's like skin plus one. Yeah, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I'd be
Speaker 1: like if I'm sitting at my cubicle and Josh Creepy
Speaker 1: hands Clark is walking up behind me, and I sense
Speaker 1: his presence before he's able to lean over me and
Speaker 1: then inhale deeply, which, by the way, she has not
Speaker 1: done that for a very long time. He has not
Speaker 1: done that for a very long time. Fans behind you
Speaker 1: in a Gremlin mask a couple of weeks ago. That's right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: chum got a Gramlin mask. I'm not sure. I'll not
Speaker 1: sure why. I have a feeling. One of their listeners
Speaker 1: sent it in that they get lots of stuff from
Speaker 1: their listeners, you know, not that none of them so listening.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't need you guys sending us stuff
Speaker 1: unless you want to. But it's just that it's amazing
Speaker 1: because you know, Josh and Chuck, they're busy, so they
Speaker 1: leave the office for a while and just started up
Speaker 1: like they start to peek up over the cubicle walls. Anyway. Anyway,
Speaker 1: um so, my favorite shark sense is um is they
Speaker 1: can they can sense electrical signals. They've got electro reception. Yes,
Speaker 1: this is the apula of Lorenzini. Yeah, Ampula of Lorenzini.
Speaker 1: I at first thought that was the actor who was
Speaker 1: in Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, but it turns out
Speaker 1: that's Lorenzo Lamas and it's not the ambula of Lorenzo Lamas.
Speaker 1: So Lorenzini was an Italian scientist a few hundred years
Speaker 1: back who who found this this organ um or or series,
Speaker 1: I would call it an organ. It's a good Okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a series of small clusters of um
Speaker 1: electrically sensitive receptor cells that are positioned under the skin
Speaker 1: in a shark's head kind of actually wear the whiskers
Speaker 1: on a dog or cat would be um uh, they're
Speaker 1: they're connected to pores on the skin surface. These pores
Speaker 1: are filled with this kind of gel jelly like stuffy,
Speaker 1: it's really stiff stuff, but it it is. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I read about a scientist who specializes in extracting this
Speaker 1: stuff from sharks that have died. Like they captive sharks
Speaker 1: and if a shark dies part of the processes, they
Speaker 1: try to pull the stuff out so they can experiment
Speaker 1: on it as quickly as possible to far in more
Speaker 1: about it, because we're going to talk about this stuff,
Speaker 1: but still largely mysterious to us. Anyway, This this particular
Speaker 1: organ is pretty cool. It doesn't sense movement, it doesn't
Speaker 1: sense sight or sound. It senses electrical fields, which is
Speaker 1: crazy and like and like electrical fields of that are
Speaker 1: created by a fish's heart. Eat. Yeah, all living things
Speaker 1: have an electrical field. It's what penetrates us and binds
Speaker 1: the universe together. It's not the force, but it is
Speaker 1: something that living things produce. It's just a natural byproduct
Speaker 1: of being a living thing. You have this electric field
Speaker 1: around you as as your heart and other muscles contract,
Speaker 1: they give up very small electromagnetic impulses. These are very
Speaker 1: very faint, and so these incredibly sensitive organs that sharks
Speaker 1: have can detect the presence of those electrical fields. And
Speaker 1: in fact, I read about a really cool um experiment
Speaker 1: where this was first kind of verified and or at
Speaker 1: least it was one of the ones that verified, and
Speaker 1: it happened back in nine And here's how they did
Speaker 1: the experiment. They got some flatfish, which sharks would like
Speaker 1: to eat. And flat fish often will be at the
Speaker 1: very bottom of the ocean floor and bury themselves into
Speaker 1: the sand, hid right, so they are out of sight.
Speaker 1: So what they did was they put these flat fish
Speaker 1: in a little chamber that was essentially hidden from the sharks.
Speaker 1: The shark can't see the flat fish, and the chamber
Speaker 1: was supposed to also mask the smell of the flat fish,
Speaker 1: so the shark couldn't get the scent. But the sharks
Speaker 1: still could sense the presence of the flatfish and would
Speaker 1: try and eat the chamber. So then they decided they'd
Speaker 1: have to repeat the experiment, because you know, just doing
Speaker 1: that alone does not verify that there's anything going on, right,
Speaker 1: we have to do good science here. So what they
Speaker 1: did next was they took those same types of chambers
Speaker 1: and they filled it with chopped up whitefish, and white
Speaker 1: fish oil is something that will really attract a shark.
Speaker 1: So they put it in this chamber, and again the
Speaker 1: chamber sealed, so the scent isn't getting out, and it's
Speaker 1: still concealed so the shark can't see it. And the
Speaker 1: sharks did not react. They did not go after it
Speaker 1: as if it were a fish. So this suggested that
Speaker 1: perhaps they think about the fish being alive was what
Speaker 1: they could sense. And so then they did a third test.
Speaker 1: In this third test, they put tiny little electrodes under
Speaker 1: the sand and then they ran a very weak electrical
Speaker 1: current through those electrodes, creating a faint electric field, and
Speaker 1: the sharks reacted as they did when they could sense
Speaker 1: the flat fish. And this seemed to be the proof
Speaker 1: here that sharks have spidy sense science, I guess it's
Speaker 1: sharky sense. That's beautiful. So, yeah, they can detect these
Speaker 1: electric fields and hunt out prey or predators. It's only
Speaker 1: a few feet away from the sharks knows that this
Speaker 1: that this is sensible, right, Yeah, it's not like it's
Speaker 1: not like it's ability to to smell something from you know, whatever,
Speaker 1: But but it does mean that once they get closer
Speaker 1: to their intended prey, that they are able to zone
Speaker 1: in on it pretty quickly, even if it's hiding. Um.
Speaker 1: They scientists also think that they may possibly help eat
Speaker 1: us this for navigation by sensing the magnetic pull of
Speaker 1: the earth. Wow, so they're able to actually detect them
Speaker 1: maybe field possibly possibly um and doesn't And definitely they
Speaker 1: have found that baby sharks use this while they are
Speaker 1: still in uh, in their eggs to uh if a
Speaker 1: predator is coming, the baby shark can sense it through
Speaker 1: this uh, through this organ and stay still enough so
Speaker 1: it'll pass the predator will not get them. Nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is uh, this is interesting stuff. And you know,
Speaker 1: we've also heard all about sharks going on these long
Speaker 1: migrations and then showing up like like whale sharks tend
Speaker 1: to show up, I believe off the coast of Central America. Um.
Speaker 1: And I have a friend actually who went and got
Speaker 1: to see this in person. Actually you know him too.
Speaker 1: Uh it's a friend of both of ours who went
Speaker 1: and saw this in person. And from his his account,
Speaker 1: it sounds like it was toy spectacular to see all
Speaker 1: these whale sharks an enormous number. But yeah, so it
Speaker 1: may be that they're using this this ability as part
Speaker 1: of that navigational um, you know, aid so that they
Speaker 1: know which way to go where they're going. And I
Speaker 1: feel like that about wraps up our first section here
Speaker 1: on on shark inner technology. Right, So now we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about in the second half all about the
Speaker 1: ways we kind of mess with sharks really in an
Speaker 1: attempt to not be eaten by them or to study
Speaker 1: them further. Before we get into that, though, let's take
Speaker 1: a quick moment to thank our sponsored All Right, we're back.
Speaker 1: So we've talked about the sharks senses. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: some of the things we do with sharks and how
Speaker 1: we study them. Yeah, well, okay, we were just talking
Speaker 1: about shark migration habits, and this is one of those things.
Speaker 1: This applies to any kind of marine life. You know,
Speaker 1: the sea is kind of deep and a little bit
Speaker 1: dark and easily accessible, right, not super you know, the
Speaker 1: fact that we can't breathe or walk on it is
Speaker 1: problematic for us. So so in order to find out
Speaker 1: more about things like sharks, we tend to tag them
Speaker 1: these This is done um in sharks cases, by acoustic trackers. Now,
Speaker 1: this was really cool. I did not realize this, and
Speaker 1: Hill I saw the research that you sent about the
Speaker 1: fact that these are all acoustic based. That means their
Speaker 1: sound based and in fact the sensors and the receptors
Speaker 1: only work when they get pretty close to one another. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's huge arrays of these under various oceans. The
Speaker 1: most extensive one is off the kind of Halifax spanning
Speaker 1: KOs which is about hundred and fifteen miles. So these
Speaker 1: are for Canadian sharks. Yes, I bet they're extra polite.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not sure if that's a true fact, but
Speaker 1: I'm willing to roll with it. Okay. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: there and if you if you're working with someone who
Speaker 1: has done this quite a bit. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: a process that actually doesn't take very long. Uh. The
Speaker 1: the way it works is they have to, uh first
Speaker 1: they have to entice sharks to come close to whatever
Speaker 1: boat they are on. Research usually not difficult. Food is
Speaker 1: a pretty pretty strong attractor. Yeah, they just put some
Speaker 1: bait chum. Yeah, anyone who's watched Jaws again, that big
Speaker 1: old bucket of chum, same sort of things. So they
Speaker 1: usually end up putting like a perforated bucket into the
Speaker 1: water and shake it around a bit and then within
Speaker 1: you know, half an hour, to an hour, they start
Speaker 1: attracting sharks. They catch the sharks, often using rotten real approach,
Speaker 1: but they'll catch the sharks bring them aboard the boat.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, if you turn a shark upside
Speaker 1: down with some species of shark anyway, it kind of
Speaker 1: paralyzes them, a similar effect to to you know, picking
Speaker 1: a cat up by the scrap or something like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's called tonic immobility. Actually know a lot of
Speaker 1: I've got a lot of friends who suffer from gen
Speaker 1: and tonic a mobility where you put it, like at
Speaker 1: least four or five drinks them and they just they
Speaker 1: ain't going anywhere. What I didn't name you, Lauren, so
Speaker 1: um anyway, Yeah, if you put a shark on its back,
Speaker 1: some sharks they go into this tonic immobility trance like state,
Speaker 1: which allows the researchers then to perform the procedure, which
Speaker 1: involves making an incision implanted to an acoustic device, uh
Speaker 1: and then stitching them up and that can take about
Speaker 1: ten minutes, and then they can put the shark back
Speaker 1: into the ocean. Shark swims away and none the worse
Speaker 1: for wear, and whenever it swims near a receiver, the
Speaker 1: transmitt mission from the implant will be picked up by
Speaker 1: the receiver and then they can track the sharks movements right,
Speaker 1: you know, and that includes tracking where they're going during
Speaker 1: different seasons, where they feed, and even where their pups
Speaker 1: are hatched and raised. Right, So that gives us a
Speaker 1: lot more information about creatures that were a large you know,
Speaker 1: largely are very mysterious to us. I mean, it's there's
Speaker 1: only so much research you can do by capturing and
Speaker 1: putting into captivity a shark because obviously that's a totally
Speaker 1: different set of circumstances than a shark being allowed to
Speaker 1: roam freely. Yeah. Yeah, so so it's pretty cool stuff.
Speaker 1: And then there's um some other things we can do
Speaker 1: with sharks that like not be eaten by them. That's
Speaker 1: that's a big thing that people want. So there are
Speaker 1: a lot of of occupations out there that involve everything
Speaker 1: from science research to certain types of fishing or ocean harvesting,
Speaker 1: or or even hobbyists like surfers. Right where it could
Speaker 1: mean that you are occasionally put into an environment what
Speaker 1: it could be shark rich and uh and you know, again,
Speaker 1: sharks are not out to get us, but there are
Speaker 1: times where you could be in a situation where you
Speaker 1: could be prone to a shark attack. So I've got
Speaker 1: a lot of work done in ways of making that
Speaker 1: not happen, which is excellent. There's one of the slightly
Speaker 1: older technologies is called electric shark repellent. Yeah, this is now.
Speaker 1: Remember we talked about the Lorenzo Lamas Oregon in the
Speaker 1: last section where it allows you to detect bad movies.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at my wrong notes and feel Laurenzini, well
Speaker 1: impelve Lareenzini allows them to detect electric fields. So here's
Speaker 1: the thing. If you overwhelm the shark's ability to detect
Speaker 1: electric fields, it causes them discomfort. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: if you were to overwhelm any of our senses, and
Speaker 1: it's it's a little bit like blowing an air horn maybe,
Speaker 1: or or a flash bomb or something like. If it's
Speaker 1: if it's an incredibly bright light, you can't look at
Speaker 1: it right, if it's incredibly loud sound, you want to
Speaker 1: get away, if it's an incredibly bad smell that you
Speaker 1: want out. I mean, they're they're all these different uh
Speaker 1: ways that we have experienced as human beings. Are senses
Speaker 1: being overwhelmed and it's not a pleasant experience. Same sort
Speaker 1: of thing here, the electric shark repellent. The idea is
Speaker 1: to create an electric field that's not going to hurt
Speaker 1: the shark. It's not going Yeah. The design is not
Speaker 1: harm the shark in any way, but to create, yeah,
Speaker 1: or or just give it like a really unpleasant sensation
Speaker 1: so it gets the heck out of there right. Uh.
Speaker 1: This was developed by South Africa's Natal Sharks Board around Um.
Speaker 1: It's currently by a company called shark Shield the technology
Speaker 1: and originally it was called Protective Oceanic Devices or pods.
Speaker 1: Currently it is called shark Shield and it works by
Speaker 1: creating an electromagnetic field detectible from a couple dozen feet away. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's usually between eight and ten meters, depending upon the strength.
Speaker 1: The strength of it. Yeah. It consists of a battery
Speaker 1: pack which provides the power and two electrodes. Uh. The
Speaker 1: one that shark Shield showed off that I saw had
Speaker 1: an electrode that fits on a scuba tank and a
Speaker 1: second electrode that fits around the diver's ankle. So these
Speaker 1: two electrodes are what produced this electric field. And it's
Speaker 1: a weak field. It's not terribly strong, because remember that
Speaker 1: shark's ability to sense these electric fields is incredibly sensitive,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't take a lot to overwhelm it. So
Speaker 1: when the shark swims in and encounters this intense field,
Speaker 1: it usually just jerks away. Bid. Yeah, it looks like it.
Speaker 1: It looks like something like, you know, you just hit
Speaker 1: the worst smell you've ever smelled, and you just got
Speaker 1: to get out of there. It's kind of like that.
Speaker 1: There's like a quick spasm and then they're just gone.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't look like there's any It doesn't stun
Speaker 1: them to the point where they suddenly go motionless and
Speaker 1: start to sing again, and they don't flop around or
Speaker 1: anything unpleasant like that. It's like it's like nothing not
Speaker 1: doing that. The video actually had the guy, one of
Speaker 1: the guys, underneath uh tuna, a giant tuna that they
Speaker 1: had cut open his bait. Well, great white sharks swam
Speaker 1: around him but would not get close to him because
Speaker 1: he was wearing one of these things. They are not guaranteed.
Speaker 1: Studies have found that sharks, I mean basically, if you
Speaker 1: have a bit of bait and do you put an
Speaker 1: electric field on it or near it, a shark is
Speaker 1: gonna eat it. Yeah, but humans are are not tasty bait.
Speaker 1: Most sharks, in fact, once they take take an initial
Speaker 1: bite out of human, person will go new. That's not
Speaker 1: good at all. It's called a test bite. But the
Speaker 1: problem is that a test bite can be can totally
Speaker 1: kill you. Yeah, if it's a if it's a large
Speaker 1: enough shark with a powerful enough bite, that's more than
Speaker 1: enough to at least maim you, I mean give cause
Speaker 1: you serious injury, if not actually critical injury rather um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but so I recommend not being uh tunabate while you're
Speaker 1: in the water. So Olympic size swimming pool filled with
Speaker 1: blood and tuna bate, loud load noises. Uh, you don't
Speaker 1: want to jump in just with one of these to
Speaker 1: protect you. Yes, okay, got it, all right, I'm still
Speaker 1: I'm making this checklist is getting longer. I'm never going
Speaker 1: swimming again, not even in my pool. He's just this,
Speaker 1: This next one might might comfort you a tiny bit.
Speaker 1: Slip and slide. The most recent technology to have been
Speaker 1: developed UM comes from the University of Western Australia, teamed
Speaker 1: with a biotech company called UH Shark Attack Mitigation System.
Speaker 1: All right, So Sam's Sam's right, and this is shark
Speaker 1: repelling wet suits based on visual designs. So it is
Speaker 1: fashion so bad that sharks run screaming. The other way
Speaker 1: sham screaming. Oh no, not even so what how does
Speaker 1: it do this? Like? Is it is it? Is it
Speaker 1: hiding you or is it? Well? There there are two
Speaker 1: types of patterns that they have developed. One is a
Speaker 1: m cryptic or blinding pattern, and this is kind of
Speaker 1: like water camo. It helps you. It's a it's a
Speaker 1: series of grays and greens and blues and helps you
Speaker 1: blend in hypothetically with the background of the of the water. Interesting. Now,
Speaker 1: that would not leave me terribly confident if the shark
Speaker 1: got close enough, because again, it could start picking up
Speaker 1: that electric field, absolutely, but it might at least not
Speaker 1: attract the shark's attention the way that any normal bit
Speaker 1: of surfer gear might. Yeah, and if the shark doesn't
Speaker 1: come close, then that field isn't is not gonna be
Speaker 1: activated anyway. Like we said, it's very sensitive, but it
Speaker 1: has to get within a few feet of you before
Speaker 1: it starts picking anything up. So you know, it's a
Speaker 1: little bit like um active shark cameos. The other kind
Speaker 1: is warning and this makes you so highly visible with
Speaker 1: a with a disruptive high contrast pattern that the shark
Speaker 1: looked like takes one look at you and goes that
Speaker 1: is not that is not normal, that is that is tasty,
Speaker 1: and that is maybe dangerous. Wow. Okay, so it's looking
Speaker 1: at you and it's just so it's essentially oh, high
Speaker 1: contrast banding. I see that. Yeah. So yeah, it's these
Speaker 1: very it's these very thick black and white bands. You
Speaker 1: look a little bit like a zebra surfer and so interesting.
Speaker 1: So if you threw a zebra into an Olympic sized
Speaker 1: swimming pool, don't do that. Why would you do that? Science? Okay, No,
Speaker 1: you're fair, that's Fair's fair? Yea, it would be cruel
Speaker 1: and unusual zebra punishment. Um. Yeah, but I mean these
Speaker 1: are really interesting ideas because you know, bank, when when
Speaker 1: us and I first talked about doing a Shark Week
Speaker 1: episode or tech stuff at that time, the most of
Speaker 1: the stuff we were looking at it was pretty low tech.
Speaker 1: We were looking at things like chain mail suits that
Speaker 1: are bite suits designed to withstand a shark's bite, but
Speaker 1: you still get bitten by the sharks, right, and you
Speaker 1: can still sustain heavy bruising and even even bone breakage
Speaker 1: through a chain mail suit like that. And then we
Speaker 1: also talked about like shark cages, but really, shark cages
Speaker 1: don't have a lot of tech to them. It's essentially
Speaker 1: a metal cage designed to keep the shark away from you.
Speaker 1: Really good welding. Yeah, so I'm glad that you were
Speaker 1: able to find so many interesting examples of technology being
Speaker 1: used in shark research and just protecting people who are
Speaker 1: working in environments where there are a lot of sharks.
Speaker 1: And of course here's where we remind our listeners yet again,
Speaker 1: sharks are not out to get yet. They are not,
Speaker 1: none of them. None of them are like Jaws. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they certainly won't follow you from not tuck it down
Speaker 1: to the Caribbean and then wait for you and and
Speaker 1: and plan revenge like Jaws. For they what a horrible
Speaker 1: movie that is. However, you will get to meet Michael
Speaker 1: Caine if that happens, so that's kind of cool. Um
Speaker 1: And and sharks are very useful. I'm just going to
Speaker 1: ignore that last. Sharks are very very useful um as
Speaker 1: the top of their food chain. They help keep the
Speaker 1: gray seal population in check, which it sounds terrible for
Speaker 1: gray seals. But the thing is that if you take
Speaker 1: a major predator out of an ecosystem, um you wind
Speaker 1: up just working that ecosystem on balances. And then next
Speaker 1: thing you know, you have other other animals populations exploding,
Speaker 1: which then is a negative impact on other populations and
Speaker 1: other eco system For for example, US, if the gray
Speaker 1: seal population isn't kept in check, then the amount of
Speaker 1: fish that we can capture from from natural waters goes
Speaker 1: way down because the gray seals eat too many of them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's and etcetera, etcetera. So if you like sushi,
Speaker 1: don't kill sharks. Fair enough, Sharks are hunted very frequently
Speaker 1: form for their fins, which are sold as food and
Speaker 1: occasional occasionally as like kind of her herbal traditional medicines. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's and a lot of sharks are protected by law,
Speaker 1: although which does not stop poachers at all. Doesn't stop
Speaker 1: them at all. No, so uh, and then there are
Speaker 1: you know, there are plenty of sharks out there that
Speaker 1: I think are wicked awesome that are not a danger
Speaker 1: at all to humans, like whale sharks another example. They
Speaker 1: are not They're not going to chew you up they're
Speaker 1: not going to do that. That's not what they eat.
Speaker 1: The tiniest of tiny things. If you swam directly into
Speaker 1: its face, um, it would probably wonder what the heck
Speaker 1: you're trying to do. It might I suppose it could
Speaker 1: crush you accidentally. It could whack you with its tail.
Speaker 1: But they tend to be these just giant, slow moving,
Speaker 1: fairly gentle creatures. I mean they're they're essentially they're filter feeders,
Speaker 1: very similar to other filter feeders. Um, and they're awesome.
Speaker 1: We have a couple here in Atlanta that I like
Speaker 1: to see whenever I go to the George To Aquarium.
Speaker 1: Well that that's a good conversation just about the science
Speaker 1: of sharks and the technology we've developed. Oh oh, I
Speaker 1: forgot to mention. I had mentioned at the top of
Speaker 1: the show about the possibility of developing tech that would
Speaker 1: allow us to kind of emulate what sharks can do. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that electro was that the electro electro sensitive idea. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so this is something that we'll talk about more
Speaker 1: in a future podcast. We're gonna probably do an episode
Speaker 1: about body modification. Uh. And in the interest of full disclosure,
Speaker 1: Jonathan has two tattoos. Um. But the body modification I
Speaker 1: was going to talk about was that there's this subculture
Speaker 1: of body modifying folks and one of the things they
Speaker 1: like to do is have a tiny magnet implanted uh
Speaker 1: in their fingertip. In a fingertip usually it tends to
Speaker 1: be at least the reference I've always seen is make
Speaker 1: it the ring finger on your non dominant hand, because
Speaker 1: so that if something terrible goes wrong, that's you've lost
Speaker 1: the least useful finger. Morbid. But yeah, it's tough, and
Speaker 1: we'll talk more about it if we do a full
Speaker 1: podcast on it. But the the ideas the magnet would
Speaker 1: allow you to do things like sense electric fields because
Speaker 1: the the relative the nature between electricity and magnetism means
Speaker 1: that you have this this connection now would have to
Speaker 1: be a fluctuating electric field. You can detect it if
Speaker 1: you moved through it, but upon moving through it, like
Speaker 1: if you if you just encounter an electric field that
Speaker 1: wasn't changing, you would detect it when you first encountered
Speaker 1: it and then it would just be normal. Right, So
Speaker 1: it had to be a fluctuating electric field for you
Speaker 1: to continue to detect it. But this would allow you
Speaker 1: to do that where you could sense electric fields just well,
Speaker 1: not just like, but in a similar way to the
Speaker 1: way sharks do. So it's kind of interesting that there
Speaker 1: are body modification fans out there who are building in
Speaker 1: the capability of sensing things the way a shark would
Speaker 1: not necessarily you know, framing it that way, but that's
Speaker 1: how it ends up, and I think that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: I don't think I would be volunteering to do that anytime.
Speaker 1: I don't want to that either. Yeah, yeah, it seems
Speaker 1: like that might be a little extreme, even for me. Um.
Speaker 1: But however, it's kind of interesting and we'll talk again
Speaker 1: more about that because there's been some other interesting developments
Speaker 1: of technology built up around this kind of body modification.
Speaker 1: But anyway, I just thought i'd throw that in there
Speaker 1: because I thought it was meat, you know, this idea
Speaker 1: of this sixth sense out of the seventh that sharks have,
Speaker 1: and and to uh to kind of talk about how
Speaker 1: there are people who are sort of emulating that. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that kind of wraps up this conversation. Guys, if you
Speaker 1: have any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, like
Speaker 1: you totally want to hear that body modification episode, let
Speaker 1: us know. Send us an email. Our address is tech
Speaker 1: stuff at Discovery dot com, or come find us on
Speaker 1: Facebook and Twitter. We're not hiding, We're right there. Our
Speaker 1: handle is tech stuff hs W, Lauren and I will
Speaker 1: talk to you again. Really sing for more on this
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