When a surfer paddles out to catch a wave, their silhouette creates a picture to a Shark swimming beneath. In opposition to a vivid sky within the water, a human might resemble the physique of a seal, or a shark’s favourite prey.

We have generally heard that this is the reason Sharks assault people. Lately, nonetheless, a brand new examine challenges this concept.

Eric Clua, a marine biologist and veterinary physician primarily based in French Polynesia, and Carl Meyer, a biologist on the College of Hawai’i, revealed a paper in Behaviour that analyzes why sharks confuse people with seals and gives an alternate reply to shark assaults: character and upbringing.

How Typically Do Sharks Assault People?

Crucial factor to find out about shark assaults is that they nearly by no means occur. Fewer than 100 unprovoked bites are reported yearly, and 6 individuals die from them worldwide in a median yr. Examine that to the benchmark of unlikely occurrences, like being struck by lightning, which kills about 28 people each year within the U.S. alone.

“They get a whole lot of consideration by journalists,” says Clua, referring to shark bites and the media frenzy they will generally create. “However in the event you have a look at the information, there are a lot fewer bites from sharks than from crocodiles, canine, and so forth.”

Why Do Sharks Assault People?

H. David Baldridge first advised the scientific concept of sharks mistaking people for seals, aka the mistaken id concept, however used cautious language to explain the thought.

Baldridge wrote in a 1973 technical report that it was “definitely not past purpose that an individual so clad [in a wetsuit] would possibly seem to a shark to resemble a seal or different marine animals upon which the shark may be feeding.”

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Debunking the Mistaken Id Concept

The mistaken id concept bought comparatively little public consideration, till one other paper on white shark searching habits, 10 years later, introduced the thought into the scientific mainstream.

From there, it has been repeated in each scientific and fashionable sources, generally with out the nuance and caveats of Baldridge’s unique writing. However Clua and Meyer say the science of mistaken id is something however settled.

How Sharks Hunt

Their case in opposition to Baldridge’s concept rests on just a few completely different items of proof. One is the array of senses {that a} shark makes use of in opposition to its potential prey. Clua says that almost all research of shark-human interplay have centered totally on imaginative and prescient and odor.

“These are solely two senses, and there are two others which might be essential from my perspective: sound and mechanoreception,” he says, referring to sharks’ means to sense motion within the water. “I strongly imagine that these two senses are literally extra necessary than imaginative and prescient and olfaction.”

What Sharks Eat

One other piece of proof: Most of the species of shark that almost all typically chunk individuals don’t even eat seals or different marine mammals. Blacktip sharks, for instance, account for over 15 % of all shark bites worldwide, and so they eat largely small or medium-sized fish.

Even when a shark in murky water would possibly confuse a human surfer with a seal, it appears much less lifelike that they might combine us up with a mackerel or flounder. On the subject of visibility, Baldridge’s concept appears to counsel that there can be extra bites in murky water than in clear situations. In reality, most shark bites occur in clear water.

However is there a extra seemingly clarification?

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Shark Traits

Clua and Meyer assist an alternate concept primarily based on shark traits known as the prey exploration speculation. Earlier research have proven that sharks have particular person character traits, together with completely different levels of boldness or curiosity.

Missing parental care, sharks should find out about their environments and potential prey themselves, and so they do that by exploring, typically with their mouths. Put merely, they could not assume we’re seals. They don’t know what we’re, and the boldest, most curious ones sometimes chunk us to seek out out.

Wanting Into Shark Eyes

When researchers simulated the way in which a white shark’s retinas would interpret the silhouette of a surfer in a paper revealed within the Journal of the Royal Society Interface in 2021, they discovered pictures visually much like a seal or sea lion.

In Clua and Meyer’s paper, nonetheless, they argue that the findings of this examine, whereas technically spectacular, could possibly be interpreted to assist both concept. The truth that youthful white sharks usually tend to chunk people than older ones, which the authors of the 2021 paper declare, additionally helps their prey exploration speculation. To them, a youthful shark is prone to be much less skilled with people, resulting in the uncommon, exploratory chunk.

Clua has easy recommendation for anybody frightened about shark encounters, regardless of how extremely uncommon bites are within the wild. “If you’re diving, swimming, browsing, preserve doing what you’re doing. However by no means do it alone – for 2 causes. Initially, by being two, you may change the shark’s decision-making, as a result of it’s a special option to chunk a single prey vs. biting prey which might be collectively. And, if the shark does make that call, the second individual is there to assist.”

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