Welsh inventor says he's cracked the code to
fending off sharks. The stink of death!
Who would’ve thought, say,
fifteen years ago, that the development of
shark repellants would become a boom industry?
Wasn’t the ocean dying? Less fish not more? A desert beneath our
toes?
Do you remember the $250 anti-shark
leash, a device so magical it prompted one surf
website to write: “The streets of Torquay and Jan Juc are abuzz
right now. It’s not about a warm wetsuit, or the
Sci-Phi or even about stealing Micro Hall as a coach. Instead,
surfers are lining up for something much smaller… pros are
scrambling to acquire one particular piece of surf tech… The
tech? A leash with shark-deterring capabilities.”
Then there was Sharkbanz. The
$600 anti-shark
tail-pad.
And so on and on.
Of course, they all sucked, at least according
to Australian consumer magazine,
Choice.
But maybe salvation is nigh, in the form of a Welsh cafe owner
who admits he knows “nothing about sharks or science” but who
has sold his house, his biz and his pension and poured a
quarter-of-a-million pounds ($US350,000) into his version of a
shark repellant.
From Wired magazine.
“I was really pissed off at the authorities,”
Brooker says, speaking about the 2014 protests that erupted across
Brisbane and Western Australia when the Western Australia Shark
Cull was implemented, and which Brooker witnessed first hand. The
policy was to cull sharks of over 3.5 metres, and as the majority
of sharks in that area are in excess of four metres, Brooker saw
this as a general attack on the entire species. “I thought, ‘’We’re
the most intelligent species on the planet, there has to be a
better way of resolving this conflict,’” he says.
Hoping that if sharks could be persuaded to
leave humans alone, such measures would no longer be necessary,
Brooker put his thinking cap on, and he and Simon sold their stakes
in their Cardiff properties and sank everything into developing the
Podi. The device, which can be attached to a surfboard or worn on
the person that slowly, releases a chemical based on the scent of
dead shark. This chemical continuously dissolves in water,
providing a potent, and potentially life-saving, repellent. With
Podi, the Brookers’ aim is to prevent sharks from wrongly being
killed, while also preserving reefs and wider marine
ecology.’
“Brooker admits that he “knew nothing of
sharks, or science” yet he did what anyone would do in his
position: he took to Google. A comprehensive trawl of the internet
told Brooker that not only were most current shark defence systems
expensive, the majority only worked in close-proximity, a range
which Brooker believes is too dangerous. Or, as he puts it “Not
even a double-barrelled shotgun will stop a white shark when it’s a
metre and a half away in attack mode.”
Brooker sought a more logical approach,
beginning with the assumption that, like every animal in existence,
a shark can be persuaded to flee as an act of self-preservation.
The key to encouraging such behaviour was stimulating its most
powerful sense. Many sharks can detect their prey at one particle
of DNA in 10 billion, while a white shark can smell prey up to 1.8
miles away. Using a shark’s own sense of smell against it, it
seemed, was the answer.
“I thought if we can make a smell that it
doesn’t like that encourages it to move on, we’d have something.
Sharks generally aren’t cannibalistic, so I thought a rotten shark
might just scare another shark,” says Brooker.
Long story short. Brooker’s Eau de Fuck Off Sharks is
eighteen months from completion.
“We’re risking everything,” says Brooker.
Do you believe? Or he crazy?
Read the story
here.
