Breakthrough: Great White-proof wetsuit “one step closer to reality!” Human trials to begin soon!

"The incidence of shark bites in Australia has increased from 1–3 per year in the 1980s to more than 10 per year in the 2010s."

It’s gotten real tense, I guess you could say, around those great surf utopias Byron Bay, Santa Cruz and Margaret River.

Getting hit by a Great White shark, a species protected in Australia since 1999 and California since 1994, has moved from the abstract to the very real.

Santa Cruz shaper Ben Kelly, twenty-six, hit and killed by a Great White in May; Gold Coast surfer Rob Pedretti, sixty, hit and killed near Byron Bay in June. 

A pal called a couple of days back and said the site of breaching Whites had become almost as common as the whales that pass the coast every June.

So far, solutions have danced around three poles: the proven, if brutal, efficiency of nets, surveillance by drone and tagged sharks linked to social media; and various trinkets calling ‘emselves shark deterrents. 

The first works, but society don’t have the stomach for seeing photos of sharks being winched, dead or dying, to the surface. 

Surveillance is patchy. It works when the water’s clear and a drone is in the air and if the entire population of Great Whites has been tagged.

Shark deterrents? No.

A new angle works on the premise that as hits on surfers have become the new reality and since there’s only going to be more Great Whites, how about we minimise the impact of a shark bite.

(Kinda like carrying tourniquets.)

The NSW Department of Primary Industries has tossed ninety-gees to researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide toward the development of a Great White-proof wetsuit.

Kevlar was the first choice, and it works, but while it might be ok under your combat uniform it ain’t much fun as a wetsuit.

Instead, the researchers are testing two types of protective fabrics that incorporate ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene fibres (UHMWPE)

“We tested the fabric on White sharks because it is the species responsible for the most fatalities from shark bites,” says Associate Professor Charlie Huveneers, co-author a paper that reminds surfers, “Although the risk of being bitten by a shark is intrinsically low, the occurrence of shark bites has increased globally in the last 30 years. For example, the incidence of shark bites in Australia has increased from 1–3 per year in the 1980s to more than 10 per year in the 2010s.”

The results from the test have been fairly encouraging.

It ain’t gonna stop the jaws but it might limit the damage.

Human trials to begin soon.

Volunteers wanted.