Introducing "biteprinting."
Do you recall, last month, when dear Stab
magazine tossed its wetsuit advertorials behind a
paywall but took time to kick your BeachGrit before
locking the door? “For those left it will be a race to the bottom,
and speaking from experience, when you’re chasing clicks, you get
lost in the outrageous and contagious. Think graphic shark attacks
and Ellie-Jean Coffey nudes.”
Well, The New York
Times, getting lost with BeachGrit in the
outrageous and contagious, just published a fascinating portrait of
marine biologist who has an entirely progressive theory on how to
deal with “problem sharks.”
Dr. Eric Clua, a professor of marine biology at the École
Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, has taken issue with mass
culls after attacks noting that, “They are killing sharks that are
guilty of nothing.” The good doctor has found a way to identify
sharks that have attacked people, though, through a form of DNA
profiling he calls “biteprinting” and believes these incorrigible
few can be singled out and executed.
He recently published his findings thereby infuriating his
colleagues.
“That’s not how fishing works,” said Catherine Macdonald, a
lecturer in marine conservation biology at the University of Miami.
“Even when you have a satellite-tagged shark and you know where it
is, if you turned up at the site and put a hook in the water,
there’s no reason to think you would definitely catch that
shark.”
Christopher Pepin-Neff, a public policy lecturer at the
University of Sydney who has studied human perceptions of sharks,
said the problem, or “rogue shark” theory, is neither cool nor
true. “They are basically saying that the shark from ‘Jaws’ is
real.”
Blake Chapman, who studied shark neuroscience at the University
of Queensland in Australia said removing these guilty sharks
“…would be more or less impossible. “I don’t think that the removal
of ‘problem individuals’ as a result of this information is a
realistic application for the data.”
David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist and postdoctoral
researcher at Arizona State University said, “This idea makes no
sense on any level that I’ve been able to find.”
Etc.
Dr. Clua is unperturbed, though, and fighting on for the good
people of Réunion Island, setting up his biteprinting operation
there to prove that it works.
“I’ll let them bite a pig leg,” he says, “or something else with
flesh, muscle and bone.”
Scientific research in the field of Ellie-Jean Coffey nudes is
forthcoming.
