Or disguise yourself as a zebra! 
That website makes you think Sharks differenciate what they are eating before they strike. I don’t necessarily buy it. But the idea is brilliant, and the marketing is just OK.
You may mock, but there are very, very few documented cases of sharks attacking zebras.
Crocodiles, however, are a different issue…
OK, I’ll bite. Why do dogs fetch? Is it all dogs? Is it instinctual or learned? Will they fetch any object at all?
As you said, that’s conjecture. If you don’t know the answer, why do you think it’s so obvious that scientists should? Isn’t that rather the point of scientific investigation, so that you don’t have to conjecture? Instinct isn’t a magic word you get to wave that makes all further discussion pointless.
More importantly, do they attack humans making long, loud cellphone calls? I’d like to see this put to the test, maybe even on pay-per-view.
Definitely not all dogs. My Labrador retriever will bring back anything, anytime with great zeal. Other dogs react to thrown objects and “Fetch!” commands with “Meh.”
Genetics + training + treat = fetching dog.
Farewell and adieu to you, fair Spanish ladies.
Farewell and adieu, you ladies of Spain.
For we’ve received orders for to sail back to Boston.
And so nevermore shall we see you again.
Usually someone comes along and points me to a cite or other material that supports the latest and greatest facts on something…I probably should have put this in IMHO.
Why so short a time? Do they need more room to swim than is cost-effective? Do they prefer live prey, and that’s hard to provide day after day? Do they just fail to thrive? Something else?
Interesting…I’m definitely reading this book when I get a chance. Why is it that scientists call them “white sharks” and not “great whites”?
Great whites spend a lot of their time in the deep pelagic areas of the ocean, meaning swiming along in deep areas with the current, not hunting, perhaps breeding, we don’t really know.
How do you know that?
We know so little about their behavior that I don’t know how you can make the case that you know where in the brain (or with what evolutionary derivation) it’s centered. There have been no fMRI studies on shark brains to my knowledge ;). While it’s an interesting area to speculate, I think it’s a good idea to clearly label speculation that has no basis in knowledge versus what little we can divine from observations in the wild.
Frankly, I think there’s a lot of assumptions made about sharks that are based in the fact that their body plan has remained similar for hundreds of millions of years. That’s the “living fossil” idea you’ll hear bandied about - applied to the entire Chondrichthyes rather than a particular species like the frilled shark.
And what, exactly does a body plan have to do with behavior and prey images? Probably not much, IMHO, but it does feed a lot of misconceptions about sharks - like that their behavior cannot be highly derived and sophisticated because the basic body plan hasn’t changed in 100 million years or so. I don’t know of any reason why an ancestral body plan indicates that the animal’s behavior must be ancestral as well. Sharks should be able to surprise us with sophisticated behaviors and reactions to their environment - their impressive migrations, like Nicole’s trip across the Indian Ocean and back. That kind of navigational precision was unexpected and is totally not understood, but is obviously a pretty sophisticated behavior.
White sharks (scientists tend to avoid the appellation “Great” because it sounds sensational rather than objective) are the products of exactly the same amount of time for evolution to take place that our common fishy ancestor (at the junction of the Chondrichthyes and Osteichthyes clades) had to develop humans. There’s certainly sufficient time and evolutionary pressure for them to develop advanced behaviors that we have only poorly observed so far.
So if sharks just attack without any sort of differentiation, why don’t they attack round or square floating objects? Pyle and Anderson’s work out at the Farallones and at Año Nuevo has included putting out lures that were not surfboard/seal shaped, and these were not attacked, particularly the square and round lures (I haven’t found a good reference for that yet, but I’ll keep looking.) The “pin-striped” wetsuit recommendation may also come from these tests, but it’s not completely clear to me. This also seems like conditional evidence against John McCosker’s suggestion that white sharks are like babies - they investigate the world by putting parts of it in their mouths. At least some differentiation is going on here, we just don’t know how much and why.
pg. 24 “they created the Farallon Islands White Shark Project, the only long-term study of individual great white sharks- or white sharks, as scientist prefer to call them- in existence.” No further explanation, sorry. I’m about a third of the way into it, and it has been quite informative. I grew up in the East Bay, and an exceptionally clear day was one which you could see the Farallones from the Oakland Hills. I knew that they were one apex of the GW triangle (along with Tomales Bay and Santa Cruz), but not that there used to be fights between eggers (or even that SF’s eggs used to be murre eggs! before Petaluma came along) or that there was a school and small village out there.
Would you want to pump up the egos of ginormous, man-eating sea beasts?
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Ah, the backstory 
: The Farallones are a part of the Farallon National Wildlife Refuge, which has (justifiably) some of the heaviest access restrictions in the refuge system. Permits from USFWS are required to set foot on the island (Southeast Farallon Island - SEFI for short,) and are usually only given to researchers, volunteers for back-breaking labor on the island, and Coast Guard personnel. I don’t think there’s been more than 10 people staying overnight on SEFI in living memory of anyone involved. In the winter, late fall, and early spring there will be more like 4 people on the island because the mammal, shark, and seabird projects require fewer people at those times of year.
[sub]Note: the following I have heard secondhand, so take it with a grain of salt. There is likely another side (multiple other sides?) of the story I haven’t heard.[/sub]
When Susan Casey was researching The Devil’s Teeth, she visited SEFI and decided to center her book on the place. She applied to USFWS for another permit to revisit the island and stay for weeks.
Casey had used her position at Time magazine to convince Joelle Buffa, the refuge manager at the time, to give her the initial permit to visit, but after her first visit, Buffa discovered that Casey’s research was for a personal book rather than a story for Time, and denied the second permit (I don’t think she appreciated being lied to.)
Casey worked out a deal with Scot Anderson and Peter Pyle, two of the long-time shark researchers on SEFI, to observe the work from a sailboat she would anchor in Fisherman’s Cove, on the east side of the island. She wouldn’t need a permit as long as she didn’t set foot on the island. That worked out fine until one morning, the sailboat was missing, blown off by waves and wind.
Casey turned out to be fine on the island, and the abandoned boat was found by the Coast Guard hundreds of miles away. Casey had been staying on the island all along without permission. The way I heard it, the sailboat was in good condition, and had it been crewed even by a single person, it would not have been lost and no search would have been necessary.
Buffa was not pleased with this second deception, and Casey was removed from SEFI. Peter Pyle lost his job at PRBO Conservation Science, Scot Anderson became persona non grata to the Refuge, and PRBO lost its shark research permits (which were given to other shark researchers.) The >10 year collaboration of Anderson and Pyle at SEFI was busted up, and the shark research work they were doing was dramatically harmed. Casey gets most of the blame for this in the version I heard.
In 2005, some folks working for the National Marine Sanctuary around the Farallones (run by NOAA, not USFWS) and I went to Susan Casey’s book signing at a San Francisco bookstore and asked some rather pointed questions in the public Q & A session. To me, she seemed not the least bit guilty about what she had done. I think of it as being either an unrepentant jerk or being so embarrassed that she cannot acknowledge any role in the harmful repercussions of her actions.
[Paul Harvey]…and that’s… the rest of the story…[/Paul Harvey]
I haven’t read the book yet, so I don’t know that she mentions any of this in the book.
Bad things started to happen. The shark they caught (can’t remember her name, but it’s probably googleable) was a young female, and after several months in the MBA’s Outer Bay tank (~1,000,000 gallons) she started attacking the sea turtles and banging up against the sides of the tank - even though she was being fed sufficiently. They decided it would be safer to release her at the time.
They do need a big tank. MBA kept her in a large pen in the ocean near Santa Barbara for several months before putting her in the Outer Bay tank and they thought she might be acclimated to smaller spaces. That turned out not to be the case, and as Phlosphr has mentioned, we now know from tagging studies that white sharks can swim thousands of miles in the deep ocean, even crossing ocean basins, before returning to shallower coastal waters.
At MBA, they weren’t providing live prey, just dead fish at the feeding target. But she had become accustomed to target feeding just fine. Physically, there didn’t appear to be anything wrong with her before she started biting the sea turtles and banging into the walls. It’s more likely something psychological (as hard to believe as that may be about a shark.) I really think shark minds are more complex than a lot of people give them credit for.
I see. Thanks!
Thanks wevets! Great info.
Just as an aside, I would love to do an internship [I know I’m too old I bet] at the Farallones. I think that would be absolutely fascinating.
I don’t think there are any age restrictions. A lot of citizen science these days is done by older folks (maybe older than you) who have more time available due to retirement or other reasons.
If you want to, go for it! I might see you on the way out to the islands.
What about other crafts such as scrapbooking or macrame’?