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I texted this clip to my wife who wanted proof
I wasn't doing anything stupid on a recent trip to the Bahamas
Now if you're wondering what my feet are doing in shark-infested waters with a bucket of blood 20 miles away from any land
Well, that comes down to a conversation. I had with my friends at the Discovery Channel six months ago
They told me Shark Week is coming up and they want to know what I would do
if they could put me in the middle of the ocean on a boat surrounded by sharks for as long as I can remember
I've always wanted to test if sharks can really smell a drop of blood in the water from a mile away
Now before you say Mythbusters already did this
They kind of did this as you can see to test this they poked their fingers and then stuck them in a barrel with these
Tiny lemon sharks and since they didn't really seem to turn around and look at their fingers
They said it was busted now
I'm friends with both Kari and Adam, but I think even they would have been at least in this case
The methodology was less than scientifically rigorous
so I came up with a more robust test procedure built some NASA great hardware for the experiment hopped on a plane and then a
Speedboat and soon enough. I was 20 miles offshore of the Bahamas
To kick things off I sat down with my marine biologist shark diving expert friend Luke Tipple and explained my plan in eventually
Eventually I plan to test just how far they could smell a single drop of blood in the water
But first I wanted proof that they actually preferred blood over any other scent
So for my first experiment
I plan to put four surfboards in the water equa-distant from the back of the boat
each board would host two litres of a different liquid that we would pump into the ocean over the course of an hour then using
A three meter radius around each board as a gauge we would use drone footage and count how many sharks went over to check out?
Each board. So this board would be fish oil, which I heard was a general attractant for lots of fish
Then we would have cows blood here
Then sea water here as a control to make sure the Sharks weren't just interested in the surfboard and then finally urine I've heard
From surfers that a lot of them won't pee in their wetsuits because they feel like it's gonna attract a shark
I don't know a surfer alive who doesn't pee in their wetsuit.
But yes that's definitely something that I've heard, a lot.
It'll liberate surfers everywhere, if we show it's cool to pee in your wet suit.
And so after a bit more discussion Luke was on board for the first of our two experiments
Well as a firm believer in the scientific method, we'll test it out
And then you'll dive
Well, depending on the results I dive
If I can't pee, then the deal's off
And so with that we started putting the four boards together
[Music]
We also started collecting scientific donations from the crew
All right, so now it's time to fill these bags. Mm-hmm, what do you want to do first - pee or blood?
Yeah, let's do pee. Okay, let's do rock-paper-scissors for who holds the bucket and who holds the bag
Alright, one two three shoot?
Ohh I gotta strategize... okay I know I know
One two three shoot.
Yeaaaa. Dammit
Ohh that smells so bad
It's urine
Whosever's it is, they need to hydrate - dude this is going to be a nightmare.
Oh it's warm
Your pouring sucks!
Okay
Oh that smell of
All in the name of science
That's a great time of day to be doing this cuz we have a lot of sharks looking down here
we got three or four lemons on the surface and I can actually see two Tigers
down on the bottom and that's actually a massive tiger shark
That is huge
All right, see if you can do it better job pouring than I did. Oh
my gosh
Oh wow. There's a feeding frenzy
It's fine
What do you mean don't move it? I almost lost my hands
They're not gonna jump out of the water.
Okay, so we've got sea water as our control, fish oil, we have urine, and cows blood
So while Luke is bravely swimming the four surfboards out and anchoring them in place in preparation for the one hour countdown
Now is a perfect time to explain the cool tech on each board
I designed and built from scratch with my buddy Shawn Hodgins
For this experiment to be robust
All four boards need to start pumping at the exact same time after Luke has them in place
That means we need to somehow start the pumps using a radio signal from the boat
so each surfboard has a waterproof receiver box like this that also hosts the battery, a custom printed circuit board, and two Arduinos
Then I have the remote control and as soon as I hit this button
[mechanical whirring]
They all start pumping at the same time
We know each pump is working because the corresponding yellow light is lit up
That's important because they're too far away from the boat to see if they're functioning properly
To pump the blood and pee
We're using a peristaltic pump
this is a perfect choice because it's a totally sterile way to get the blood from the bag to the
Ocean since the blood never touches any sort of valve or something
It just has these rollers that sort of pinch and push the blood through the tubing in a manner that just happens to be similar
To a severed artery
And so with the board's in place
It was go time
operation shark bait test thing commence - three two one... beep
All four going we have confirmation
Everything is rolling. The experiment is underway. We'll, let them go for an hour just dripping stuff out
And yea we'll see what happens.
And after ten minutes I was really surprised there wasn't a lot of action on any of the boards
So so far. It's pretty interesting
I mean we've shown if you have a massive cut and you're bleeding out and there's this many sharks within like
50 yards of you that they're kind of like 'meh' so like already that's an interesting finding, right?
You would think like a little bit of blood and there would just be a massive swarm
But that's not the case so far
And to be clear we weren't dealing with small quantities here the human body contains five liters of blood and after you use
Two liters, which is the exact amount. We're putting in the water then you die
About 20 minutes in things were still pretty quiet, especially at the fish oil urine and control boards
But then the blood board started attracting some smaller fish and soon after one or two sharks started taking notice
Not a lot of love for my pee. I don't know why I find that kind of offensive, but I'm just a little hurt
Eventually with about 15 minutes left things started getting pretty wild over by the blood board
The blood was spread out and made almost like a blood run way
So you have the surreal line of sharks swimming up this
Enticing blood trail one after another only to be super disappointed to find a big piece of styrofoam
We're almost done
Three-two-one, the motors have stopped our experiment is done. I just like to point out the bags have been sucked dry
So the engineering part of this experiment
was flawless
Gunshot everywhere. Yeah, no to super pissed off targets
and so now it's time to go in and review the footage and get a final tally for each board and what we found was
that four sharks went to check out the fish oil then zero sharks went to check out both the control and
The urine and then the blood board had a direct visit from a whopping
41 sharks
and so now that we debunked some surfing myths about
Urine and proved that sharks certainly had a strong preference for blood over anything we tested the real question was
Just how much blood is interesting to them and there was one part of the experimental design
That was really nagging at me. Cuz that was cows blood right that was cows blood. You wanna try human
At least 10 living braiding blood bags around here
Not everyone was luke and I about this idea
Yeah, and then just draw will just have fresh blood just mainline it and put it in the water one up. Would you be down?
Moondog, what do you reckon look at me?
So Luke made some calls and soon enough we had an amazing certified bhajami and phlebotomist on board
And after some generosity from the camera crew and even captain Scotty
We had four bulging bags of human blood for our second experiment
This is my actual blood free to see if sharks have a taste for it
And if they do I probably won't go three dining with them for the second experiment. We had three boards again
We placed the control in the middle the board over here would pump the human blood
Slowly at one drop a minute and then on the other side this board would pump the blood fast on
average one drop every four seconds we were able to do that because another cool feature for the boxes we built was that by turning
This knob you can control the flow rate
So over time they can pump out different amounts and because sometimes we all have to step up and just do our part while Luke
Once again risked his life by placing the three boards. I'd prepared to push a button
All right, all of them are popular and good to go now the clock is ticking
So we have like fifty five more minutes to go
We'll see if the Sharks notice there
One drop of human blood every four seconds may sound like a lot and it certainly is but it's also important to note
That's 40 times less than the first experiment where we saw so much activity in this case halfway in to experiment number two
Even though there were tons of sharks still in the area. The boards themselves were pretty quiet
We'll have to see when we look at the footage afterwards. But so far it looks like the answer's no
Five four three two one
Experiments over
and so after the full hour we brought in the board's and once again reviewed the footage to see that over the course of an
hour zero sharks two checked out the control board zero checked out the slow blood pumping board and
Exactly zero sharks checked out the fast one
So this is by no means a perfect experiment
but I think it's safe to
Qualitatively say that if no sharks came to check out 15 drops of human blood a minute in the middle of shark-infested
Waters and probably gonna be okay with a small scrape
I mean there certainly won't be some kind of feeding frenzy with a single drop of blood from all sharks within a mile
Now that I had some first-hand data to put my mind at ease
I was willing to try diving with the sharks without a cage, but I had one final experiment
I had a theory that if we secured a
360 camera to the front of a hand spear and then shot it near some sharks
We could create the world's first really cool matrix, like underwater bullet time effect. So I suited up
and goddamn I
Like theory proved correct on the whole time ham spirit because as you can see that footage
What I'll take home from this shoot is just more evidence of
the amazing animal that sharks are but also the ability to point people in a specific direction to say
Hey your thoughts about them are a little overblown this experience. Definitely changed my perception on sharks
I would say I respect them more after seeing their raw power up close at the same time
There's less of that fear that comes from ignorance on top of all that I didn't die
Please play the YouTube video first