July SharkSafe Barrier™ News 2020
Hope this is finding you in good spirit! If not… here are some good shark news to brighten your day!
- No shark nets in South Africa during lockdown
- The SharkSafe Barrier™ is officially among the 6 finalists of the prestigious NSFT South32 Awards!
- We could inspect the two SharkSafe Barrier™ Barrier Units in Glencairn
- We have an on-line shop!
June SharkSafe Barrier™ News 2020
I am writing to keep you in the loop of the progress of the SharkSafe Barrier™ and send you some exciting news about our mission!
Happy Birthday to the SharkSafe Barrier™ in Reunion!
Replacing fishing gears used for “beach protection” with eco-friendly alternatives should become the priority of every government advocating for environmentally friendly politics and sustainable tourism.
From our side, we are simply blown away by the beauty of the SharkSafe Barrier™ exclusion experiment in St Paul, after one year since deployment.
Designed to keep sharks separated from swimmers and surfers, the SharkSafe Barrier™ technology combines two shark deterrents: the visual appearance of a think kelp forest with a strong magnetic field.
FOR THE WHOLE YEAR THE BARRIER UNITS DIDN’T NEED ANY MAINTENANCE.
The installation survived the winter storms, despite the anchorage system is designed to be removed at the end of the experiment, and also became a stunning reef with several fishes feeding of the biofouling on the structure.
Photos taken on Wednesday 12 February 2020
A big thank you to Dr Arnault Gauthier for taking beautiful photographs!
Where have all the Great White Sharks gone?
By Noah Tobias• 12 September 2019
Great White sharks are the stuff of legend and Cape Town’s False Bay gained a worldwide reputation for its very visible population of the magnificent creatures. But now they’ve gone missing.
For the past 18 months, the Cape Town municipality has been monitoring the gradual disappearance of Great White sharks from False Bay. Working in tandem with a conservation group called Shark Spotters, researchers recorded a massive drop-off in the number of Great White sightings between 2016 and 2018.
There has not been a single confirmed sighting this year at a beach where spotters used to see upwards of 200 sharks annually. Where did they all go?
In 2009, Dr. Sara Andreotti of Stellenbosch University began counting Great White sharks around the South African coastline. Her findings came as a surprise: there were between 353 and 522 sharks cruising around the seaboard – less than half the figure she had expected. Using a process called genetic analysis, Andreotti and her team refined that sum, discovering that 333 breeding sharks were all that remained of the once-numerous species. That was a bad sign – shark populations need at least 500 breeders or inbreeding will cause genetic deficiencies, perhaps even keeping the group from reproducing entirely. Those findings crystallized in 2016. Since then, the population has probably shrunk further. This raises another question: why was the population dwindling in the first place?
Because animal behavior is complex and dynamic, it is difficult to point to a single exclusive circumstance that explains everything. However, one thing is clear: humans are, at least partly, responsible.
Human-shark interactions have been complicated from the beginning. Prehistoric predators with up to 300 razor-sharp teeth, Great White sharks instill a deep, primitive fear. Perhaps that is why, in the 1930s, Australian fishermen began setting up gill nets, enormous fishing nets that float vertically in the water. A demonstrably ineffective way of protecting beachgoers, gill nets also have significant detrimental effects on marine animals, catching and killing everything from turtles and whales to Great White sharks. Although much of the world has banned their use, one can still see them along the KwaZulu-Natal coastline.
Because of the indiscriminate nature of shark nets, institutions like the KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board now prefer drumlines, a more targeted method of reducing the shark population. Drumlines are large hooks attached to bait, which catch and kill curious sharks. There have been zero shark attack fatalities in KwaZulu-Natal since the introduction of drumlines, but that comes at a massive expense. According to statistics released by the Sharks Board, only a quarter of Great Whites caught between 2013 and 2017 were released alive.
The most egregious human attack on sharks, however, comes not from protection agencies but from fishers. One study showed that fisheries tend to collide with Great Whites in certain hotspots, where both ships and sharks head to look for fish. In the ensuing interaction, sharks often get caught on baited hooks and suffer devastating internal injuries.
Researchers concluded that “sharks have limited spatial refuge from current levels of fishing effort in marine areas”. In other words, when the fishing boats come, sharks have nowhere to swim (run). Years of conditioning by films like Jaws and Sharknado might make Great Whites difficult to empathize with. However, the loss of these creatures could massively imbalance the marine ecosystem. According to Andreotti, “we cannot even grasp the negative ecological effects” of the changes. Without Great White sharks, seals and other predators will grow in numbers, eating enormous quantities of fish and crustaceans and significantly harming local fisheries. Their disappearance might also damage the increasingly popular shark ecotourism business. Stephen Frank, the owner of a tour agency that specializes in shark cage diving, called the impact on his business “absolutely tremendous”. “Tourists are obviously aware of it,” he said, noting, “It’s the first time in 17 years that sharks aren’t breaching in False Bay.”
Where did the Great Whites go? That is a difficult question, and it will take years to fully answer. We don’t know enough about shark behavior and movement patterns, which can be erratic and difficult to explain. According to a statement released by Dr. Allison Kock, a marine biologist at SANParks, sharks “are capable of large migrations and, when conditions are not good in one place, they can move to a better one”.
Another theory holds that Great Whites might be fleeing larger predators. Two killer whales spotted in False Bay – true to their name – might be targeting sharks for their livers, which make high-fat, scrumptious meals for a hungry orca.
The research indicates that the population is in serious trouble. There are a lot of things we could have done – and could still do.
Scientists are hard at work creating non-lethal shark control methods, including an eco-friendly barrier that mimics kelp forests and doesn’t harm marine life. Fishers have a wide array of options, such as real-time satellite surveillance that explains where sharks are and how to avoid them. Other options include technology that sends irritating electronic or magnetic signals, deterring sharks by making use of their incredible sensory biology instead of killing them. Here’s hoping these initiatives work and the charismatic predators return to False Bay one day.
SharkSafe Barrier™ tested at popular beach resort on La Réunion Island
Author: Wiida Fourie-Basson
29/08/2019
Shark-deterrent technology developed by a team from Stellenbosch University is now being tested of the coast of La Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean.
The SharkSafe Barrier™ is the most advanced shark-specific deterrent technology currently available that does not injure or kill sharks and other marine animals while keeping surfers and swimmers safe.
The technology has been in development for the past seven years by SU’s Dr. Sara Andreotti and Professor Conrad Matthee, in collaboration with well-known conservationist Michael Rutzen, Dr. Craig O’Connel from the USA and South African coastal engineer Laurie Barwell. The team combined two well-known aspects of shark biology, their natural dislike of dense kelp-forests and their sensitivity to magnetic fields, to come up with a barrier that will physically separate sharks and people from each other.
In practice, it consists of several rows of staggered high-density polyethylene pipes that are positioned one meter apart on the sea bed in order to imitate a dense kelp forest. The ocean-facing row contains large ceramic magnets, creating a strong magnetic field to further deter the sharks from entering.
The concept has been piloted and tested in the stormy waters of Gansbaai, regarded as the mecca of great white sharks in South Africa. During the two years of trials, not a single shark have entered an artificially-created kelp barrier of 169 square meters, even though tempted with fish bait and chum.
Invention to be tested outside South African waters for the first time
In 2014 the SharkSafe Barrier™ was commercialized with the help of SU’s technology transfer company, Innovus.
Now its chief operating officer, Dr. Andreotti was approached in 2017 by La Réunion’s Shark Risk Management Centre to test their invention’s effectiveness with bull sharks in the Indian Ocean.
“During January and February 2019 we installed a 100 square meter barrier of the coast of Saint-Paul. Twice a week, chum and fish bait are released in the middle of the square by Reunion researchers to lure sharks. The structure has already formed an artificial reef and has become a refuge for local fish, but so far, no sharks have approached the enclosure,” she says.
The field test will be completed after the Réunion team has recorded interactions with at least 20 bull sharks.
Between 2007 and 2016, this surfers’ paradise has seen seven fatal and 14 non-fatal shark incidents, with a subsequent drop in tourist bookings of 40% after each of these unfortunate events.
“In 2014 tourists totaled almost half of the population on the island. But today the authorities warn residents and tourists to stay out of the water” says Andreotti.
If successful, the installation of the SharkSafe Barrier™ along this popular coastline could mean a turn-around for the island’s ailing tourism industry.
But, more importantly, it could also mean a turn-around for the oceans’ threatened shark populations.
“Between 2011 and 2016, there have been 491 registered shark attacks worldwide, of which 43 proved fatal. Meanwhile, thousands of sea creatures have been killed by getting entangled in shark nets, or fished by drumlines,” Andreotti says.
Crowdfunding for one more test
The team is currently working on improving the robustness of the SharkSafe Barrier™ technology by adapting the anchorage system to better secure the pipes on sandy sea beds. It then needs to be exposed to real sea condition for one more time.
For this exercise, the team plans to raise $24 000 through the crowdfunding platform Thundafund at https://www.thundafund.com/project/sharksafebarrier
If this last test is successful, the Shark Safe Barrier invention is one step closer to be rolled-out to beaches all over the world, to the benefit of both humans and the oceans’ marine animals, Andreotti concludes.
Media enquiries
Dr Sara Andreotti
E-mail: andreottisara@gmail.com
Cell: 27(0)72 321 9198
SharkSafe Barrier™ Bottom-up movement
Sara Andreotti
August 2019
The SharkSafe Barrier™ (SSB) was conceptualized in 2012, by merging in one single technology two efficient shark deterrents: large ceramic magnets and the visual appearance of a thick forest of kelp.
Since 2012 the results of the tests conducted on sharks with the SSB were published on peer review scientific journal. Through all the experiments, what soon became clear is that sharks do not like to cross the SSB, not even when attracted through it with the smell of their favorite fishes.
Despite the shark research results were positive, the route to commercialization was still long, and the power of the South African waters made the progress on the engineering tests painfully slow and expensive. Fortunately, the SSB proved to resist the notoriously strong waves of the South African coast and makes it well suited for being deployed behind surfers in similarly wavy environments.
This year we successfully completed the very first overseas installation in Reunion Island in January (in collaboration with CRA, Shark Risk Management Centre, Réunion), we cannot wait to stop shark-culling for good.
So, after seven years of work on this eco-friendly alternative to protect people from sharks (and vice versa), it is time to expand our team.
We realized that local governments are very reluctant to invest public funds on new technologies, no matter how tested they are, so we decided to make our mission everyone’s mission.
We realized that this is no longer a work that can be achieved by a handful of passionate scientists and conservationists, and it must become a global plea to stop the unjustifiable cull of marine life by shark nets and drumlines.
There are thousands of likely minded people in the world that realize the importance of saving sharks and all the other marine creatures currently being killed by drumlines and shark nets. Thousands of people asked for the removal of the nets and raised awareness in the past, but their efforts were time and again stopped by the official excuse of lack of alternatives.
This official excuse is no longer valid.
It is our hope that when enough people will stand with us and support the use of the SSB to protect surfers without harming the marine environment, we will get a step closer to really make this happen.
Get involved!
Alarming drop in Great White shark numbers
Magnet barriers could save sharks
Sarah Wild 16 May 2014 00:00
Every beat of your heart could attract a shark. It starts with an electrical impulse, which sets off a cascade of activity in the relatively small muscle that keeps you alive. That electric current goes hand in hand with a magnetic field and this changing field is how, even if you are not bleeding, a shark knows where to find you.
Scientists from the University of Stellenbosch are using this information to develop shark barriers that will protect swimmers from the marine predator and also save the sharks – as well as numbers of other marine creatures such as dolphins and sea turtles – from shark nets.
“Sharks play a critical role within the marine ecosystem,” said Craig O’Connell, a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a research fellow at Stellenbosch University.
“Beach nets are being utilised to maximise beachgoer safety; however, these nets are substantially and negatively affecting shark populations.”
The main threat to shark populations in South Africa and worldwide, however, is fishing.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature now considers the great white shark, a shark often found in South African waters, a vulnerable species.
O’Connell and a team of researchers are working on magnetic barriers called SharkSafe rather than nets to keep sharks away from beaches, and to protect local sharks and other marine animals.
Their technology is based on the fact that sharks actually have a sixth sense: the ability to perceive magnetic fields.
’Sharks use sensory organs’
”[Sharks] can detect magnetic field emissions, either natural or produced by prey, or artificial – produced by submarine communication cables – relative to the Earth’s background geomagnetic fields,” said Dr Sean Fennessy, a senior scientist at the South African Association for Marine Biological Research.
“Sharks use sensory organs, called the ampullae of Lorenzini, concentrated in their heads to detect electromagnetic radiation. [They] reportedly have the greatest electrical sensitivity of any animal.”
The ampullae, first described by scientist Stefano Lorenzini in 1678, are a network of tiny jelly-filled pores that allow sharks to perceive electromagnetic and temperature changes.
The SharkSafe barrier involves placing magnets in Perspex tubes, which are disguised as a kelp forest. “The point is to mimic a kelp forest so that it [appeals] to the shark’s visual system and magnetic electro-sensory system,” O’Connell said.
He was speaking from a boat in Gansbaai, where the team is beginning the next phase of development.
“For the past three years, we have been working on a larger-scale barrier at Dyer Island [about 8km off Gansbaai] … It has been very successful: more than 60 sharks interacted with the barrier, and not one crossed it.”
Professor Conrad Matthee, principal investigator of the evolutionary genomics group at Stellenbosch University, has been providing logistical support for the project and has been involved in it since its inception.
He said: “The next stage is an exclusion barrier, where [the sharks] can never come in … [Engineers] are looking at the durability of the system and the materials, and measuring the wear and tear.”
O’Connell and partners are now testing this exclusion zone on great white sharks. He had previously tested it with other sharks, such as tiger and Zambezi sharks.
“We deployed an exclusion zone, and put bait in the centre,” he said.
“Our thinking was that, if you can block a motivated shark, [the technology] is promising. Eleven bull sharks tried to get through the barrier, and they wouldn’t do it. We’re now in South Africa to test it on the next breed, the great white.”
‘Causes temporary discomfort’
Asked whether the amplified magnetic waves could hurt the sharks, O’Connell said: “We think it causes temporary discomfort. We think they use magnetic fields to navigate, and a stronger field will repel them.”
He likens it to walking down the road: “If a car hoots, you’d jump a bit. If a train sounded next to you, you’d jump a mile. That’s what these stronger magnets are doing. It’s a stimulus the sharks are not used to.”
Asked whether he enjoyed the seminal shark movie Jaws, O’Connell said: “Jaws did a lot of bad things. Growing up, I used to love the movie, but it negatively affected perceptions. They are beautiful creatures that deserve to be protected.”
Predators or pussycats?
Despite the public’s widespread fear of sharks, the KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board says shark attacks are rare events.
“Since 1990, only 26% of attacks have resulted in serious injury and only 15% were fatal. This equates to an average of one serious shark-inflicted injury every year and one shark-inflicted fatality every 1.2 years along some 2 000km of coastline from the Mozambique border to Table Bay,” it says.
Many scientists, including Craig O’Connell, do not believe that sharks hunt humans and that injury is more commonly accidental.
The United States’s National Ocean Service says: “Sharks have been known to attack humans when they are confused or curious. If a shark sees a human splashing in the water, it may try to investigate, leading to an accidental attack.” This is why shark attacks are split into provoked and unprovoked attacks.
The International Shark Attack File, a global database of shark attacks, said that last year (2013), there were 72 unprovoked shark attacks worldwide. Read this article for more recent shark incident data - Shark bites consistent with recent trends, with a small spike in fatalities – Research News.
But the KwaZulu-Natal Sharks Board data shows that sharks did not fare as well: every year between 2006 and 2010, about
470 sharks died in shark nets, as did a variety of other ocean species, including birds, whales and dolphins.
SA‘s coastline is protected
The Sharks Board has been experimenting with net alternatives to keep people safe, while protecting marine animals.
At the moment, South Africa’s coastline is protected from sharks by the use of nets and drum lines, which are floats with baited hooks attached to catch sharks.
“Most of the shark nets deployed by the [Sharks Board] are 214m long and 6m deep and are secured at each end by two 35kg anchors; all have a stretched mesh of 51cm,” it says.
Durban, for example, has 17 nets, each 305m long, which cover the area from the Umgeni River to the harbour entrance.
The Western Cape last year began trials on an “exclusion zone” at Fish Hoek beach, which involves cordoning off a swimming section for people.
‘Save Our Seas white shark’
“The Save Our Seas white shark research programme over the last seven years has identified Fish Hoek beach as a primary habitat for white sharks, particularly during the summer months,” says Shark Spotters, an organisation that promotes shark research and also acts as a shark warning system for the Cape area.
The head of research at the Sharks Board, Geremy Cliff, says: “Shark nets have been around for decades. They were introduced at a time when people were … desperate [for a] solution to prevent shark attacks.
“Over time, people’s attitudes to the environment have changed. It’s important to come up with a solution to keep man and shark apart without killing any animals at all.”
New barrier '100% successful' in shark infested waters
20th Oct 2017 3:52 PM | Updated: 4:56 PM
FAKE kelp forests, would you believe, are the latest technology in the race to design an effective repellent to sharks.
The inspiration for the barrier was the observation that Cape fur seals used kelp forests as a natural protection from white sharks.
The inventors also recognised that sharks were deterred by strong magnets.
Combining the two, they created a new kind of shark deterrent with big eco-friendly credentials.
The end product, called the SharkSafe Barrier™, has been "100% successful" during peer-reviewed trials in shark infested waters off South Africa and the Bahama, according to its inventors.
The new barrier appears to be a far more elegant solution than the failed barriers which had to be abandoned at Lighthouse Beach and Lennox Head (at an undisclosed cost to the NSW Government).
Instead of using kelp, the team of four inventors came up with the idea of using sections of buoyant black piping to mimick its colour and movement in the currents.
At the base of the lengths of pipe are powerful barium ferrite magnets designed as an additional shark repellent.
The company says the barrier "bio-mimics the visual effects of a kelp forest, and combines this with a series of permanent magnetic stimuli, to form a barrier that dissuades sharks from passing through".
During prototype testing in South Africa and the Bahamas, a crew chummed waters inside the barrier to attract sharks and none of the 84 white sharks and 41 bull sharks swam through it.
The barrier repelled the sharks even when a large bucket of fish was put in the 15sqm enclosure to tempt them.
In good news for surfers, the barrier has proven to resist swells as high as eight metres and has been "maintenance free" for the past two years at one location in South Africa - suggesting it is very cost-effective long-term.
It can also be deployed up to 12m deep - more than enough to protect Lighthouse Beach.
The company claims the technology is the first one to be "shark-specific", in that it doesn't deter other animals, even large marine mammals such as seals or dolphins.
It also doesn't harm any marine life at all.
The Northern Star has sent questions to the company about the cost of installing a beach-sized barrier roughly the equivalent of the length of Lighthouse Beach at Ballina.
Questions have also been put to the NSW Department of Primary Industries about whether the product, which has been in the testing phase for some time, was ever discussed at the NSW Government's Shark Summit in 2015.
In response, a DPI spokeswoman said the department aware of the technology but it was only in the "early stages of development" in 2015 when the original shark summit was held.
"The NSW Govenment's Shark Management Strategy is testing and trialling a range of new technologies," the spokeswoman said in a statement.
"We are interested in talking with anyone with new technologies and particularly in technologies that have been independently and scientifically tested and trialled in Australian conditions." Perhaps that is an invitation for SharkSafe to get in touch.
Magnets Help Keep Sharks Out of Fish Traps
Adding cheap magnets to the traps reduced shark and ray bycatch by a third and increased fish hauls by just as much, according to a new study
Sharks are having a rough go of it. It’s estimated that humans kill 100 million sharks of all species each year, many hunted for shark-fin soup while others are killed as bycatch when fishermen accidentally hook or trap them. While there’s a lot of work to be done to save sharks, Ben Millington at the Australian Broadcasting Network reports that researchers have come up with a simple and cheap strategy for preventing some shark bycatch: outfitting fish traps with magnets.
Sharks have special sense organs called ampullae of Lorenzini, small jelly-filled pores located on their snouts and around their head. This sixth sense can pick up the electrical field of small fish, which helps sharks locate prey in dark or murky water. The ampullae may also allow sharks to detect the Earth’s magnetic field, which they might use to navigate the oceans. Other groups of cartilaginous fish in the subclass elasmobranchii, including rays and skates, also have the electricity-sensing organ.
Researchers at the University of Newcastle in Australia developed new tech that uses sharks’ electrical sensitivity to deter them from fishing traps. According to a press release, team studied 1,000 fish traps deployed near Sydney, Australia, over the course of eight months. The traps were targeted at Australasian snapper, but at least 10 percent of their catch is typically elasmobranchs, including blind sharks, Wobbegong sharks and electric rays. The team outfitted a third of the traps with magnets around their entrances, another third with metal bars and the rest were unchanged and left alone a control.
The magnets had a big impact. “Across the summer we deployed close to a thousand traps and we found pretty significant effects from those magnets, which basically reduced the total catch of the sharks by about 30 percent, which is great for that fishery," marine biologist Vincent Raoult, co-author of the study in the journal Fisheries Research tells Millington. Because the magnets successfully deterred sharks, there was more room for fish in the traps. In total, magnet traps had about 30 percent more fish in them than usual.
“This is an awesome example of how to mitigate the impact of fisheries on sharks and at the same time have benefits to those fishermen, because they're catching more fish,” Millington adds.
Raoult tells Joshua Rapp Learn at National Geographic that the strong magnets confuse the animals' senses when they get close to the fish trap, the equivalent of getting hit in the face with a strong stink. “It’s just an unpleasant thing for the animal as far as we can tell,” he says.
Another advantage of using magnets is that they are cheap—about $2 a piece, meaning a trap can be outfitted for about $30 depending how many openings it has. That can have a big impact for fishermen.
For a minimal investment they can increase the productivity of their traps and perhaps even reduce the number of traps they fish with, which also reduces costs. “It’s definitely better for the business and the sharks, for them not to get in the traps, and you can catch more fish. It’s win-win for everyone,” commercial fisherman Mark Cranstone tells ABC’s Millington.
The research team wants to communicate their finding to the fishing community around the world since this technique can be implemented quickly and on a large scale. But Learn reports the magnet trick really only work on fish traps, currently. Using magnets with other types of fishing gear is a much stickier situation, literally. Tests using magnets in longline fishing, which uses metal hooks, showed that they attracted the hooks and tangled the gear.
Other studies showed that some shark species overcame their aversion to the magnetic field and went after baited lines. Some species, like blue sharks and shortfin makos, even seemed to be attracted by the magnets.
But researchers have had some success in using magnet technology to replace shark nets and barriers, which can tangle up fish and other marine wildlife. The SharkSafe Barrier™ is made of magnet-filled tubes, which look like a kelp bed, which sharks dislike to begin with, and has had success keeping sharks away from places like beaches.
Shark-Repelling Fake Kelp Could Prevent Beachside Attacks
JENNIFER VIEGAS for Discovery NewsJul 21, 2014
A shark-sensing "buoy" and a fake kelp forest that is actually a high tech shark barrier could soon be deployed at beaches to help prevent shark attacks, which led to 10 deaths last year and dozens of serious injuries.
The new inventions could be a win for sharks as well as humans, since both systems do not harm sharks. Shark culling as well as drum lines, which brutally capture large sharks using baited hooks, are still common at beaches around the world, so it’s hoped that more high tech methods will soon replace the very eco-unfriendly practices.
Craig O'Connell, founder of the marine conservation non-profit O’Seas Conservation Foundation, helped to develop the SharkSafe Barrier™, which is designed to resemble a kelp forest and includes magnets that deter great white, bull, hammerhead, tiger and other shark species. Its success is documented in a paper that will be published in the November issue of the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology.
"The current Western Australian shark cull is a short-term solution that may have long-term negative consequences on the marine ecosystem," O'Connell, lead author of the paper, told Discovery News. "Our barrier does not use netting or hooks, but rather stimuli that non-invasively deter sharks away from a region, whereas other marine life can simply swim through the barrier."
Testing has determined that marine mammals, such as Cape fur seals, pass through the barrier unimpeded. Abalone, a sea snail whose population has been in global decline, seem to love the SharkSafe Barrier™, attaching themselves to it as they would to a rocky substrate.
As for its shark-repelling properties, O’Connell explained that sharks, skates and rays have a unique electro-sensory system known as the ampullae of Lorenzini, whereas most animals do not. The researchers therefore believe that the magnets within the SharkSafe Barrier™ specifically target sharks and their relatives.
"As a shark approaches the magnet," O'Connell said, "we hypothesize that an electric field is induced that may overwhelm the electro-sensory system of these sharks," causing them to avoid the area and swim in the opposite direction.
Additionally, sharks tend not to enter high-density natural kelp forests, which is why prey of these toothy hunters so often seek refuge in kelp. Just the look of the SharkSafe Barrier™, made up of three to five rows of large vertical pipes, can put a shark off.
Clever Buoy is yet another new shark attack deterrent system. The visible part of the device is a bright yellow buoy.
Hamish Jolly, who helped to develop Clever Buoy, explained that it "is a shark detection system, which uses remote sensing in the ocean looking for shark-like objects. When it finds a shark, it sends a signal to shore via satellite through the Optus network."
Jolly, co-founder with Craig Anderson of Shark Mitigation Systems, added that the sensing component utilizes commercial software already used by the oil and gas industry. Instead of being calibrated to look for oil, the system is adjusted to seek out the sonar signature of sharks.
Once a shark is detected, an alert is sent to local lifeguards or other officials, who can see the alert on a smart device. They may then sound an alarm, notifying recreational water users to get out of the water until the shark swims away.
Both the SharkSafe Barrier™ and Clever Buoy are still in development and testing phases. O'Connell said that "once we finish our final phase of research in South Africa (anticipated completion date is August 2014), we will be searching for funding so we can deploy the barrier at beach sites."
Clever Buoy could be spotted at beaches by mid 2015, which is when Jolly, Anderson and their team hope to commercialize their system.
This article originally published at Discovery News