Exposure Suit Color to NOT Resemble Sea Lions?

[drrich2]

Don't know whether this has been discussed before. Thought about it yesterday and wanted to ask your thoughts.

It's been said that great white attacks on humans are likely often due to mistaken identity; at the surface, and especially on a surf board with feet sticking off the back & arms dangling over the sides, humans can look a lot like seas or sea lions. Couple that with the fact that GWS are cold water sharks & thus encounters with humans often involve people wearing exposure suits like wet suits, and I figure...

that a lot of people who dive around GWS are wearing black wet suits that look too much like a sea lion for comfort.

Here's a thread for a 'Shark Research Institute' page dealing with the question of whether sharks see color. Evidently they don't discriminate color much. But I would think patterning could be used; a black wet suit with white or yellow spots or striping to break up that seal-like silhouette, perhaps?

Anybody ever tried something like this? I'd think dressing the dummies used to trigger GWS breech attacks near Sea Island, South Africa, in these 'I'm not a seal!' wet suits would help test them.

Richard.

 

[Akimbo]

This shark attack happened about 15 miles north of me and I heard from several local divers that the whitey either passed or pushed by a diver in a black suit and bit the head off the diver in a camo suit.

Shark Estimated at 16-18 feet;

I have never seen it in writing so can’t say the report is accurate.

 

[drrich2]

Interesting article. I'd read about that story elsewhere, I believe, a different article, but what you linked was more concise. A shark that large, in about 15 feet of water. Says the victim was diving head first in about 15 feet of water; I'm assuming that means it was 15 feet to so to the bottom, not that he'd gotten down 15 feet? If it hit right after he hit the water, perhaps it didn't have much time to analyze the situation?

Richard.

 

[Arubandi07]

Interesting article. I'd read about that story elsewhere, I believe, a different article, but what you linked was more concise. A shark that large, in about 15 feet of water. Says the victim was diving head first in about 15 feet of water; I'm assuming that means it was 15 feet to so to the bottom, not that he'd gotten down 15 feet? If it hit right after he hit the water, perhaps it didn't have much time to analyze the situation?

Richard.

When you get a chance, try to check out "Shark Attack Experiment", was on during "Shark Week". They ran all sorts of tests to determine 'trigger factors', including the color/contrast of wet suits.