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Beware – shark repellent testing in progress

By Michael Le Page

23 February 2005

THE water is murky but every now and then the dark shapes circling me come close enough to make out. They’re sharks. I’m in a pen with six of them.

OK, so the water is only waist deep and the sharks are barely a metre long. But when you’re testing a shark repellent, it is wise to start with the small ones.

A few weeks earlier I had heard about a company called Shark Defense of Oak Ridge, New Jersey, which claims to have invented a chemical repellent that actually works. There have been plenty of similar claims over the decades, yet few products have ever reached the market and none has proved truly effective. Could Shark Defense have succeeded where so many others have failed?

It turned out that although the company’s claims have been widely reported, no journalist had been to see the repellent in action. So when I found out the next tests were being held in Bimini in the Bahamas, I got in touch and begged for an invitation.

Bimini is a tiny cluster of islands about 100 kilometres east of Miami, inhabited mostly by vicious mosquitoes and, of course, surrounded by shark-infested waters. It is also home to the Bimini Biological Field Station, the Shark Lab to locals, an independent research centre crammed full of tanned volunteers who spend their days studying the young lemon sharks for which Bimini’s lagoons and mangrove swamps serve as a nursery.

The Shark Lab was set up in 1990 by renowned shark researcher Samuel Gruber of the University of Florida. Gruber, who still owns and runs the lab, worked …

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