Sharks aren’t out to get you. They’re not lurking in the water, starving, waiting for the most delectable surfer to pass by to sate their hunger. But bites do happen.
More often than not, bites happen because the sharks confuse a person in a wetsuit for a seal or some such delicious creature. Luckily, a team of researchers is working on a bite-resistant wetsuit.
Marine biologist Charlie Huveneers and his team at Flinders University in Australia have been working on making wetsuits that won’t get you chomped. Their new designs, recently detailed in Wildlife Research, and brought to our attention by Science News, are built to stop the kind of injuries that actually kill people during shark attacks.
Those injuries include things like massive blood loss from deep lacerations to major arteries.
Researchers Made a High-Tech, Anti-Shark Bite Wetsuit
The researchers tested four different shark-resistant materials, integrating materials such as lightweight chain mail, Kevlar (commonly used in bulletproof vests), and polyethylene nanofibers (used in ropes that hold sailboats together). They stitched these into traditional neoprene wetsuits, focusing protection on the limbs where critical arteries are located.
To test the suits, Huveneers and his team chummed the waters and let white and tiger sharks take test bites out of floating “bite packages” wrapped in wetsuit materials. While unprovoked shark attacks are rare, these species of shark in particular are responsible for most of the unprovoked shark attacks reported in Australia.
The researchers found that traditional neoprene was left looking like it had been run through a wood chipper. The new materials, however, fared way better. They were minimally damaged, filled mostly with shallow tooth marks that a playful family pet would leave behind. That’s a big difference from what a 1,200-pound apex predator would typically do.
It sounds like a remarkable advancement in wetsuit technology that may one day save countless lives. That said, if you were to wear one of these, you shouldn’t assume you’re suddenly invincible.
The suits can’t stop crushing injuries, and it’s not like they provide some anti-shark force field or emit a Batman-style shark repellent. Consider them one tool in a toolbox, with the primary tool being the limbs that get you the heck away from the shark, which you should do without looking like a wounded seal.
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