The final slap in the face of Project 374 would come in the form of a paper by Navy Captain H. David Baldridge Jr.: “Analytic Indication of the Impracticability of Incapacitating an Attacking Shark by Exposure to Waterborne Drugs.” By plotting the speed of a closing shark against the speed of dilution and the concentration needed to put the creature out of commission, Baldridge showed that such a large quantity of drug would be needed that it “does not appear to be at all reasonable as an approach to the control of predaceous shark behavior.” As one of Burden’s colleagues put it: “You can’t do much with a pint of liquid in an ocean.”
Taking a cue from the octopus, Navy researchers next looked into using clouds of inky dye as a way to hide crewmen from potential predators. Under those same “mob psychology” conditions, all feeding activity was stopped until the dye had diluted to the point at which it no longer obscured the prey. Production began at once. Shark Chaser’s active ingredients: 80 percent black dye and 20 percent pink pill—a little copper acetate having been added to the pot[51] for some false peace of mind. From 1945 all the way through to the Vietnam War, packets were available for the emergency survival supplies of lifeboats, life rafts, and life jackets on military vessels and planes. Even the post-splashdown survival kits of the Mercury astronauts were stocked with Shark Chaser.
Through all of it, there’d been skeptics among the Navy brass. Rear Admiral Ross T. McIntire, Chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, made the eminently reasonable point that a package labeled SHARK CHASER in bold capital letters might in fact lower, not raise, morale, planting, as it would, the seed of terror in minds that had been, until that moment, occupied by the real threats of ocean survivaclass="underline" dehydration, starvation, drowning, heat, cold. Especially given the “negligible danger,” to use McIntire’s words, that sharks posed to Navy personnel.
How negligible? Opinions varied, but at one point in the proceedings, the Commander of the South Pacific Fleet issued a memo to all naval bases and hospital ships soliciting “authentic cases of injury to personnel from attack by sharks.” With all hands reporting, the final count was two cases. (One additional attack was later determined to have been a “vicious eel.”) The OSS responded in time-honored intelligence-agency style: They disappeared the report. “The report on shark attacks has been destroyed, as you requested,” reads an interoffice memo to Harold Coolidge from a staffer in December 1943.
It was another stink bomb for the OSS. They’d set out to develop a shark repellent based on one man’s experience and another’s political connections, with no solid data to support a need. If you look back at the Ecuador incident—the original impetus for all this—it really wasn’t a testament to the danger or ferocity of sharks. If anything, it was a testament to the disinterest and/or shyness of sharks. The flight officer was adrift in a life jacket for thirty-one hours, yet he emerged from the ocean unmauled by the retinue of sharks that followed him most of the way to shore.
If you wanted to preserve morale, the better approach would have been to share these reassuring facts and statistics. “Correct information,” wrote McIntire, “would be more universally operative in alleviating those fears than any repellent that could be devised.” Beginning in 1944, that is what the Navy did. Their Aviation Training Division distributed copies of a pamphlet called Shark Sense to all future fliers: 22 pages of comforting facts, illustrated with comic drawings of cringing, perspiring, fleeing (“HALP!”) sharks.
And it proved true. In a review of 2,500 aviators’ accounts of survival at sea during World War II, there were just 38 shark sightings, only 12 of which resulted in injuries or death.
As reassuring as it was, Shark Sense failed to address the most urgent questions on the minds of men afloat in the bedlam of a disaster at sea. Is it true that a shark can smell a drop of human blood in an ocean of seawater? Does noise arouse a shark’s curiosity, or scare it away? What about movement? Some accounts—including that of the swimming Ecuadorian—indicated that thrashing scared a shark away; others suggested it sparked their interest. No one really knew.
In 1958, the head of the Biology Branch of the Office of Naval Research, Sidney R. Galler, set out in pursuit of answers. He funded a shark research panel (the Shark Research Panel) and helped establish the Shark Attack File, a database of global incidents that continues today as the International Shark Attack File. David Baldridge’s statistical analysis of nine years of Shark Attack File data gave the world—I’m quoting a 2013 National Marine Fisheries Service paper here—“most of what we know today about shark attacks.” Much of the rest comes from studies the Office of Naval Research funded in the 1950s on shark predation, olfaction, and feeding behavior. “If you had a good idea for research on sharks,” Baldridge told the author of a historical account of shark research, published in Marine Fisheries Review, “you went to Sid.”
ALBERT L. Tester went to Sid. He had a good idea, he had three species of shark in the ocean outside his door, and he had a pair of fifty-foot-long seawater tanks for experimenting. Tester worked at the Eniwetok Marine Biological Laboratory in the Marshall Islands. (Eniwetok was one of the atolls, along with Bikini,[52] upon which the US had tested nuclear bombs; the lab provided data on the effects of radioactive fallout on sea life—and, if anyone tracked the obituary pages over the ensuing decades, Eniwetok staff.) Tester set out to determine what, specifically, draws a shark to its prey. Do sharks hunt mainly by sight or smell? If it’s smell, which smells? Whose smells? If repelling sharks wasn’t a reasonable option, a sailor or aviator’s best bet was not attracting them in the first place.
Let’s start with the good news. Human urine does not attract sharks. When presented with anywhere from a half teaspoon to a third of a cup, blacktip sharks in Tester’s tanks took no interest. Neither excited nor repelled, the sharks simply noted the substance, as evinced by a quick turn, or “swirl,” which is, I guess, how one acknowledges pee in the pool when one has no eyebrows to raise or shoulders to shrug.
Human perspiration is likewise uninteresting to the shark. It was sufficiently hot and humid in the shark house that Tester and his grad students were able to collect what they needed by sponging each other’s bodies and wringing the sponge into a bucket of seawater that was then quietly siphoned into the shark tank. In general, the sharks, and who can blame them, were mildly put off. The perspiration of Albert L. Tester was particularly repulsive to them. At concentrations as low as one part per million, Tester’s sweat caused a captive blacktip shark to shake its head and make “a rapid exit from the area.”
51
You may have heard stories about how Julia Child’s first recipe was for shark repellent. Her OSS employment file shows that she indeed worked for the head of the shark repellent project, Harold Coolidge, in the Office of Emergency Rescue Equipment in 1944. However, her title was Senior Clerk, and her name appears nowhere in the OSS shark files. Child herself made no claim to have come up with the recipe for Shark Chaser but said merely that she followed it, mixing the ingredients “in a bathtub.” This seems odd, as none of the other repellent prototypes were produced or tested at OSS headquarters. Leading me to wonder: Did she cook up Shark Chaser, or just a good story?
52
The creator of the two-piece swimsuit, Louis Réard, named it “bikini” because of the explosive reaction he hoped it would generate. The false prefix “bi” has duped many over the years—including the inventors of the monokini, the tankini, the trikini—into wrongly assuming that