New devices use an electric field to scare sharks from fishing hooks

A brand new gadget takes benefit of sharks’ sixth sense to ship the fish scurrying away from lethal hooks.

Sharks, rays and their family can detect tiny electrical fields, due to bulbous organs concentrated close to their heads known as ampullae of Lorenzini. So researchers developed SharkGuard, a cylindrical gadget that attaches to fishing strains simply above the hook and emits a pulsing, short-range electrical discipline. The gadget efficiently deters sharks and rays, in all probability by quickly overwhelming their sensory system, the scientists report November 21 in Present Biology.

Whereas many individuals are afraid of sharks, the concern makes extra sense the opposite manner round; quite a few shark species are prone to extinction, largely because of human actions (SN: 11/10/22).

One main drawback going through sharks and rays is bycatch, the place the creatures get unintentionally snagged by fishermen focusing on different fish like tuna, says David Shiffman, a marine biologist and college analysis affiliate at Arizona State College in Tempe.

Whether or not sharks and rays can be repelled or attracted by the electrical fields generated by SharkGuard units was an open query. The animals use their additional sense when searching to detect the small electrical fields given off by prey. So marine biologist Rob Enever of Fishtek Marine, a conservation engineering firm in Dartington, England, and his colleagues despatched out two fishing vessels in the summertime of 2021 — each outfitted with some regular hooks and a few hooks with SharkGuard — and had them fish for tuna.

In brief, the sharks wished nothing to do with the SharkGuard devices. Video reveals blue sharks approaching a hook with SharkGuard and veering away with no obvious hurt. When encountering an unadorned hook, sharks took the bait, changing into bycatch.

Hooks with the electrical repellant decreased catch charges of blue sharks (Prionace glauca) by 91 p.c in contrast with normal hooks, dropping from a mean of 6.1 blue sharks caught per 1,000 hooks to 0.5 sharks. And 71 p.c fewer pelagic stingrays (Pteroplatytrygon violacea) had been caught utilizing SharkGuard hooks, going from seven captured rays per 1,000 hooks on common to 2 rays.

A typical fishing boat like these used within the research has roughly 10,000 hooks. So a ship whose complete set of hooks had been outfitted with SharkGuard would go from catching about 61 blue sharks to five, and 70 pelagic rays to twenty.

Once you scale these numbers as much as the tens of millions of sharks and rays which can be unintentionally caught in longline fisheries yearly, Enever says, “you’re going to have large restoration of those pelagic shark populations.”

“It’s positively a notable and important impact,” says Shiffman, who was not concerned with the research. “If [the devices] went into impact throughout the fishing fleet that interacts with blue sharks, it might actually be excellent news for [them].”

However that doesn’t imply that SharkGuard is able to be rolled out. Tuna catch charges had been unseasonably low throughout the board on this research, which made it unimaginable to find out but whether or not tuna are additionally bothered by the gadget. If they’re, it wouldn’t make sense for fishermen to make use of the gadget in its present type.

The workforce can be working to make SharkGuard smaller, cheaper and as straightforward to handle as potential, in order that fishermen can “match and overlook” it. For instance, the present battery, which must be modified each couple of weeks, can be swapped for one that may be induction charged whereas the fishing line just isn’t in use, “like a toothbrush, mainly,” Enever says.

Shiffman want to see SharkGuard examined in numerous environments and on different kinds of sharks. “There are plenty of shark species which can be caught as bycatch on these longlines,” he says.

And whereas this invention appears efficient to date, no know-how will function a silver bullet for shark conservation. “Fixing this drawback of bycatch goes to require plenty of totally different options working in live performance,” Shiffman says.

The necessity for options is pressing. “We’re at a state of affairs now the place a lot of our pelagic species are both critically endangered, endangered or weak,” Enever says. However the brand new findings are “an actual story of ocean optimism,” he says. They present that “there’s individuals on the market … attempting to resolve these items. There’s hope for the long run.”