What to do when you have two successful cafes? Sell them and start another! Photo: BBC
When Collin and Simon Brooker decide to do something, they pull out all the stops. The father and son duo recently sold two of their businesses to fund a new kind of shark deterrent.
After developing two successful cafes in Cardiff, Wales, they saw an opportunity to create a new business, so they put their cafes on the market and raked in £250,000, or just over US$350,000. That money will be used to pay for the research they’ve got planned over the next two years.
Shark deterrents, of course, aren’t a new idea. But with everything from cayenne-filled surf wax and electronic tail pads on the market, many of them don’t exactly do what they’re supposed to do. I suppose, however, that peace of mind is worth something, but that only works if you believe that your shark deterrent is the reason that you’re not getting savaged by great whites.
Collin, who is 59 years old, came up with the idea a few years ago while living in Queensland, a place where shark attacks are often a topic of conversation. In very simple terms, their device uses something already in use in other deterrents: a man-made liquid that smells like rotting shark flesh. While you might’ve heard that sharks are attracted to carcasses (and you heard right), according to a study done back in 2004 off Bimini Island in the Bahamas, live sharks are deterred by dead ones.
Although the repellent is already in use, the Brooker team is in the process of creating a device that will essentially emit a halo around a surfer or diver. According to their early estimates, it could keep sharks away from up to three miles. It’s a small pill that sits in a plastic holder on a surfboard, slowly dissolving to send out a scent that only stingrays and sharks register.
While none of it has been proven yet, the pair is optimistic. “I sat down and said ‘how do you control a supposedly wild animal?'” Collin told the BBC. “You start looking at the senses—eyesight and ultrasonic sound are poor but its most powerful sense is smell.”
Admittedly, the two knew next to nothing about sharks or marine life in general, but like any good businessmen, they saw a problem and decided to find a solution. “A white shark can smell perhaps 5km away,” Collin continued. “We don’t want to scare it and all the defence mechanisms currently are last minute when it’s generally too late. How do we generate this feeling that it’s not safe, the pre-avoidance, what triggers that? What’s going to get a shark’s reaction to the point where it doesn’t want to go there? Maybe another dead shark? They’re intelligent animals. Most wild animals we see as predatory, which they are, need to eat but the prime objective is to survive. If we can trigger something in its brain to say, ‘it’s not safe,’ that’s the answer.”
According to Collin, commercial fishermen have known that dead sharks scare away live sharks for a long time. “For hundreds of years fishermen have learned to trawl a dead shark on their nets to keep sharks away,” he said, “but we’re commercializing that.”
Should the deterrent prove to be successful, they’re planning on selling the device to surfers for about $80 with the hopes of eventually selling to a larger market.
