A man covered himself in blood to check if sharks would attack him, and the result was terrifying.
Yeah, sounds like the stuff of a crazy person, right?
Well, this was actually a fully planned out experiment, and it came a year after the same bloke dropped human blood into the sea to see how the sharks would react.
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Former NASA engineer turned YouTuber, Mark Rober, took to the Bahamas back in 2019 to conduct his science experiment, alongside marine biologist and shark diving expert Luke Tipple.
Dropping his own blood into the sea, he said that over an hour, ‘zero sharks’ came to ‘check out 15 drops of human blood a minute’.
He claims this busted the film myth that sharks ‘are these ruthless killers that just go crazy if they smell a drop of your blood from a mile away’.
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So, in 2020, he returned to the Bahamas and checked back in with Tipple to figure out how to get blood from a fish.
Eventually they used a blender to make ‘five gallons of mouth-watering fish blood smoothie’ to see if sharks would ‘go nuts in the presence of a little bit of fish blood’.
They then took that out to sea to compare the sharks reaction between fish and human blood – well, they used cow’s blood as a replacement.
With 134 approaches from a shark for the fish compared to eight for the mammal blood, it was decided to use fish blood for the big experiment.
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And it’s quite the experiment. The next day, Rober went down into an underwater shark cage and popped bags of the ‘fish smoothie’ around him.
As the water surrounding him began to fill with the blood, he was quickly screaming as sharks swarmed.
“Here they come!” someone shouted, as Rober let out a fair few shrieks and ‘oh my god’s.'
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He did let out some laughs as he said: “Look at those teeth… they want to eat me real bad.”
The sharks began circling the cage as one even squeezed its head in. “This is certifiably insane!”
Yeah, you’re probably right mate.
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The bigger danger came as Rober needed to escape the cage. So, a nearby diver ‘distracted’ the sharks with a bait box as he sneaked out.
However, he began to panic as the sharks started to come back to the cage and even seemed to attack the cameras.
Rober managed to get out unscathed (if not a little shaken up).
“As humans we’re always the predator and not really ever the prey,” he said.
“But this gave me a sense of what it’s like to be a tuna fish.”
Deep.
Jess Battison