LED lights on underside of surfboards may deter great white shark attacks
Australian-led
study using seal-shaped decoys finds lighting disrupts ability of
predators to see silhouettes against sunlight above
Using LED lighting on the underside of surfboards or kayaks could deter great white shark attacks, new research suggests.
In an Australian-led study using seal-shaped decoys, underside lighting disrupted the ability of great whites to see silhouettes against the sunlight above, reducing the rates at which the sharks followed and attacked the artificial prey.
The brighter the lights, the more effective the deterrent was.
The study’s lead author, Dr Laura Ryan of Macquarie University in Sydney, said white sharks seemed to rely on the visual cues of a dark object silhouetted against a lighter background. “If you flip that to a light object on a dark background, then it doesn’t seem to be something they recognise as prey,” she said.
Ryan’s previous research on great whites suggests that attacks on humans may be a case of mistaken identity.
The animal has a far lower visual acuity – the ability to see shapes and details – than humans.
Her work has suggested that juvenile great white sharks, from below, are unlikely to be able to clearly tell seals apart from swimmers or people paddling surfboards.
A great white shark breaches to bite a seal decoy in Mossel Bay, South Africa.
Photograph: Nathan Hart/Macquarie University
Other research has shown that sharks are colour-blind or at best have only limited colour perception abilities.
The new study, conducted in Mossel Bay, South Africa, involved towing decoys behind a boat for dozens of hours.
The researchers initially found success by covering the underside of the decoy entirely in lights.
“But if you’re actually going to come up with something to protect people, [entirely] covering a surfboard … is just not practical because it’s a huge amount of lighting, which needs a huge amount of battery power,” Ryan said.
The researchers experimented with more sparse lighting options, finding that horizontal stripes of LED lights had a similar deterrent effect.
“When you do horizontal stripes, the silhouette [appears] wider than it is long, so it’s less like a seal,” Ryan said.
Longitudinal strips of light, however, were not effective, nor were strobe lights, which gave the sharks momentary glimpses of the decoy silhouette.
“Interestingly, just that small glimpse of the entire silhouette was enough for the white sharks to start biting the decoys,” Ryan said.
The scientists towed the seal decoy to encourage the white sharks to breach – one form of hunting involving rapid acceleration to the surface to catch prey.
They say more research is required into shark behaviour with static decoys, which would resemble surfers waiting to catch a wave rather than actively paddling.
The team is testing a surfboard prototype with fitted lighting. “Surfers can be a little bit fussy with their surfboards,” Ryan said.
“As a surfer, I want it to be usable.”
Globally, most shark bites are associated with people surfing or taking part in other board sports.
Fatal shark bites, though rare, are mostly due to great whites.
The study, published in the journal Current Biology, noted it would be important to test whether lighting was also effective in deterring other speciesthat attack humans, including bull sharks and tiger sharks, as these have different predation behaviours.
Shipwrecks and other potential threats to navigation off the Bay of Plenty coast are being captured in a hydrographic survey of the seabed.
Among things detected by experts from Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (Linz) is a large digger, believed to have fallen off a barge travelling between Maketu and Motiti Island more than 15 years ago.
The discovery was made by contractor Discovery Marine Ltd, which was conducting the survey.
The 4m tall digger is sitting upright in 12m of water, with the top of the digger 8m below the surface.
A Linz spokesperson said the high-resolution images captured by the survey team showed the digger seemingly undisturbed for over a decade.
“It’s great to see it in such detail after all this time.”
This discovery is part of a larger, ongoing hydrographic survey that aims to update nautical charts and improve safety for mariners navigating the waters of the Bay of Plenty.
The survey is being conducted to capture a wide range of underwater features, including shipwrecks, rocks, and other natural formations that could pose hazards to navigation.
Survey boat MV Tranquil Image conducts surveys of the seafloor.
Photo/Discovery Marine Ltd.
Linz officials said while the digger might not pose an immediate risk, its discovery highlighted the importance of surveying the seafloor to ensure that charts remained current and accurate.
The survey began in early November and will continue into 2025. Using advanced multi-beam echosounder technology, the survey boat MV Tranquil Image scans the seafloor, collecting data to generate detailed 3D images.
These images will then be used to update New Zealand’s nautical charts, which are crucial for the safe navigation of commercial ships, recreational boaters, and other marine vessels.
“This work is essential for ensuring the safety of mariners who navigate these waters, whether they are local fishermen or large shipping vessels,” said Annette Wilkinson, senior hydrographic surveyor at Linz.
“We’re also capturing valuable data that can be used for scientific research, like tsunami modelling and marine resource management.”
Image of the digger mapped on the Bay of Plenty seabed. Image/ LINZ/Discovery Marine Ltd.
The data will help build a clearer picture of the underwater environment, enabling safer routes for ships to follow as they approach ports and wharves in the Bay of Plenty.
As part of this project, Linz is also gathering data on the shape of the seafloor, which can be important for various scientific endeavours, including understanding how the coastline and marine ecosystems might respond to natural events like tsunamis.
A second survey vessel, the Tupaia, will map the shallower waters off Ōpōtiki in early 2025.
The survey work is being carried out in two phases: the first focusing on the offshore areas around Tauranga and Whakatāne, and the second concentrating on the shallower waters closer to shore.
Once the data from the survey is processed, it will be made available to the public via the Linz Data Service.
This will allow not only mariners to access the updated charts but also researchers, planners, and conservationists to use the data for various environmental and scientific purposes.
The survey also fills in important data gaps and helps improve the resolution of existing nautical charts, which is particularly useful for areas with heavy marine traffic.
“The more accurate and up-to-date the charts are, the better-equipped mariners are to navigate safely and avoid underwater hazards,” Wilkinson said.
Map showing digger location in the Bay of Plenty.
Visualization with the GeoGarage platform (Linz nautical raster chert)
The data collected from this survey will also support the development of tools for managing New Zealand’s marine resources and improving our understanding of the seafloor.
Linz said these 3D models would be particularly helpful in marine conservation, providing a more detailed understanding of the habitat and the types of underwater features that might be significant for marine life.
Linz has also encouraged the public to keep an eye out for the survey boats operating in the Bay of Plenty over the summer.
“If you see the survey boats out on the water, give them a wave from us,” said the spokesperson, highlighting the importance of public awareness and support for the surveying effort.
New data is used to map a volcano-like feature discovered this fall by science teams aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, a polar-class icebreaker used for Arctic research.
The scientists found the structure on the continental slope off northern Alaska.
It rises from the seabed about 585 meters, but it is at least 1,600 meters below the sea surface, according to the scientists.
The discovery was made during the first phase of a project to better map the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas north of Alaska along a corridor that the Coast Guard is proposing as a preferred shipping route between Utqiaġvik and the U.S.-Canada maritime border in the Beaufort Sea.
(Image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)
While under way off the coast of Alaska on a survey mission, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter USCGC Healy and an embarked science party found a previously-uncharted volcano-like feature, like a small seamount.
USCGC Healy finished up a repair period in Seattle on October 1 and got under way for a rare late-season Arctic deployment.
Her first mission was to deploy oceanographic buoys and conduct surveys along a portion of the Coast Guard's proposed Alaskan Arctic Coast Port Access Route Study corridor, a planned route connecting the village of Utqiagvik on Alaska's North Slope to the U.S.-Canadian border demarcation in the Beaufort Sea.
During the first phase of the survey, Healy's sonar revealed a volcano-like feature about 585 meters tall protruding from the seabed, with a minimum depth below the surface of about 1,600 meters.
The science party also detected signs of what may be a gas plume rising from the feature - a common feature for volcanic seamounts.
The area has very little marine traffic, and it was only lightly surveyed in decades past.
Many parts of the Arctic lack detailed bathymetric charts, and the new surveyed routes are intended to ensure safe navigation for deep-draft shipping.
"These findings are exciting and offer insight into what may exist beneath the ocean's surface, much of which is unknown in this region," said Capt. Meghan McGovern, the commanding officer of NOAA survey ship Fairweather and a member of the Healy's mapping team.
U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy crewmembers retrieve a measuring instrument from the Chukchi Sea on Oct. 30, 2024.
(Image credit: U.S. Coast Guard photo by Senior Chief Petty Officer Matt Masaschi)
A NOAA team from Fairweather is embarked aboard Healy to add hydrographic survey expertise for the mission.
They are using the icebreaker's multibeam sonar to produce detailed, precise measurements of the seabed along the proposed deep-draft shipping route.
After completing the first elements of the mission, Healy returned south through the Bering Strait and called at Dutch Harbor.
In a statement, the Coast Guard said that her mission continues.
The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy maneuvers off the coast of Nome on Oct. 24.
(Photo by Senior Chief Petty Officer Matt Masaschi/U.S. Coast Guard)
Healy sustained a fire in a transformer room on July 25 while operating off of Banks Island, near the western entrance to the Northwest Passage.
While her propulsion remained functional, as a precautionary measure she returned to Seattle early, arriving August 16. She got back under way once more on October 1.
Healy is one of the Coast Guard's two seagoing icebreakers, along with the 1976-built USCGC Polar Star. Links :
As we kick off Week 1 of the 101-day underwater challenge, our enthusiasm is driven by our passion for ocean living and our vision for the future.
Our mission is straightforward: to establish a Guinness World Record with Rudiger Koch, Co-Founder of Ocean Builders, by spending over 101 consecutive days in the underwater room of Alpha Deep.
At a depth of 11 meters off the coast of Panama, German aerospace engineer Rüdiger Koch has been living for two months in a capsule attached to a futuristic house built over the waters of the Caribbean Sea.
With his unusual adventure, which he plans to continue for another two months, the 59-year-old aims to set a Guinness World Record and prove that it’s possible to live and work comfortably underwater.
“Moving to the ocean is something we should consider. It’s much more peaceful down here; it’s not like city life. All you hear are the waves and the faint sound of fish,” Koch said to journalists in English from his underwater capsule.
The 30-square-meter capsule includes a portable toilet, a bed, a TV, a computer, a stationary bike, and fans.
The only visits permitted are those of the press, a doctor and his family.
He also has satellite internet and solar power, along with a small generator, but no shower. “I wake up at six, follow the news, work a bit, and then make breakfast to deal with the daily tasks,” Koch explains. On a small table, he keeps a copy of his favorite book, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by 19th-century French novelist Jules Verne.
A fan of Captain Nemo, Koch began his challenge on September 26 and plans to resurface on January 24, aiming to surpass the record for the longest time spent underwater without decompression.
The current record is held by Joseph Dituri, who spent 100 days submerged in a habitat in a Florida lake.
Two large digital clocks, each a meter wide, track the days, minutes, and seconds he has completed and how many remain.
German engineer Rudiger Koch is attempting to live underwater for 120 days, in a submerged home off the coast of Panama
(Photo by Martin Bernetti / AFP)
Turquoise Windows
The floating house, located near the coast of Puerto Lindo in Portobelo, is accessible by a 15-minute motorboat ride from the Linton Bay marina.
The circular house, with 360-degree windows, is mounted on a cylindrical structure.
To enter, one must climb a hanging ladder or use a hoist.
Inside, a narrow spiral staircase descends through the cylinder to Koch’s submerged cabin.
“It’s not particularly hard. I don’t feel like I’m suffering down here at all, although the hardest part is that sometimes I want to go diving,” he admits.
From the circular windows of his capsule, Koch can see fish of various sizes.
“You have a very different view,” he says, with the turquoise waters in the background. Koch notes that the material of the capsule he lives in is environmentally friendly.
Its exterior walls are made of a material similar to shells, which can host corals and fish.
The underwater capsule is attached to a house on a metal cylinder above the water.
(Photo by MARTIN BERNETTI / AFP)
A Good Shower
Four cameras monitor Koch to ensure he doesn’t abandon his mission and that everything is going smoothly.
Above in the house, Israeli safety expert Eial Berja tracks his movements on a screen.
“We’ve had winds, waves, and rainstorms that made it impossible to see anything. We’re alone in the middle of the ocean,” says Berja, who recounted how a recent storm nearly derailed the plan.
Koch receives food from the surface and is visited by a doctor and his two children.
“The last time I checked, I was still married,” he jokes about an upcoming visit from his Thai wife.
“We decided to go for the Guinness World Record to show the world that it’s possible to innovate and live underwater,” says Canadian Grant Romundt, who co-founded a company with Koch that has already built three floating houses in this part of the Panamanian Caribbean.
The research represents a shift in how we may predict the weather.
Google DeepMind has unveiled an AI model that’s better at predicting the weather than the current best systems. The new model, dubbed GenCast, is published in Nature.
This is the second AI weather model that Google has launched in just the past few months. In July, it published details of NeuralGCM, a model that combined AI with physics-based methods like those used in existing forecasting tools. That model performed similarly to conventional methods but used less computing power.
GenCast is different, as it relies on AI methods alone. It works sort of like ChatGPT, but instead of predicting the next most likely word in a sentence, it produces the next most likely weather condition. In training, it starts with random parameters, or weights, and compares that prediction with real weather data. Over the course of training, GenCast’s parameters begin to align with the actual weather.
The model was trained on 40 years of weather data (1979 to 2018) and then generated a forecast for 2019. In its predictions, it was more accurate than the current best forecast, the Ensemble Forecast, ENS, 97% of the time, and it was better at predicting wind conditions and extreme weather like the path of tropical cyclones. Better wind prediction capability increases the viability of wind power, because it helps operators calculate when they should turn their turbines on and off. And better estimates for extreme weather can help in planning for natural disasters.
Google DeepMind isn't the only big tech firm that is applying AI to weather forecasting. Nvidia released FourCastNet in 2022. And in 2023 Huawei developed its Pangu-Weather model, which trained on 39 years of data. It produces deterministic forecasts—those providing a single number rather than a range, like a prediction that tomorrow will have a temperature of 30 °F or 0.7 inches of rainfall.
GenCast differs from Pangu-Weather in that it produces probabilistic forecasts—likelihoods for various weather outcomes rather than precise predictions. For example, the forecast might be “There is a 40% chance of the temperature hitting a low of 30 °F” or “There is a 60% chance of 0.7 inches of rainfall tomorrow.” This type of analysis helps officials understand the likelihood of different weather events and plan accordingly.
These results don’t mean the end of conventional meteorology as a field. The model is trained on past weather conditions, and applying them to the far future may lead to inaccurate predictions for a changing and increasingly erratic climate.
GenCast is still reliant on a data set like ERA5, which is an hourly estimate of various atmospheric variables going back to 1940, says Aaron Hill, an assistant professor at the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, who was not involved in this research. “The backbone of ERA5 is a physics-based model,” he says.
In addition, there are many variables in our atmosphere that we don’t directly observe, so meteorologists use physics equations to figure out estimates. These estimates are combined with accessible observational data to feed into a model like GenCast, and new data will always be required. “A model that was trained up to 2018 will do worse in 2024 than a model trained up to 2023 will do in 2024,” says Ilan Price, researcher at DeepMind and one of the creators of GenCast.
In the future, DeepMind plans to test models directly using data such as wind or humidity readings to see how feasible it is to make predictions on observation data alone.
There are still many parts of forecasting that AI models still struggle with, like estimating conditions in the upper troposphere. And while the model may be good at predicting where a tropical cyclone may go, it underpredicts the intensity of cyclones, because there’s not enough intensity data in the model’s training.
The current hope is to have meteorologists working in tandem with GenCast. “There’s actual meteorological experts that are looking at the forecast, making judgment calls, and looking at additional data if they don’t trust a particular forecast,” says Price.
Hill agrees. “It’s the value of a human being able to put these pieces together that is significantly undervalued when we talk about AI prediction systems,” he says. “Human forecasters look at way more information, and they can distill that information to make really good forecasts.”
Survey boat MV Tranquil Image conducts surveys of the seafloor. 
Image of the digger mapped on the Bay of Plenty seabed. Image/ LINZ/Discovery Marine Ltd.
Survey boat MV Tranquil Image coming into Whakatāne Harbour. Photo/Annette Wilkinson/LINZ
New data is used to map a volcano-like feature discovered this fall by science teams aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, a polar-class icebreaker used for Arctic research.
