ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
“A shark can detect a single drop of blood in an Olympic-size swimming pool.” Like most scientists who study sharks, Jelle Atema of Boston University has heard this old saw again and again. But scientific evidence for this “fact” is conspicuously lacking. The widespread belief in statements like this one speaks to the public’s fascination with sharks, but the myths also contribute to unnecessary fear of the animals.
From his laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, Atema is working to change the popular perception of sharks by attaching real numbers to their sensory capabilities. He’s currently working to pin down the animals’ behavioral olfaction threshold: the concentration of odor in the water that initiates a tracking behavior in sharks.
In Atema’s experiments, ...
