Shark Attack Test- Human Blood vs. Fish Blood

this is a specialized human-shaped shark cage i designed and this is me in the middle of a shark feeding frenzy in that cage which is that happens doesn't actually keep the sharks out they're in the freaking cage but to understand how i ended up in the middle of the bahamas with buckets of blood surrounded by a butt ton of sharks we've gotta go back exactly one year because that's when i ran a test to see what really happens if sharks smell a drop of human blood in the water for that experiment i pumped out 15 drops of human blood per minute for an hour pretty close to a bunch of sharks that in the end just weren't really that interested so this busted the myth from the movies that sharks are these ruthless killers that just go crazy if they smell a drop of your blood from a mile away but those results made me really curious if the sharks would react differently to fish blood versus human blood and if they did go crazy for fish blood could i use that to put myself right at the center of a shark feeding frenzy and so to satiate my curiosity my friends at discovery helped me make my way back to the bahamas as part of shark week this year but this time i wouldn't be alone what up robes oh wow mark's jumping in on this what's up y'all look last shark week shark tried to kill me i think we'll have a little bit of science with robert a little bit of fun with dude perfect and a little bit of me all right you all ready to do this we were born ready sir all right chop chop let's get to it fellas we will not let you down looking forward to it see ya yeah i've got this idea for a bill to just really get me in close with the sharks uh last i that was me saying i'm finished with the call bro no of course yeah all right see you guys later let's get to it let's do it looking forward to it and so in the direction of shaq diesel it was time to head to the bahamas all that was left was to swab my nose to prove to the bahamian government that i didn't have coronavirus the only problem was my test came back positive and this just made me really sad because not only was i going to miss out on this epic adventure but as far as i was concerned i was basically just waiting to die and i had to interact with my family through the glass door to the backyard using a laser pointer and not even fat gus would get within six feet of me now i'm happy to say i eventually beat the rona and tested negative but the only problem now is i missed my chance because they were no longer accepting any commercial flights from america because we're number one baby so i was once again incredibly sad until i found a loophole because while you couldn't go to the bahamas on a public commercial flight there were no rules against going to the bahamas on a private jet and since this was the first and last time i would ever have my own personal g6 i acted like i've been here before like the true professional i am i mean mostly [Music] [Applause] [Music] put elon on hold and transfer to oprah and i should mention flying across country on your own plane isn't the most ecologically responsible choice so while i was in the air i utilized this website called teamtrees.org you might have heard of it to plant enough trees to suck up the carbon not only from my flight but the next 100 flights this plane would take in the end it's important you guys know i'm still super grounded and i didn't let the experience change me one bit and so now that i was in the bahamas the first thing i did was check it with my marine biologist shark diving expert buddy luke tipple because we need to figure out how to somehow get blood out of a fish the first thought is like can you just freaking blend a fish give it a shot i'll be over here dude you've clearly never seen will it blend there's a whole youtube channel dedicated to this [Laughter] okay i think if we add a little bit of water yeah oh yeah oh yeah this looks like the number 32 from jamba juice we tried a variety of other techniques and eventually started hitting our stride and the buckets started filling up [Music] if i could smell this that looks pretty delicious [Music] the good thing about mark is it's his stupid idea but he's not making other people do it i respect that about me too yeah [Applause] i also learned this is what fish skills look like on the inside they're like pages in a book to increase the surface area which maximizes the oxygen they can pull out of the water so we've taken about 20 fish with a little bit of help from the blender turn them into this farm a shark i'm like that's freaking delicious now that we had five gallons of mouth-watering fish blood smoothie it was time to get some answers we already know that sharks don't necessarily go nuts in the presence of a little bit of human blood but would they go nuts in the presence of a little bit of fish blood and as a firm believer in the scientific method it was time to test our hypothesis by heading out to sea once we were far enough from land luke and i came up with the game plan for the experiment basically we would have two surfboards in the water one would have a five gallon bucket of our fish blood smoothie and then another would have five gallons of human blood we would also have a third board that just had sea water as a control to make sure the sharks weren't just interested in the surfboards then we would pump out the contents of each of the buckets over the course of an hour and observe how many sharks approached each board and once we know which one they prefer after this we'll use that tomorrow in the cage just to create the most wild feeding frenzy right which sounds super fun to me because you're not in the cage and so with the plan in place all that was left to do was put the boards together and get them out with the sharks [Music] one of the limitations to last year's test was that the boards might have been too close to the boat so it's possible some of the sharks actually smelled the blood but didn't investigate it because they were just waiting for a handout from the boat so this time we basically placed the boards in the middle of the freaking ocean super far away from the boat so it wouldn't be a confounding variable oh and i should also mention we ended up using cow's blood because it's really hard to legally find five gallons of human blood and after talking with a couple shark scientists they've shown experimentally that all mammal blood essentially smells the same to sharks so it wouldn't affect the results to use cow blood in place of human blood so now that all three boards were in place we double checked to ensure each was anchored down to the ocean floor then i just had to start all three custom built pumps using our custom built remote trigger which is the exact moment i realized it must have got busted while being shipped out here because it wasn't sending a signal which sucks because there's absolutely no way to run the pumps manually luckily a trick i learned while working at nasa is you always build redundancy into your systems just in case so we have it in the code that if no remote start signal is received after an hour each of the pumps will just automatically start up on their own it's just a feature we never had time to test so we just had to firmly cross our fingers and hope for the best i'm hopeful we've had to overcome a lot to get here for this video what's one more little challenge and at exactly one hour right on cue the backup code kicked in and saved our whole experiment with blood now officially in the water we put the drone into the air and started our observations [Music] and things were pretty quiet for about the first 20 minutes but then we had our first hit on the mammal blood board shark yeah shark face oh yeah yeah but pretty soon thereafter things started heating up for the fish blood smoothie board oh my gosh there's one two three four five six seven eight nine 10 11 sharks around the fish smoothie board and then 10 minutes later things were only more intense here you can see the difference in activity between the three boards and while you're running an experiment and still collecting data you really need to keep an open mind but given what we were seeing it was getting pretty difficult to remain objective and so after an hour we called the experiment and went inside to officially tally up the results using the drone footage and it turns out the mammal blood board was approached eight times the seawater control board was at zero and the fish blood board had a whopping 134 approaches from a shark it definitely seems like this fish smoothie is where it's at right it's pretty obvious massive blob of sharks no sharks i think that's the go for tomorrow for maximum feeding frenzy now that we had a game plan for my feeding frenzy cage the next day we headed back to shore and to our hotel to get some rest for what was to come oh and fun side note if the only way to get to a vacation destination is by private jet it really cuts down on the crowds we literally had this whole resort to ourselves well almost to ourselves there were like 40 cats who apparently must also fly private we woke up bright and early the next morning feeling refreshed and headed right back out to sea where luke and i prepared some massive bags of fish blood smoothie for me to burst open once i went down it just seemed like a cool idea to make a cage to get in the middle of the fruiting frenzy until this moment now that they're making me put on freaking chain mail makes me reconsider my life choices if something terrible happens shaq you gotta take care of my family because this is all your fault and after several months of prep unfortunately it was time for me to get in it also just so happens i might have forgot to mention this part to my wife i'm not looking under the water yet on purpose she might have been under the impression i was just doing another experiment with surfboards and pumps sorry sweetie not only was i wearing 10 pounds of steel chainmail for protection but my vest is also filled with 20 pounds of lead weights that means i sank pretty fast but also that the buoyancy to weight ratios were perfect for giving me practice for walking on the moon that's one small step because like many of you i will definitely go to space in my lifetime again just haven't mentioned that to the wife yet all right you ready for the tip okay the face is coming behind you right now now that i have the fish smoothie bags and everyone was back at a safe distance i just had to pop these stupid things okay here we go oh this is crazy what are you doing okay the place is there we go oh my god [Music] [Music] oh the sharks were literally trying to eat me through the bottom of the cage so they left me no choice but to defend my honor yeah get out of my cage get out of my case i'm gonna kill you sir [Music] we knew all along that the most dangerous part would be when i exited the cage because they'd still be agitated and they'd be stoked to finally have access to the soft chewie center so the plan was for one of the other divers to distract them way off to the side with the bait box and then i would get out as silently as possible so they wouldn't notice me [Music] [Music] oh crap that was loud luke i need help man going away [Music] for me for this experience is that sharks have been on this planet longer than the dinosaurs or even trees have so they've had 400 million years of evolution to develop these instincts that are rewarded for smelling fish blood humans and cows would be an extremely rare delicacy so it makes sense that it's not just hardwired into their brains and so with all my limbs intact and with my curiosity fully satiated i will leave you with these profound words that in my defense might have been the drama means speaking as humans we're always the predator and not really ever the prey but this gave me a sense of what it's like to be a tuna fish if you're tired of staring at a screen this summer and you're looking for some excitement and yet swimming with 20 sharks and a bunch of blood seems a bit extreme then my friends at kiwico have got you covered as you probably know by now they deliver these really cool monthly crates that are designed to foster your creativity as a maker and creator and be super fun at the same time they all come with really simple kid-friendly instructions plus all the supplies you'll need to put it together so there's never any extra trips to the store each one also includes a booklet that talks about the science principles and where you might see examples of this in real life lots of people have told me i should make my own subscription box but it just doesn't make sense because i honestly don't know what i would improve this is exactly how i would do it i'm also friends with their founder sandra and i can vouch that she's doing this for all the right reasons they have eight different crate lines that cover the full steam spectrum from science and engineering to art and design geared toward all different ages as well so if you want to support my channel and protect yourself from summer brain drain go to kiwico.com markrober or use the link in the video description to get your first box free this also makes for a really great gift for any young person in your life so thanks to kiwico for being so awesome thanks to the sharks for not eating me thanks to you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Mark Rober

Views: 31,298,336

Rating: 4.8733363 out of 5

Keywords: sharks, sharkweek, jaws, shark attack, blood in water, Discovery

Id: vePc5V4h_kg

Length: 17min 53sec (1073 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 09 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/rover24741]

I was curious how long he had the virus for. At 2:01 mark of the video, it's written that the testing date was 7/19/2020, when he was found positive.

At 2:23 mark, when he was found negative, the testing date was also 7/19/2020. Am I misreading something here?

[u/EchoTab]

They didnt use just fish blood though, maybe the sharks were more interested in the meat than the blood?

[u/Zootpak]

my heart has never raced so fast during a fucking mark rober video

[u/gurrddurrr]

Honestly kinda upset about him skirting around the rules with the private jet. I’m not sure if he addressed it because I stopped watching after that but if places don’t want Americans to travel to their country you should probably should respect that.

[u/RotPunktEUW]

Was I the only one that was weirded out how he handled and blended the dead fish?

[u/ParkourPaul]

can someone please tell me the name of the song at 3:00? cuz i've been looking for a while now, and i still can't find it. someone please help me out