Numlock Sunday: November 18, 2018

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with a writer behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about the story they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Munyaradzi Makoni who recently wrote “Many Shark Repellents Don’t Work” in Hakai Magazine. Here's what I wrote about it:

A team of scientists investigated the actual efficacy of five shark repellents and came up severely wanting. They ran 297 trials with 44 great whites interacting with bait 1,413 times. Four of the products — electronic wearable Rpela, two Sharkbanz products and Chillax surf wax, the last of which allegedly smells bad to sharks and the rest which purport to overwhelm shark electroreceptors — had little or no measurable effect on great white shark behavior. The last of them, an electroreceptor device called the Freedom+ Surf, did score the best. Usage meant that the percentage of the time that sharks took the bait fell from 96 percent to 40 p…