Citation Needed - Shark Repellent

Episode Date: August 19, 2026

A shark repellent is any method of driving sharks away from an area. Shark repellents are a category of animal repellents. Shark repellents are of interest to the commercial fishing industry as well as to swimmers, surfers, and other people in the ocean. Shark repellent technologies include magnetic shark repellent, electropositive shark repellents, electric repellents, and semiochemicals. Some electric repellents may reduce shark interactions with bait by about half, depending on the product, the type of shark, and other factors;[1][2] the other types are not expected to have a significant protective effect for swimmers.[3]

Hello and welcome. Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose the subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. This is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and I'll be leaving this expedition through shark-infested waters, and I'm joined by the rest of the flotilla.

Noah's Sharker. Nice. The apostasy worthy. Nice. Eli's SS-R-I. And C-S-S-R-I. And C-S-S-L. something Italian

Gallion. I got the high point of the fucking show is going to be the intro? Hell yeah. Jesus. All right, well, I do have two of everything, but it's just because I'm a paranoid hoarder,

but I like the name. And the patrons are the wind in my sales. Heath isn't going to acknowledge you guys, but I got you. I got you patrons. He's just going to run right into the episode with no foreplay whatsoever. Go ahead, Heath.

Ram it in. La, la, la, la, la, A, B, C, D, F. Just to wait and find out what letters they like. So, Noah, let's get into it. What person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event? We're going to be talking about today. The misguided quest to make shark repellent during World War II.

Okay. And what made you pick the story of shark repellent? Okay, so at the risk of taking a bunch of shit for reading books and liking authors like a nerd would. I need to credit the inimitable Mary Roach for this week's essay. She talked about this shit in a chapter of her book, grunt and as soon as I read it, I knew it belonged on this show. So yes, I'm totally copying off of her homework, but I'm using new jokes and I'm encouraging you to buy the book too. So I'm pretty sure it's okay. Yeah. And now she's imminentable. Yeah, exactly, exactly. She's pretty

happy about that. So up until World War II, the U.S. had never really fought naval battles in tropical water. Well, I mean, I guess we did during the Spanish-American War, but since they literally didn't manage to sink a single U.S. ship during that entire fucking war, that's zero to 14 by the way, that doesn't really count. U.S. Right? The exceptionalism. The only other major naval engagements in the U.S.

that we had when we weren't fighting ourselves were in World War I, and those were all done where it was cold enough to freeze to death long before you'd have to worry about sharks. Or else they were fought in fucking Lake Erie or Lake Champlain or something, also not known for their shark populations. But imagine the terror of the fire sharks of Erie would inflict on people. Come on. Yeah, right? How you get them? Now, but World War II, that's all U.S. forces engaged in all new parts of the globe,

and that meant our sailors were going to have to fight in shark-infested waters. And despite the fact that sharks aren't generally prone to eating humans, the very idea of it scared the fuck out of people, and even an irrational fear can have pretty detrimental effects on morale. So the U.S. military set about alleviating that fear by putting an insane amount of money and manpower into the search for an effect. shark repellates. Okay, I guess.

I mean, Nazis in the water. That's a pretty good start for like distracting sharks. So you could do that. Yeah, there you go. Speaking of which, Donald Trump recommends a boat with a batterer. Right. There's like a confusing scenario. So this story starts with a guy by the name of Henry Field.

He was an influential 20th century anthropologist, which sounds like a contradiction in terms, right? But he was a big deal. He's the field at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago is. named after. He was also the great nephew of the field that Marshall Field department stores were named after. And in 1941, he held a post called Anthropologist to the president, which apparently is no longer a thing. And I find that surprising given Trump's acumen in the field of person, woman, man, et cetera. Well, Stephen Miller does have some strong opinions on who is and isn't human. Maybe you take the title change. There you go. So in June of 1941, field, here's

this story of this Ecuadorian Navy pilot that went down in the Pacific. The pilot survived, but the colonel that was with him in the plane died. So the pilot decides he's going to carry the body along with him to the shore so he can get him a proper burial or whatever. So there he is, swimming along, tugging a bloated corpse through shark-infested water

thinking what could go wrong when he starts to see these dorsal fins popping up ahead of him. Hey, buddy, are you going to eat that? Sharko. So I'm going to quote the pilot, as quoted in Grunt, although I need to warn you that it's been translated out of Spanish by a person who's only heard of English in passing.

Quote, at a given moment, I felt that they, the sharks, that is, were trying to take away the corpse, pulling it by the feet, on account of which I clutched desperately the body of my companion, and together with him, we slid until the detention disappeared. Once refloated with despair, I toughed his legs. I'm sure that's supposed to be touched. Touched his legs and became aware that a part of them was lacking.

He had indeed skipped leg day. Okay. He didn't let the sharks have the body. I wouldn't bother burying someone if they had died in the hole. Okay. Let me explain. You know when you're like wrestling a dog over at you a chew toy and they're like, I was like, drop it.

Drop it. I gotta get the ones that are dried out. He's chewing through these, like crazy. He's just going right through it. So anyway, so Field reads this report, and it really sticks in his head, I guess. And since he had the ear of the president, he decided to use it.

He types up a memorandum on the importance of shark repellent, and he sent it to FDR. And to his credit, Roosevelt was like, yeah, fucking knock yourself out, man. Yeah, we got a guy painting foxes, with radium to scare Japanese people. I'm going to draw the line right here. No, God, do you have whatever you want?

Know whatever you want. It's kind of wacky times now. Yeah. So now, Field, he needs to find somebody to lead the project, and he thinks who knows more about sharks than a primatologist who runs a, works as a museum curator. So he goes to this dude named Harold Coolidge, who was apparently on the CIA payroll, except it wasn't called the CIA.

It was called the Office for Strategic Services or OSS. and some of these early strategic services required fucking gorilla experts apparently, but not so many of them that they couldn't spare Coolidge long enough to lead Fields' shark repellent project. Now, experts in human society and guerrillas, that's great and all. But what they obviously needed at this point was an expert on shark behavior, except here's the problem. There was no such thing. In 1942, nobody had bothered yet to know a hell of a lot about sharks. So their lead investigator that they hired was this guy, W. Douglas Burr.

who is an expert in Komodo dragons. That's close enough. Well, right, I guess they were like, well, you know, those are pretty bad ass. I mean, I get it because you've got to be like, all right, everyone. We need someone to be the world's first shark expert. And there's no easy way to say this, but the first guy who tries that is going to get eaten by a shark. Yes. No, that's fair.

You're going to get eaten by a shark. But the closest they could actually get to a shark expert, was this college dropout named Stuart Springer, whose previous work included commercial fishermen and solid contender for the answer to what do you do for a living least likely to get you laid. He also was a, quote, chemical engineer for the Indianapolis activated sludge plant, end quote.

Yeah, you're probably thinking to yourself, is there a big market for activated sludge in Indianapolis? But if you are thinking that, it's because you've never been to Indianapolis. It's pretty much a whole city. of activated sludge in my experience. That is the jewel of Indiana to you, sir. It is.

Somehow it is. The sludge is the best jewel. He said it was activated. It's compacted. It's compacted sludge. Exactly. Apparently they have like a plant of lazy sludge too. Yeah, right.

No, exactly. Well, that's not in Indianapolis. That's in Gary. Oh, man. The other sludge is posting on Facebook about how it's a gifted kid who's burned out. I don't think it was a gifted kid. So on July 3rd of 1942, the OSS approved funding for Project 374, a three-month investigation in the development of a, quote, means of protection against sharks, barracuda, and jellyfish for men adrift in life belts, end quote. Because they have so much in common, you see.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Scary sea shit. Now, this, this despite the fact that not a single person who had ever served in the U.S. Navy had ever served in the U.S. Navy had. ever been harmed by a shark in any way, nor a barracuda and nor, but for the odd sting here and there, a jellyfish. Didn't fucking matter. People were scared of them and that was making it harder to recruit naval pilots, though I don't think anybody was bowing out of pilot duty over fucking barracudas and jellyfish.

I think they just added that shit to make it sound like they were doing something scientific here. Don't worry, men. The guys in the Navy are already peeing on each other just in case. Good to now. All right. I'm trying to, it's just going all into the water. All right, here's what we do.

We're going to float on our backs next to each other. And then I can get up out of the water. I'll aim it sideways. You catch it. I had to stop in the middle. It stings. Hurry up. So first, they did the weirdest brainstorming session in the history of science,

and they tried the 79 substances that wound up on the blackboard when somebody said, name shit that might be shark kryptonite. And this list was eclectic. It included, among other things, insecticides, pine oil, vanilla, nicotine, asparagus, and horse piss. All right, now they're just addicted to sailors in the water and weird smelling pee. They think they're addicted to that. That's bad, right? So, and apparently none of that phased the sharks that they tested on, except for the insecticides, those actually could kill the sharks, but only in doses that would have long killed any human deploying them.

Well, I'm sure the grenades do smell, Tony, but that's not what we're doing here. Exactly. You can also just shoot them, I guess. So at this point, they turned to a bit of shark lore. From what Springer had heard as a fisherman, if you abandon a shark carcass on a bait line, it would ruin that area for shark fishing. So the Navy decided to rent a house in Florida and just they left a bunch of chunks of sharks sitting around at room temperature for four or five days. And then they blended.

Shock on the bedroom. You can have it. Then they blended all this. together. They stirred it up in alcohol and they filtered out the shark goos that was left over. And at that point, it looked like they might actually be on to something. Better be fucking ruined the smoothie blender. Now we can't have any. This is like pizza gate for sharks. Like it's insane. All right. So using this ground up shark goo, they ran a battery of experiments and Springer was delighted with the results. He was so impressed

with them. In fact, that one of their reports from the period said he was, quote, sufficiently convinced of the effectiveness of this concentrate that he would be willing to test it in a life belt with a bucket of blood, end quote. That's one of those things a motherfucker says because he knows he's not getting a called out on it, by the way. By his own estimate, the concentrate was only 90% effective and those numbers were wildly optimistic.

Boss walks in. Hey, the whiteboard says, Cannibal shark steroids, question mark. What? What are you doing at your job right now? What are we paying you for now? So, okay, so to this point, the team had only been testing on the docile little sharks that Springer and Burden had in their lab. The next test was to test it on wild sharks, but Springer argued that they should rush the repellent into production anyway, right?

He argued that field tests were just going to set production back by at least six months. And if some American sailor was to get eaten by a shark in that time, they'd all feel like a bunch of assholes. In fact, he even knew a guy. Yes, much like that. Eli in an opening sketch on Patreon, he actually had a guy that could carve up sharks for them, leave them out for a few days, and reduce them to goo. He ran a company called Shark Industries that specialized in shark skins and shark oils, and was also a Springer sometime and sometimes employer.

So the whole deal, forgive me in advance, smelled a bit fish. Nicely done. They actually used the same guy for the reflecting pole in D.C. recently. Yeah, the same guy. This is Rolodex. There's one card inside that says shark goo guy. And he's like, oh, here it is.

Hey, wait a minute. I found it. I can get rid of this Rolodex. Let's try this. The LSS at this point had at least a passing familiarity with logic, despite what you've heard so far. So they explained to Springer that you can't put everything into production

that might do something because everything might do something. Plus, they weren't sold on the idea of actually grinding up sharks as a means to make this shark reduction. After all, if the goo repelled sharks, there has to be some chemical ingredient that's doing that work. And whatever chemical it is, there's got to be a better way to get it than shark pulping. So they hired some chemists to try to isolate it. Okay. One of my favorite things about this program is these beautiful

moments of history where scientists have to duplicate a crazy person's lie. Right. Because they're not in on it. They're just like, Sorry, what? I don't think this is real. Yeah. You want me to invent divermectin? I don't even know if this isn't. I don't know.

We already did the experiments. You just got to isolate it or whatever. So ultimately their chemist returned a promising candidate, ammonium acetate. So they loaded up on that along with three other promising candidates, copper sulfate, Malayic acid, and 30 pounds of Springer's Floridian shark goo. And they set out to Ecuador to repel them,

some sharks. All right. Well, apparently, some guy's going to go chum the water with goo and be like, uh, da,

yeah. Uh, we'll see how that goes for them after a quick break. Oh, President Roosevelt. Agent Fields, come in.

Oh, are you a bit chilly, sir? Oh, uh, the blanket on my lap. Uh, yes,

yes, I'm, I'm chilly. Hmm. It's, uh, uh, the middle of summer.

And I have a boner. Cardet. So I was reading this report about a sailor. It was the darndest thing. Yes. Yes, sir. He was dragging this drowned shipmate of his to the ocean when a shark ate off the corpse's legs. And I just thought, well, that is it right?

Sure isn't. I love having legs. I would hate to lose mine. Right. Yes, no, that would be bad. So I was thinking... Because I have them. Yes, sir, yes.

So I was thinking... My legs. I have my legs, I mean. Yes, sir. You were saying, sorry. Yes. I'm sorry, can I make a shark repellent? Yep, go for it. Very good, sir. I will take my leave.

I'd stand up to shake your hand, but I hate you. Oh. My legs work great. Yes, no, yes, sir, they do. Yes. And we're back. When we left off, happy day. was definitely running out of ideas.

So what's next? All right. So, yeah, they're about to jump the fonts on this bit here. Yeah, so probably the weirdest thing about this topic is that when I first said shark repellent, the thing that immediately sprung to the mind of at least some significant percentage of our audience was American chef, author, and weird sing-talker Julia Child. That's a great description of her. Thank you.

The most common way that shark-repelling. enters a conversation is through the dubious factoid that Julia Child's first recipe was for shark repellent, which isn't true, but it is less untrue that you'd probably think. Less untrue than you'd think, the Eli Bosnick story. It's a little generous. Julia Child did work for the OSS, which we've actually discussed on this show before, check out episode 415, and she did work directly for Harold Coolidge at the time that Project 374 was underway.

And while she never claimed to have come up with the recipe, she did say that she had made some. There is, however, reason to doubt, or she talks about mixing that up in a bathub, which doesn't actually make sense in terms of what was done to mix this stuff. But she's far more shark repellent adjacent than I assumed going into this thing at the very least. So, anyway, so when we last left our heroes, they were heading to Ecuador to test out their various chemicals.

But this is where they first encountered the problem that would paradoxically be deviled this whole enterprise, sharks are really easy to repel. In fact, one guy who actually did some testing found that a kick on the nose from the leg of a rat swimming away from it was enough to deter most sharks. They were also repelled by things like boats and scientists and people dump in a bunch of weird shit in the water. So even when they chum the waters, it was really hard to entice sharks to come over and check it out. And when they did, you could repel them with virtually any placebo at hand because sharks are incredibly timid creatures. They finally settle on a waterproof speaker that just plays on repeat.

Sharks, get out of here, sharks! Get out of here! Go on now! Okay, brainstorming, brainstorming. What if we have like a gang of white tap dancers in there? Snapping on every nation. When you're a jet, you're a jet all the way. Eventually, the expedition managed to find some sharks that wouldn't fuck off the

second they scented humans. And that just brought more bad news. It turned out that none of the chemicals they brought had any real effect in a realistic dose. They could generate a more or less effective repellent by combining the ammonium acetate and the copper sulfate. But to make a difference, you'd need to deploy about three and a half pounds of the shit, which is not particularly useful since the whole idea is that this is something

that's just going to hang off your life belt. And you kind of want life belts to be free of three pound anchors. Okay. So admittedly, Johnson sank like a stone to the bottom of the ocean. But that corpse is fucking pristine down there. No sharks, yeah. There's not a... Now, I should mention, too, that there's a reason I'm talking about life belts instead of life vests.

Life vests would be introduced a little bit later in the war. So at this point, sailors just had this inflatable belt that they were supposed to always be wearing. So, like, that motherfucker would have wear and tear on it before it was actually used. Exactly what you want in a flotation device, right? A lot of wear and tear. but also the more it weighs, the more likely sailors are to find a reason to take it off. Another thing that you really don't want in a flotation device. Okay, well, nobody was wearing the hamster ball filled with chum that I came up with.

So we did belts, whatever. Now, at this point, the Navy's starting to lose patients. They've spent over $100,000 on this program, which would be like $2 million in today's money. And not only did they not have a shark repellent with a reasonable dosage, because they'd had to run around so much looking for sharks that could test this shit on, It was also starting to look more and more like these guys were just taking an awesome fishing expedition around South and Central America on the Navy's dime. Oh, man, the new girl made beef, bore and yon for dinner tonight. I mean rations.

We are meeting why. I say we're rations. Now, ultimately, the Navy yanked the project from the OSS and turned it over to the Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Laboratory, which, like, just from the name, sounds like those are the ones who should have been handling it from the start. And the first thing the NRL did was devise a more realistic test. So until then, they'd just been testing on like a single shark, either in a lab or in the ocean, being offered a piece of food. And if he went for the food, the repellent failed. If he didn't, the repellent succeeded.

But that wasn't remotely like the kind of shark relevant naval disasters the Navy was looking to guard against. They were thinking more along the lines of sinking ship filled with fucking humans, many of them already dead type situations. All right. Nobody be weird about this. does anyone have a human goo guy? I have a human goo guy. Okay?

I thought you might. I threw out my roller deck. And did? So the NRL sets up a more realistic test of what's known as a feeding frenzy. Because again, you can scare off most casual sharks with a rat's leg worth of a nose flick, right? But what they were worried about is a bunch of sharks already mid-meal, right? So in August in 1943, they brought a bunch of the copper acetate, which was still the most promising chemical derivative of the shark puree onto a shrimp trawler in Mississippi.

These ships were in the habit of tossing back, flailing, panicked, often injured fish that failed the test of, you know, being a shrimp. And so they regularly triggered feeding frenzies in the Gulf shark population. So the NRL scientists would wait until a feeding frenzy got going. Then they'd see how much copper acetate they'd have to dump in the water before that would stop the sharks from eating. And the answer turned out to be infinity. That was how much. They found that even if they put five or six pounds of the shit in the water, the sharks would barely even pause. At this point, at least one rational head prevailed in the form of Captain H. David Baldridge,

Jr., who wrote a paper called Analytic Indication of the Impracticability of Incapacitating an Attack Shark by Exposure to Waterborne Drugs. And the title pretty much spoils the ending. What he concluded was that there was no reason to think that any amount of anything that, It didn't kill the shark would get it to stop munching on an easy meal. Oh, fuck. Guys, kill the shark. We didn't think of kill the shark. Oh, we got all this killing stuff on the boat already.

Right, yeah, exactly. But the Navy never quits or some bullshit. So they kept at it when they realized that they weren't going to be able to repel the sharks, they figured maybe squids were onto something. And they tested ways to cloud up the water around downed pilots and sailors with an inky substance that would confuse the sharks. but that was fucking stupid and obviously couldn't possibly work because sharks don't hunt using their eyesight. So the Navy rushed this into production anyway. And from 1945 all the way through the fucking Vietnam War, packets of inky shark baffle were available in the emergency supplies for naval lifeboats and life jackets.

Apparently, they even gave some to the fucking Mercury astronauts for Splashdown. Okay. what about distracting them with magic tricks, guys? Kind of like that. All right, we're still brainstorming. So what about this? What if I, like, take my laser pointer and I shine like the pointer on one shark. You think they'll bunk heads with the other one?

So, CESL, I didn't have room for it in the essay anywhere, but there's actually a guideline that the Navy put out and may still put out that says that what you should do if there's a shark in the water with you is tear up a piece of paper and throw the shreds out which like a rip torn you're just throwing confetti

right exactly yes exactly you should do a rip where the fuck are you gonna find cadet when you're down in the ocean

right you're like oh I know just what to do does anyone have any confetti once that will go to party city with the shark

bring the shark to party they're in staples now and it's a little sad but it's okay you just kind of you just wall it off in your heart

you just pull it a long nap get out of your top pocket. Yeah, right, right. Confetti in there somewhere. I know I put it in there. But here's the thing about this whole stupid fucking story. Sharks don't eat people. Right?

Even when the USS Indianapolis sank, which is the worst case of shark gun, sailor violence, in human history, which we had a great chuckle about on episode 134, the vast majority of the people who died were killed by exposure or dehydration or drinking sea water or drinking fuel oil or injuries sustained when their ship was torpedoed or exhaustion or delirium or hypothermia, sharks barely made the top 10 cause of death

in the classic example of sharks killing sailors. Guys, I think no one might be a shark. He's podcasting about the Great White Replacing. Okay. There it is. Okay. Now,

supporters of the project argue that even if it was ineffective, it would alleviate the fear of shark attacks and could raise morale regardless, right? And since sharks are so uncommon to begin with, it's unlikely that people would learn how ineffective the shark baffle was. But skeptics pointed out that walking around all the fucking time with a package on your person marked shark repellent doesn't really make you think about getting eaten by a shark lass. Now, ultimately, since one out, more or less, as near as I can tell, the current naval strategy with sailors when it comes to sharks is on. honesty. They point out that attacks by sharks are exceedingly rare, that sharks are generally super timid, and that sharks don't really care for human, especially not living human. And whether or not it's as as squid ink shark confuser packets, it's at the very least cheaper.

That's true. All right. If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? They really should have focused on some kind of drowning repellent. Bullet repellent? I mean, like, you're in force. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Torpedo repellent? Are you ready for the quiz? Damn straight, I am. All right, Noah.

Which incredibly effective shark repellent was the Navy too afraid to try? Hmm. A. Fire. B. A specially bred antifish called the crass. Is that shark backwards?

Yes, it is. C. Telling the sharks about... Bread, not the food. the way you've written bread. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. See. Telling the sharks about the current baseball season.

I think the answer is secret answer D, just staying on land. Yeah, I'll do it. I guess every time. All right, Noah. When the repellent did not work. How did we achieve the post-war international order? A. We formed

Shark Mato. Oh, God. Bravo. Well done. Oh, shark nato. Amazing. I've been holding on to that one. All right. That's fucking amazing. I was so happy. I, yes. I get, you know, it's funny. I read it and I was like, I don't get it. And then as soon as I said it out loud, I'm like, oh, that's A. Obviously, the answer is A, that's goddamn brilliant. Correct. Okay, Noah, they had a bunch of ground up sharks that they had left over, so they sold it as a perfume. What was it called? A. Christian D. Or soul, B, Tiger Blood, C, Suez Canal number five, or D. Amore. Oh, nice. It's got to be D. Amore.

Correct. Noah, you got them all. You are the winner. All right. Well, I would like, for some reason, an Eli essay next week. All right. All right. Well, for Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Eli.

I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week. and Eli will be an expert asterisk on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to cognitive distance and no rogan experience. Dear old dads, godawful movies, the scathing atheist, the skeptocrat, and D&D Minus. If you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make up her episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes. Connect us on social media or take a little show notes. Check out citationpod.com. Sir, the Japanese have surrendered. Hazzar! I could jump for joy! Indeed, sir. With my legs. Correct. Right.

That'd work. Yep. I got it.