Anti-Shark Warjare 125 



But a 3-foot Dogfish in a laboratory tank is not a 20-foot Great 

 White shark charging a man in the open sea. So the experiments were 

 shifted to Florida, where the researchers hoped to test their potential 

 repellent against real man-eaters. 



They couldn't find any sharks! 



The scientists, aided by local fishermen, scoured the Florida coast 

 from St. Augustine to Jacksonville. No sharks. Navy and Coast Guard 

 submarine-chasers were assigned to hunt sharks in Cuban waters. No 

 sharks. Ernest Hemingway offered his services, and gave the frustrated 

 shark hunters some locations where he had caught sharks. There were 

 no sharks to be found, at least in the numbers the repellent project 

 needed. 



The problem became a matter of international diplomacy. On De- 

 cember 1, 1942, Secretary of State Cordell Hull cabled the American 

 Embassy at Quito, Ecuador. After briefly describing the shark project, 

 Hull ordered: 



"... You are requested to secure permission from the Ecuadorian 

 government for the . . . necessary investigation of the territorial waters 

 of Ecuador . . . You are also authorized to transmit reports from the 

 investigators via diplomatic pouch. Please take up this matter on an 

 urgent basis and report by telegraph." 



Even with the aid of the United States Department of State and the 

 government of Ecuador, the shark hunters could not find sharks. Near 

 the island of La Plata, 25 miles off the coast of Ecuador, sharks had dis- 

 rupted a dolphin-hunting expedition two years earlier by massacring 

 all the dolphins the hunters caught. This would seem to make La Plata 

 a good place to find sharks. But the frustrated shark hunters got only 

 an occasional one there. They moved on, from one place to another, and 

 the sharks still eluded them. 



They finally found a spot, near the mouth of the Guayaquil River, 

 and there, for 16 days, the scientists tried out their "dead shark" re- 

 pellent. Actually, the repellent was the chemical equivalent of what 

 seemed to be the ingredient in decomposed shark that was so repulsive 

 to live sharks. This chemical— copper acetate— produced startling re- 

 sults. Sharks struck again and again at baited lines unprotected by the 

 repellent. But they avoided the adjacent baited line, identical with the 

 others except for the repellent, which was suspended in a bag directly 

 above the bait. 



Convinced that the repellent worked on individual sharks, the ex- 

 perimenters next tried it on a pack of sharks in a feeding frenzy. Samples 

 of the repellent were dispatched to St. Augustine, Florida. The shrimp 

 fishermen who work off^ the St. Augustine coast throw away as "trash" 

 small fish that have been scooped up with the shrimp, and the cleanings 



