Some sharks can likely tell which way humans are facing and tend to stay out of their field of vision, typically passing by or approaching people from the rear, new research suggests.
Although divers and shark scientists have noticed this tendency before, it hadn't been carefully documented, said Erich Ritter, a scientist at the Shark Research Institute in Florida. In a new study, published in December in the journal Animal Cognition, research volunteers kneeled on the seafloor for hours staring straight ahead, while interactions with Caribbean reef sharks were videotaped from above. About 80 percent of the time, reef sharks that came close to the subjects passed behind them.
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