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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
by: Bob Gilbert

Four people died during 59 unprovoked shark attacks around the world last year, according to the International Shark Attack File (ISAF). 

Video: Saving Sharks - Eric Stroud discusses his work in the labs at Seton Hall

     On the other side of the ledger, millions of sharks were inadvertently killed by the gill nets and long-line hooks used in commercial fishing. Someday, though, if work by a Seton Hall graduate student pans out, none of these human-shark encounters need be fatal.

     At least that’s the idea of Eric Stroud, a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry, whose research at Seton Hall is focused on isolating the right ingredients — and  developing a timed-release mechanism — for a shark repellent that really works. 

    Back in 2001, Stroud, a chemist, pharmaceutical-industry consultant and part-time graduate student, founded the company Shark Defense, around this idea. His company is exploring two types of solutions to the problem: electromagnetic devices and semiochemicals, which work like pheromones. At the University, Stroud, along with Professor James E. Hanson, Stroud’s research mentor and adviser, and Professor Nicholas H. Snow, an expert in gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, concentrate on the semiochemicals.

    The idea was first expressed by Stroud’s wife, Jeannie, during a vacation in 2001. As he recalls, “All of the U.S. press and media seemed to be covering every single shark encounter that occurred – every nip and bite.”
   Stroud and his wife were on a cruise ship to Bermuda. Rained in one day, they found themselves watching the feverish shark coverage on TV. Jeannie turned to her husband and asked: “Why isn’t there a shark repellent?”
 
   Stroud didn’t know. But he told her, “Let me look at the literature.”What he was able to find wasn’t much. Indeed, there wasn’t much known, except for the fishermen’s lore that rotten shark carcasses seemed to rid waters of live sharks. This theory was amplified during World War II as the U.S. government sought to protect sailors and downed fliers in the Pacific Ocean.
 
   What emerged was a standard U.S. military shark repellent kit issued to servicemen and used through the Vietnam conflict. Early researchers had made a couple of good guesses about the ingredients in rotten shark meat that drove away live sharks, Stroud says, but the kit turned out to be only marginally effective.
 
   The shark-repellent question turned into a consuming interest for Stroud, who had worked on product development for Pfizer Consumer Health Care and for Merck & Co. from 1995 through 2001. The idea captivated him, even though he was not a biologist with any marine biology training.
 
   Stroud didn’t quit his day job, but three weeks after his wife asked the key question, he was communicating with Professor Samuel Gruber of the University of Miami, who has spent more than 40 years studying sharks. Gruber had tested and written about the effects of a chemical repellent based on secretions from the Mose Sole, a flatfish found in the Red Sea. But the effort “had gone cold,” Stroud says, about a decade before the two men met.
 
   Stroud soon turned his interest into a second career. He launched Shark Defense that September. And for the next two years, “all I had was paperwork and ideas,” he says, as he worked to set up a shark lab in Oak Ridge, N.J., complete with 2,000-gallon saltwater tanks and live sharks shipped in from the Florida Keys.
 
    Progress was slow. “At first, all I did was work on the water quality.” But as his imported sharks started to survive in the tanks, he began experimenting.
 
   The most fruitful finding was a mixture of liquids he harvested from the original sharks that had died in his tanks. “I took some of that fluid and put it into the tank. Immediately, the sharks’ behavior changed.” In short, they fled the area.
 
    In April 2003, Stroud met Gruber in the Bahamas to begin testing his mixture – a combination of more than a dozen compounds – on the shark species that thrive in the area, particularly Caribbean reef and blacknose sharks. As with the sharks in Oak Ridge, when Stroud introduced the extract into the water, “they all dropped their food and headed out.”The same experiment worked three more times that weekend, and a long- term research partnership was established with the Bimini Biological Field Station.
 
    But what exactly was in the fluid? For the next few years, Stroud did not come any closer to the answer than the U.S. Navy had in the 1940s. Meantime, Stroud had become aware of two counterintuitive facts about sharks:
     Statistically, the number of shark attacks on humans is not growing rapidly. Shark attacks have varied between 36 and 79 incidents worldwide per year over the last 20 years, according to the ISAF.
 
    Also, the biggest danger in shark-human encounters is not to humans, it’s to the sharks. “Somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 sharks are taken each week in commercial fisheries,” Stroud says. The sharks are caught in nets or hooked on long lines where they die before they can be released. This is a disaster to both nature and the fishing industry, which suffers damage to equipment and lost opportunities. “Moreover, we are taking the apex predator out of the food chain,” he says.
   
    Stroud says the tuna industry is particularly hard on sharks, and in 2004 he tested his repellent — with excellent results — for the industry at a research facility in Achotines, Panama. ‘The fish didn’t mind the repellent at all,” he says. “Actually, it looked like they loved it.”
 
   At that time, Shark Defense was still personally funded by Stroud as “a combination hobby and start-up.” He still didn’t know why his mixture worked, but he knew he needed money to continue his research. He could either pursue venture capital, which he eschewed as “vulture capital,” or become a research organization, funded from government grants and awards. He took the latter route in 2006 with two grants from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Another grant was awarded recently by the National Marine Fisheries Service to support the time-release repellent research at Seton Hall.)
 
   The other thing Stroud needed was more scientific knowledge. And that led him to enroll in Seton Hall in September 2007 to study chemistry. Stroud chose Seton Hall partly because it was close to his laboratory, but more importantly, because of the school’s long history with New Jersey’s many pharmaceutical companies and its part-time evening program, aimed at working students. He began his doctoral work with a course in organic chemistry given by Hanson.
 
   “I just clicked with the guy,” Stroud says of their eventual partnership. He says Hanson’s background isn’t one you would normally equate with sharks. Hanson has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and geology from Texas Christian University, and a doctoral degree in organic chemistry from the California Institute of Technology. He is an expert in specialized fields — organic and polymer synthesis, dendritic and hyperbranched polymers, and polymers for biotechnology — and he developed and patented polymer technologies while at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
 
   Hanson’s expertise in timed-release polymers for the pharmaceutical industry made him a good match for solving the problem of how to deliver a repellent that won’t immediately dissolve and dissipate. From him, Stroud learned that sharks’ reaction to carcass smells is typical in all animals and stems from a chemical signaling response related to pheromones.
 
   Today, Hanson and Stroud work together to determine what is in Stroud’s repellent mixture. (They are often assisted by undergraduate students, who are learning to solve real-world problems using biology and chemistry.)
There is also a commercial orientation to their research; Stroud and Hanson hope to deliver the shark-repellent compound in a gel or polymer for the fishing industry at an affordable price. This product would supplement products already commercially available: aerosol cans with semiochemical repellents that are used by divers to enter shark-filled waters or to spray areas after an attack in order to clear the area.
 
   Part of Stroud’s research is similar to the drug testing commonly done on elite athletes to determine what compounds are in their bloodstream or urine. This work involves the use of the University’s state-of-the-art equipment — gas chromatographs and mass spectrometers — that are part of Professor Snow’s lab. Determining unknown compounds from their molecular weight is no simple matter; nor is discovering how— or if — they work together.
 
   Hanson sees several possible end results from the research: protection for swimmers and survivors of sunken ships; the reversal of economic and environmental losses stemming from the unnecessary slaughter of sharks; and, of course, protection for the sharks themselves.
 
    Moreover, Eric Stroud will have finally resolved his wife Jeannie’s seminal question: “Why isn’t there a shark repellent?
 

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