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Comment by deeringc | Hacker News Reader

I heard the exact same from a shark expert in the Great Barrier Reef. Rather than using a cage or anything we'd normally associate with shark diving, he puts a set of googly eyes on the back of his head and had been safely shark diving professionally for 2 decades.

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Did you ever hear the tragedy of Vitaly Nikolayenko?

"He spent 33 years living with the brown bears (Ursus arctos) native to the Kamchatka peninsula (...) For over 20 years, Nikolayenko followed an enormous male he named Dobrynya, forming such an easy bond that the bear would often curl up to sleep just a few feet from him."

Eventually he died of a bear mauling.

Moral of the story: it works until it doesn't.

"True Stories of Survivorship Bias"

Did that bear maul him though?

> Eventually he died of a bear mauling

Wow, same year and two months later than Timothy Treadwell, "Grizzly Man".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Treadwell

Please don't tell the Discovery Channel about this. We'll be inundated by bear-related conspiracy theories. Or "Bear Week".

An unbearable week.

To save someone the search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Nikolayenko

I listen to Joe Rogan podcasts and he always mentions bears being very different than people think. He said they do all kinds of terrible things, even their own kind. (think how much food a large bear has to eat to stay alive)

I don't think sharks have the same cognitive capacities as felines plus felines imply a lot of things about their prey when they do this like : there are only two eyes, facing the same direction, prey can only move in 2d etc... which are not true under water

Keep in mind the best shark experts have no idea how sharks reproduce.

I wouldn't call this "no idea"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark#Reproduction

Looks like 9 paragraphs to me. For comparison, we have MRI scans of human beings orgasming. Most of what we know about wild shark reproduction comes from observing a single population of nurse sharks living in the Dry Tortugas. That's a single population, of a single species, in one place on earth, at one time of year (summer). That's about it.

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