Sharks.

This is coolbert:

The tragic story of the U.S.S. Indianapolis is of course well documented and widely known.

After delivering the atomic bomb to the island of Tinian in the latter days of World War Two [WW2], the Indianapolis, enroute to the Philippines, was torpedoed and sank. Eight hundred men went into the water, only two hundred surviving.

Some of the men in the water died of exposure.

The large majority of the deaths, however, were due to shark attack.

Shark attack, that again, tragically, was aided and abetted, unknowingly so, by the men in the water themselves.

Navy seamen in WW2 were taught, that if in the water, and sharks are in the vicinity, beat and flail the water with your arms and legs, shout and scream, and do so in a group.

This is exactly the wrong and opposite behavior!!

 Rather than keeping the sharks away, the behavior of the men in the water attracted the sharks and led to many deaths!! When beating and flailing the water, those sailors, unbeknownst to themselves [and unbeknownst to the "experts" too], were mimicking the convulsive and erratic motions of a dying fish!! A fish in it's death throes.

[a shark is a remarkable predator. A shark possesses extraordinary sensory perception. Vision ten times better than that of man. An acute sense of smell, especially attuned to the smell of blood in the water. A lateral line that is sensitive to motion in the water. And special sensors in the nose that react to the electro-magnetic field of an animal. Sharks are often referred to as "wolves of the sea". Sea creatures that are attracted to and prey upon the sick, the young, the old, the feeble, the injured, the dying. Just as wolves do on land!! In the case of the Indianapolis, the sailors beating and flailing the water stimulated the lateral line of the sharks in a manner that said to the shark, "here is a wounded, dying, sickly, and feeble fish. A fish that is giving off convulsive and erratic movements signaling death. Go get it!!"]

coolbert.