Blood and sharks and blood, oh my!

This week we answer your gruesome queries about sharks and blood, spurty blood, blue blood, and DNA. [The Straight Dope] Blood and sharks and blood, oh my! By [The Straight Dope]( • Issue #3 • [View online]( This week we answer your gruesome queries about sharks and blood, spurty blood, blue blood, and DNA. Threadspotting The best of the Straight Dope Message Board December 27, 2019: [Travel far; eat poorly](. Straight Dope Classic: August 15, 2008 [Illustration by Slug Signorino] Illustration by Slug Signorino [How quickly can sharks detect blood in the water?]( Dear Cecil: We’ve all seen it in a movie: A small group of people are swimming in the sea. Someone gets hurt, blood touches water, and instantly sharks appear who then devour the party in a ruthless and very painful way. But how fast does the odor or taste of blood go in water? Am I right to believe that it takes a while for a shark a mile away to taste it?  —  David, Belgium Cecil replies: I’ll confess I haven’t seen a lot of Belgian shark movies, David, but virtually any Hollywood studio exec would see a major problem with the treatment you’ve outlined above. If the shark shows up the second the hemoglobin hits the water, where’s the unbearable tension? What we’re missing is that excruciating interval of stillness between the close-up of slowly seeping blood and the moment the here-comes-the-shark music kicks in. You’re right, though, to suspect that this interval does tend to run a little shorter on the big screen than in real life. [Click here to keep reading.]( Staff Report: August 17, 2000 [Can human beings really spurt blood like in the movies?]( Dear Straight Dope: We need a wise and knowing soul to answer a question of serious medical import. After viewing “Saving Private Ryan,” there are two camps. One says that there’s no way a human being would squirt out lots of blood, like a fountain. The intelligent ones say if you hit a major artery, like the carotid or jugular, you’d get at least a few seconds of dancing fluids. Certain parties have suggested the only way to resolve the issue is to buy knives and experiment. Help! — Bill Clark, Singapore SDStaff Hawk replies:  Ick. Where do the morbid ones hide during the day? As a duly recognized expert on the subject of blood, as well as being an all-knowing, soulless wiseass (sorry, “wise and knowing souls” cost too much), I can answer this question. First of all … [Click here to keep reading.]( Straight Dope Classic: April 25, 2008 [Crabs have blue blood; why don’t we]( Dear Cecil: The horseshoe crab is one of the oldest species on earth, yet it is one of the few (if not the only) species with copper-based blue blood. The rest of us recently developed beings have red, iron-based blood. Did all animal life on earth at one time have copper-based blood? Did natural selection favor red-blooded beings? Or would all earth life still have blue blood if it hadn’t been for an invasion of iron-blooded beings from the red planet, Mars?. — J. Watson, Omaha Cecil replies: All right, today’s blood day; cookies and juice at the end of the column. One of the main functions of blood as it’s evolved over the eons has been to transport oxygen around an organism’s body. Early oxygen-breathing life forms were limited in their complexity in part because their primitive circulatory fluid just wasn’t very good at this task. But things really perked up life-on-earth-wise once creatures started producing blood pigments — metal-containing compounds that are able to grab onto oxygen molecules and release them when and where needed. In red-blooded animals the critical pigment is hemoglobin, the primary constituent of red blood cells. [Click here to keep reading.]( Did you enjoy this issue? [The Straight Dope]( By [The Straight Dope]( Fighting ignorance since 1973. (It's taking longer than we thought.) [Tweet](    [Share]( If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe [here](. If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe [here](. Powered by [Revue](