Scheme to bet on sharks doesn’t feed gambling fix

Some bookies warn that you will sleep with the fishes. But one oddsmaker wanted you to bet on them instead.

A couple of weeks ago, MyBookie, an online sportsbook, invited gamblers to place wagers on the summer migration patterns of nine great white sharks. The company’s website displayed odds on various aspects of each shark’s travel itinerary, using data mined from Ocearch, a nonprofit that has been tracking the animals’ movements for years.

An interactive map on Ocearch’s website monitors shark migration in near-real time, providing gamblers ample fodder for wagers — akin, perhaps, to a virtual horse race, conducted entirely at sea.

With most sports out of commission because of the coronavirus pandemic, the betting market has been thin in recent months. Wagering on sharks could give gamblers an outlet, and some conservationists wonder if it might result in positive press for oft-maligned great whites.

But others worry about the ethical implications of merging these two disparate pursuits — and a tumultuous week of conversations reveals that MyBookie might have bungled its first foray into shark speculating.

In an interview, Chris Fischer, founder of Ocearch, said he was unaware of what MyBookie was doing until he read a Forbes article about the event. Though MyBookie representatives had contacted the nonprofit via Facebook early last month, a formal meeting about a collaboration had yet to occur when the virtual sportsbook debuted the event, without Ocearch’s permission or knowledge.

Fischer said staff members at Ocearch asked MyBookie

“With no sports running, we’ve had to get more creative than usual.”

David Strauss,

MyBookie head oddsmaker

to suspend the site on the afternoon of June 17, just hours after it had gone live. The two organizations are negotiating, and it is unclear whether the — now defunct — shark betting endeavor will resume.

Fischer emphasized that while he believed MyBookie mishandled this event, he was not ready to dismiss the general idea that gambling and wildlife conservation might safely intersect.

“At first, I thought, we can’t be doing science and gambling at the same time,” Fischer said. “But this is totally out of the box. If you’re thoughtful, you ask, ‘How could this manifest?’ ”

MyBookie’s head oddsmaker, David Strauss — that is his professional name; he asked that his real name not be used out of concern for his safety — thought a cadre of sharks cruising off North America’s Atlantic coast might provide a fun alternative to betting on pro table tennis or who would play the Penguin in the next Batman movie.

“With no sports running, we’ve had to get more creative than usual,” he said. “The shark is a good animal for this — it follows some of the same migratory patterns, so you can set odds on it. We kind of know where it’s going to go, but we don’t know when it’s going to get there.”

But much about the sharks’ sojourns remains unknown — gaps that groups like Ocearch are trying to fill.