Saturday, April 15, 2023

Human Season Open, Shark Bites Snorkler

At NYPo, Watch the terrifying moment a 220-pound shark lodges teeth into snorkeler

Footage captured the Jaws-dropping moment when a giant shark took a bite out of a diver’s back, leaving her with a gruesome 6-inch-wide wound.

“We decided to do a free dive trip to shark bay and snorkel inside a group of sharks,” marine photographer and freediver Ibrahim Shafeeg, 37, who filmed the gruesome attack on his GoPro, told Media Drum World.

Shafeeg frequently posts spellbinding underwater footage to his nearly 65,000 followers on TikTok, where he is known as “The Shark Guy.”

Carmen Canovas Cervello
 

Little did he know, that his latest wildlife footage would resemble a scene out of “Deep Blue Sea.”

Shafeeg and his friend Carmen Canovas Cervello, 30, had reportedly been diving at Vaavu Atoll in the Maldives when suddenly they came across a school of ten nurse sharks, a commonly-observed species in the region.

“There were around ten nurse sharks, from 198 pounds to 220 pounds,” Shafeeg described.

Hoping to get a closer look, the aquatic adventurers decided to dive in the middle of the predator pack like Sea World trainers at a dolphin show. 

They swam with the sharks for 45 minutes without incident before one of the critters decided to strike.

In the freaky footage, Cervello, who’s coincidentally a nurse, can be seen hovering above the aquatic hunters, when all of a sudden, one of them rockets up from the gloom and bites her on the back and shoulder.

The clip then cuts to the diver’s back, which now sports a crescent-shaped bite mark.

Cervello was taken aback at being chomped by a nurse shark, a generally docile species that feed on mollusks and crustaceans.

Nurse Shark jaws with teeth
Fortunately for Ms. Cervello, Nurse Sharks are equipped with a mouth full of short, but sharp teeth, poorly suited for taking chunk of flesh off a human, but capable of doing some superficial damage.

I'm not going to chide them for playing with dangerous beasts. Thousands of people around the world swim with Nurse Sharks and rarely do they attack. Who knows what triggered this particular shark to attempt a nibble? She looks kind of skinny to me. On the video it looks like she accidentally touched the shark on the side as it went by, and that triggered a defensive attack.


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