Fatal South African Shark Attack a Rare Encounter
Experts say the shark attack that killed a Zimbabwean tourist off the South Africa coast on Tuesday was a particularly rare occurrence, considering the relentless manner in which the animal apparently attacked the man.
Witness reports of the incident off Cape Town, South Africa, were gruesome , describing what sounded like a scene from "Jaws" – an innocent tourist targeted by a "dinosaur-sized" Great White shark who struck three times, leaving nothing but "a pool of blood in the water."
One official said: "It didn't bite him and let him go. It came back and carried on eating."
After days of searching, Lloyd Skinner's body had not been found.
A deadly shark attack often captures global fascination and attention, but experts say the sort of aggressive attack that occurred at Fish Hoek beach is striking.
"White sharks in general are rare and fatal white shark attacks are even more rare," said George Burgess, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the state's Museum of Natural History.
He said the majority of human-shark encounters are "investigatory," with the shark detecting the silhouette of a floating object and trying to determine if it's prey.
The attack on Skinner, however, seems to fall into a far more unusual "predatory" category."It appears he was hit very violently, with very high energy," said Richard Collier, noted shark expert and president of the Shark Research Committee.
"In this case, it seems the shark meant to disable or kill its prey on initial contact."
Any number of triggers could make a shark lash out in predatory attack, including a sense of danger or a perceived threat to its territory, according to scientists.
Collier estimates that only 5 to 10 percent of shark attacks are predatory, but Skinner's location did not work in his favor.
Studies have shown that shark attacks are more frequent in cool water environments where beaches are used more heavily, like Australia and South Africa. According to Collier, South African sharks are also a bit hungrier than their counterparts along United States' Pacific coast.
"There is less available food in the waters off South Africa," he said. "The seal and sea lion prey are smaller by mass than those we see in California
Still, Burgess points out that a person is more likely to die from an insect bite than a shark bite.
"It's hard to balance the human emotion with the scientific reality – that this is an extremely rare event, especially considering the millions of hours humans spend in the sea."According to the Shark Research Institute, of the approximately sixty unprovoked shark attacks reported globally in 2009, only seven were fatal.
"I would be more concerned about my drive to the beach, or stepping on a bottle on the shore than my interaction with a shark," said Collier.
While Burgess acknowledges that any fatal shark attack is a tragedy, he says "the real story isn't shark bites man, it's man bites shark."
"Overfishing is claiming the lives of millions of sharks a year," he said. "It's easy to see who the real threatened species is."
It's really sad and horrific when something like this happens. Especially the way this one did. However, as the article says, they, the sharks, "are the real threatened species"....
"Animalz Rule, Even Sharks",
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