Shutterstock / Michael Bogner
Swimming with nurse sharks is a favorite pastime of tourists in the Caribbean and The Bahamas. 99 out of 100 times, nurse sharks pose zero threat. They’ll often hang around marinas in hopes of catching a free meal in the form of leftover scraps from the fishermen who fillet their catch on the docks.
There are instances when you’ll see more nurse sharks than you can keep track of. Once, on vacation to Staniel Cay Marina staying on my friend’s dad’s yacht, we were swimming behind the boat trying to catch conch and I lost count at 20 sharks. I’ve seen fishermen/snorkelers basically walk up and touch these sharks as they sit on the bottom without the sharks reacting at all. They are pretty sedentary but at the end of the day they’re still sharks, and they still pose a potential threat if you were to ever find yourself swimming in a school of fish that one of these sharks sees as an easy meal. Your flailing limbs could easily be mistaken for a fish and you could get bitten.
I’m not saying that’s what happened in this instance, but it definitely seems peculiar how this nurse shark swims straight up to Sarah Illig from Charleston, South Carolina and takes a bite out of her arm while her husband captures the entire incident with his GoPro:
This is truly a freak incident. Encounters like the ones seen in the pictures below are significantly more common than a nurse shark attack:
According to the Daily Mail, the woman was in shock at first but quickly realized what’d happened:
‘Less than a second later I realized how much it hurt and looked past where my goggles were blocking my side vision to see the shark (bigger than myself) latched on to my arm.’
‘I pulled away and got out of there,’ she added.
‘Ended the honeymoon with a bang (bite),’ she wrote, adding ‘Check out the surprise and very rare nurse shark bite in the video and don’t forget the volume to hear the crunchhhhh.’
She shared some pics of the incident on her Instagram and Facebook accounts but has since set those accounts to private. So if you want to see photographs of what her arm looks like after it was bitten you can click here to visit the Daily Mail.