Posted on 07/03/2005 1:50:26 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Great whites and tigers are bigger, but the scariest shark people are likely to encounter in Florida is the bull shark.
A bull was blamed in the fatal attack June 25 on a 14-year-old girl, bitten in the leg as she swam off the beach in Walton County in the Panhandle. A bull is also suspected in an attack Monday, when a shark bit a teenager swimming in waist-deep water 80 miles from the site of the Saturday attack. Doctors amputated the boy's leg, but he is expected to recover.
A third attack, on Friday, injured an Austian who was swimming in ankle-deep water off Boca Grande, Fla. The type of shark involved is unknown.
Unlike their larger, more notorious cousins, bull sharks are common in Florida coastal waters. Divers see them among ships sunk as artificial reefs off Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties, where the sharks feed on fish drawn to the wrecks. Unique among sharks for their ability to tolerate fresh water, bulls penetrate deep into the Florida peninsula through its rivers.
"They're a very large shark and they have a very large mouth," said John Carlson, a marine biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, who studies sharks in the Gulf of Mexico. "Unlike some other species, they're found fairly close to shore."
In southeast Florida, divers say nurse sharks are the most common sharks. But Caribbean reef sharks and bull sharks rank after that.
"Bull sharks have definitely charged at me," said Jim Mimms, owner of Ocean Diving in Pompano Beach. "I've had to push them off me, push them away. It's a very uncomfortable feeling when you're diving, being stalked by a shark."
Another diver, Jeff Torode, owner of South Florida Diving Headquarters, says he's found bull sharks to be reclusive.
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
We'd only need to exterminate three or four species of sharks, and there would never be another shark attack on a human. "Scientists" would still have 297 species of the fricking things to "study".
That's exactly what I've always said about Teddy, Hillary, Lawrence O'Donnell, Howard "Fruicake" Dean and various other "Democrats", "liberals", commies, traitors, MSM news anchors, college professors, etc., etc.
but..but..but..they are just doing what is natural.
The people they kill should have stayed out of their ocean.
/sharkcuddler/
I like your plan.
Bull sharks have also been reported as far up the Mississippi River as Alton, Illinois.
To be followed by a headline, which reads:
Liberal "Bull Sh@!" likelist rhetoric to attack people!
come on guy.try to remember we share this planet,and sharks were in the water first-its their natural habitat-
Oh, and the way the media is getting into a frenzy over shark attacks is just silly. In fact falling coconuts kill 150 people per year .....15 times more than those killed by sharks! But i guess the media will not have 'summer of the coconuts' spiel.
Very interesting. Can you give me a citation or something? Because I would love to use that fact but I'm sure people will ask me for some citation or link or something.
http://unisci.com/stories/20022/0523024.htm
"Falling coconuts kill 150 people worldwide each year, 15 times the number of fatalities attributable to sharks," said George Burgess, Director of the University of Florida's International Shark Attack File and a noted shark researcher.
That may be true but as someone you spent a lot of time in the ocean surfing as a teen, I would rather get konked to death by a coconut that killed by a shark.
thanks
yeah...getting eaten to death by another creature and then eventually being turned into its feces is not very appealing I would say. ;-)
I don't know ....I'd personally rather be taken out by a shark than to be negated by a coconut.
Ankle-deep water?! How do you swim in ankle-deep water?
I always thought John Kerry and Teddy Kennedy were bull sharks. My wife and a waitress at Bickford's (a Boston area restaurant) convinced me I was only about half right. They are bullsh$t sharks.
If sharks are present, ...very quickly,,,
Or better yet, why bother...?
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