NEW ORLEANS — After a series of shark attacks over the weekend at beaches in the Florida panhandle, two people were seriously injured. Residents in southeast Louisiana often vacation along A-30, and experts are encouraging families to be cautious.
Saturday, a 15-year-old girl’s left hand was bitten off, and part of her right leg will need to be amputated. Two hours earlier a 45-year-old woman had significant injuries to her midsection and needed part of her left arm amputated. Her attack happened only four miles away.
Kristine Grzenda, a curator at the Audubon Aquarium, tells us that when we enter the ocean, we are entering the shark’s home.
“We are not their food source,” said Grzenda. “One hundred percent.”
Grzenda says when a shark does attack it’s often a case of mistaken identity.
“People survive shark attacks because those sharks realize they have made a mistake,” she said. “They don’t really want to eat us. They just don’t have any other way of investigating the situation.”
Grzenda says it’s not unusual for sharks to come in shallow water. She says despite the number of incidents over the weekend, shark attacks are still rare.
“It is very low,” she said. “It is between 70 and 100 worldwide annually, so incredibly infrequent.”
If you find yourself in that rare situation, Grzenda says the best advice is to stay calm.
“You really want to seem least like something they may be interested in as possible,” she says. “Stay very calm, stay very still just kind of calmly leave the area. It’s a very easy thing to say probably a very hard thing to do in the moment.”
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