Experts say, when a shark bites a swimmer, it's usually a case of mistaken identity. The shark thinks the person is a fish.
Shark bites are rare, but they still tend to strike fear in many beachgoers.
The sharks off our coast are typically small and in the rare cases when they bite a person, the injury is minor.
Sharks have more to worry about from humans, than we do from sharks. But that fact doesn't make people fear them any less.
Just a couple of days after a young swimmer suffered a shark bite, moms like Nicole Doll keep close watch over their kids.
"I think it makes a difference. You don't think about it. But now that we're here and it just happened, so it's definitely more, i'm more aware of it now than before," Doll of Winchester, Virginia tells NewsChannel 15.
Shark bites that happen on the Grand Strand tend to be what the experts call bump and bite attacks.
Stacia White is an Aquarist at Ripley's Aquarium in Myrtle Beach. "They're swimming through the water. They run into something. They don't have hands or anything to feel things like we do so their only way to feel and touch things is to bite," White says.
She says the shark that bit the young swimmer on Monday was probably a black tip or atlantic sharpnose, two common species along our coast that are typically three to five feet long and usually harmless to people.
Mmany people think of sharks as deep-water animals, but they will occasionally swim close to the beach.
"They'll follow wherever the fish go. So if the fish come up into the shore, as they come up in the shallows trying to avoid the sharks, the sharks are going to follow," White says.
Maybe it's the menacing fin in the water or the rows of razor-sharp teeth. Something about sharks makes them fascinating and threatening, but they shouldn't be.
"They're typically as scared of us as we are of them, so they're going to avoid us as much as possible," says White.
Great white sharks are the ones people tend to fear the most, but they are extremely rare and becoming more endangered every day.
According to the International Shark Attack File, the last deadly shark attack in South Carolina happened in 1852.
