A 10-year-old girl was bitten in the legs by a shark on a beach in St. Johns County, on the northeast coast of Florida, and had to be moved to a hospital in the area, where she was given 40 stitches, local media reported today.
The event occurred last weekend in Crescent Beach, when Peyton Shields was in the water enjoying a day at the beach for his birthday with his family and was attacked by a shark, picked up the local channel WJXT.
The species of shark that bit the smaller one in the legs and one hand when it tried to move the shark is still unknown.
The girl’s parents were on the beach when they heard her daughter’s cries and thought it was a jellyfish that had stung her in the water, but soon they saw the blood and understood that it was something more serious.
“Blood was coming out of her hand and I started saying ‘what’s going on?’, And when she left the water, I saw much more blood coming out of the lower half of her legs,” father Steve Shields told the media.
Immediately, the girl’s parents pressed the wounds with a towel and called the 911 emergency line.
The minor was transferred to the Flagler Hospital Hospital, where the doctors closed their wounds with numerous stitches.
Although at the time of the shark attack there were more children bathing, Shields was the only one who bit the shark.
The International Shark Attack Archive (ISAF), an entity of the University of Florida in Gainesville, investigated 130 human-shark incidents in 2018 in the US, of which 66 were classified as unprovoked, a figure below 84 registered on average annually in the 2013-2017 period.
The state of Florida, with 16 unprovoked attacks, is the “number one” region of the United States in 2018, a position it maintains historically.
The decrease in the number of unprovoked attacks was especially significant in Florida, where the annual average was 30 cases in the 2013-2017 period.
This could have been due, although not included in the report, to the fact that in the summer of 2018 there was a persistent contamination by algae both in the Florida coast of the Gulf of Mexico (west) and in the Atlantic (east), which he invited to go into the sea.
