HALIFAX: A Dalhousie University professor thinks a recent incident where a young woman was reportedly bitten by a shark off Inverness County may have involved a white shark.
On Aug. 13, a woman was airlifted to hospital with series injuries following what is believed to be a shark attack.
Sgt. Andrew Joyce said the RCMP received a 911 call just before 5 p.m. claiming that a shark bit 21-year-old Taylor Boudreau-Deveaux while she was swimming off a boat approximately one kilometre west of Margaree.
Joyce said police were told by witnesses with the victim they saw what they believed to be a shark fin in the water just after the incident and near where it occurred.
Boudreau-Deveaux was airlifted to hospital in Halifax via EHS LifeFlight but in a Facebook post on Aug. 14, Wayne Boudreau, who is a grandfather of the victim, said she received “lots of stitches” but was doing “fine.”
Fred Whoriskey, with the Ocean Tracking Network at Dalhousie University’s Department of Biology told The Reporter he doesn’t have much direct information about the incident.
“We don’t know much about this particular attack. It sounds like it was a bite, or at least, a slash,” Whoriskey noted. “We don’t know whether it took a while for her to get back to the boat and get onto it. Where that becomes significant is did the shark not return after having made the first strike to finish off the event? It may have been one of these instances where, he thought it was seal, made the hit, discovered it wasn’t a seal, and just forgot about the whole thing.”
Whoriskey said there has also not been an examination, nor photographs taken, of the wound, which is unfortunate since there is so much data on shark bites.
“The forensics have been worked out for about 20 species of sharks; so as to what the bite marks look like. It’s based on different dentitions, different jaw structures on the animals, depending on how the individual was bit, and whether you can, for example, calculate a jaw arc, and then the distance between the teeth, and the actual penetration by the teeth, the nature of the wound, and does it have a sign of serrated teeth that sliced it in a particular, versus smooth teeth. You can begin to tease it down to a particular species of shark,” he explained.
Whoriskey said his group has detected a “fair number” of sharks in Canadian waters, including the Gulf of St. Lawrence, due to the efforts of research teams in the United States, namely the Massachusetts Department of Marine Resources, which has a shark program off Cape Code that fitted more than 150 sharks with acoustic tags that the Halifax group has been able to monitor.
“You run down the probabilities of these types of things happening. Macos and the blues tend to remain offshore, six miles or more, and we don’t find them moving in large numbers into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, per se. The white, by contrast, is one that is patrolling along shorelines. There are parts of the world where it will actually jump up on beaches and grab seals, and haul them back into the water,” he said. “It frequents these areas where seals haul out because seals are a preferred prey to it. We do know that we’ve been seeing a fair number of tagged white sharks.”
Despite the fact that witness accounts of a fin could belong to dolphins or porpoises present in the area, Whoriskey said there are many valid reasons to think it was a white shark attack.
“They were also off of an island which was a haul-out for the seals. It is kind of an ideal hunting ground for white sharks which like to find these islands where the seals haul-out, where there’s a deep area close to the haul-out site so that they can lurk down deep. The prey is silhouetted against the surface,” he explained. “When a vulnerable animal is not paying attention, that’s when the shark will strike.”
Just as the threat of bear encounters when hiking in certain national parks can be mitigated by taking smart measures, Whoriskey said the public can do the same when in and around oceans.
“One is don’t go swimming at dusk and dawn, or in the night time. Those are the peak hunting hours for the sharks, and that’s because the suite of sensory systems they have effectively illuminates the ocean for them; they know where everything is and what it’s doing all the time, and we don’t have a clue what is going on when we’re in the ocean in the dark like that,” he said. “Don’t go swimming alone. Try to avoid swimming in areas where there are seals, in hunting grounds especially.”
However, Whoriskey noted that beaches, during the daytime, are safe places to enjoy the water. He added that he frequently swims at the end of the work day, and does not worry about sharks when visiting beaches.
“Your standard beach where people go swimming is not a standard attraction area for sharks,” he added. “Seals aren’t there, either because the conditions aren’t right for them to haul-out. There’s nothing that a seal would want to eat anywhere around those standard, big, beautiful sandy beaches with the sand flats that run out. They’re totally disinterested in that because there’s nothing to eat, hence the sharks have no reason to be anywhere around them.”