Martin, it’s all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, “Huh? What?” You yell shark, we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.
A shark killed an American tourist surfing in western Mexico, police said on Tuesday, the second fatal attack along North America’s Pacific coast in four days.
A shark bit 24-year-old San Francisco resident Adrian Ruiz in the leg on Monday, opening a 15-inch (38-cm) wound. (…) “He was rushed in a bystander’s vehicle to the military naval hospital, where he died soon after from blood loss,” the statement said.
On Friday, a 66-year-old man was attacked and killed by a shark in the ocean near San Diego in the United States, the first person to die in a shark encounter off Southern California in nearly 50 years.
Fatal shark attacks in Mexico are also uncommon. The last one was in the Caribbean in 1997, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack File. No one has been killed by a shark on Mexico’s Pacific coast in over 30 years.
Attacks on the Atlantic coast are more frequent, especially in Florida, which has about 25 to 30 a year. Last year, the only fatal shark attack in the world was in New Caledonia, in the southwest Pacific
{ Reuters }
