Nature's War On Humans hits another major setback. Thanks to 13 year old Hannah Mighall, even teenagers now know that the deadliest living arsenal Nature has to keep us out of its oceans can be beaten, and humiliated :
More here"We were just surfing and (Hannah) was probably five or 10 metres out in front of me," he said.
"The next thing I know she screamed and disappeared under the water.
"She came up and was fighting the shark and hitting it and screaming 'help me, help me, help me'. We didn't see it coming.
"It grabbed her surfboard and dragged that under and she still had her leg rope on and it dragged her under again.
"She kept it together. There was blood everywhere and I didn't know whether it was going to try and bite her again.
"She's 13 years old. She made me very proud. She gave me the strength to stay there with her in the water - when I saw the way she was fighting it off.
"She was scared but she fought it off. She wasn't going to let it beat her.
"I was stunned - I didn't know what to do. She was the one who pulled me through it. She's the hero. She's my hero."
Hannah hasn't changed her mind about her planned career : marine biologist.
Now we know that teenage girls can take on five metre white pointers, and win, we can't be too far away from the creation of a breathtaking new Australian sport : deep water, bare-handed shark fighting. More action packed than koala wrestling and kangaroo polo.
UPDATE : More shark attacks and more Australians fight back against the so-called lions of the sea. It's time to remake Jaws, but with Australians launching themselves into the water to go one on one, fist versus snout :
Legendary shark hunter Vic Hislop' has a theory about the spate of recent Shark Vs Human attacks and it screams out "Make Me Into A Movie!" Sharks are, according to Hislop, running low on their usual diet of assorted varieties of sea kittens, and view humans are "an alternative food source" :A snorkeller has suffered 40 puncture wounds to his leg and abrasions to his hand after he punched a shark that was biting him.
The 23-year-old man was snorkelling under the Windang Bridge about 10.45am when he felt a tug on his leg, a NSW Ambulance spokeswoman said.
He turned around to see a flurry of white water and "punched at a brown shape", believed to have been a bull shark.
Mr Hislop said 200 years of over-fishing Australian waters had turned the attention of big sharks to "gentler" prey such as dugong, turtles and dolphins.Boring experts dismiss Hislop's theory :
"That's what's in their stomach now every day," he said on Macquarie Radio today.
"As the turtles disappear, which is inevitable, and the dugong herds disappear, humans are next in line on the food chain.
"It will definitely get worse."
But Tarango Zoo shark biologist John West rejected the claim saying if any species behaviour was changing it was humans.As long as the sharks believe that, too.
He said there may have been a rise in the number of shark sighting but that was only because more people were spending more time in the water.
Population increases and wetsuits that allow people to swim through the colder months would increase the chance of someone coming into contact with a shark.
"It may sound logical that over-fishing would lead to more attacks but it has no basis in fact," he said.
