There was some nurse-on-nurse violence.
Footage captured the Jaws-dropping moment when a giant shark took a bite out of a diver’s back, leaving her with a gruesome 6-inch-wide wound.
“We decided to do a free dive trip to shark bay and snorkel inside a group of sharks,” marine photographer and freediver Ibrahim Shafeeg, 37, who filmed the gruesome attack on his GoPro, told Media Drum World.
Shafeeg frequently posts spellbinding underwater footage to his nearly 65,000 followers on TikTok, where he is known as “The Shark Guy.”
Little did he know, that his latest wildlife footage would resemble a scene out of “Deep Blue Sea.”
Shafeeg and his friend Carmen Canovas Cervello, 30, had reportedly been diving at Vaavu Atoll in the Maldives when suddenly they came across a school of ten nurse sharks, a commonly-observed species in the region.
“There were around ten nurse sharks, from 198 pounds to 220 pounds,” Shafeeg described.
Bite victim Carmen Canovas Cervello.mediadrumimages/Ibrahim Shafeeg
Cervello’s bite measured 6 inches in diameter.mediadrumimages/Ibrahim Shafeeg
Hoping to get a closer look, the aquatic adventurers decided to dive in the middle of the predator pack like Sea World trainers at a dolphin show.
They swam with the sharks for 45 minutes without incident before one of the critters decided to strike.
In the freaky footage, Cervello, who’s coincidentally a nurse, can be seen hovering above the aquatic hunters, when all of a sudden, one of them rockets up from the gloom and bites her on the back and shoulder.
The clip then cuts to the diver’s back, which now sports a crescent-shaped bite mark.
Cervello was taken aback at being chomped by a nurse shark, a generally docile species that feed on mollusks and crustaceans.
Nurse sharks are generally considered a docile species.mediadrumimages/Ibrahim Shafeeg
Cervello gets bitten by the shark.mediadrumimages/Ibrahim Shafeeg
Thankfully the wound was relatively minor with the pair believing that she’d received a light warning nip for getting too close.
Had the shark actually felt threatened, the outcome could’ve been a lot worse, the medical worker claimed.
In fact, Cervello was so unbothered by the bite that she forwent going to the hospital, instead opting to dive right back into shark-infested waters and resume her underwater Jaw-odyssey, MDW reported.
“After the shark bite, we thought nothing major about it as it was only a minor injury so we cleaned the wound and continued snorkeling at the same spot again,” explained Shafeeg.
Ibrahim Shafeeg, who caught the attack on camera.mediadrumimages/Ibrahim Shafeeg
The shark bite in question.mediadrumimages/Ibrahim Shafeeg
The pair would continue snorkeling and diving with the predators for days afterward, leaving her humongous hickey to heal on its own.
The medical worker is lucky to have emerged from the nurse-on-nurse violence relatively unscathed.
Despite their non-aggressive nature, nurse sharks sometimes attack if provoked, and can inflict painful wounds with their powerful jaws and sharp teeth.
Carmen Canovas Cervello works as a nurse.mediadrumimages/Ibrahim Shafeeg
The species was responsible for a total of 51 provoked and five unprovoked attacks in 2022.
In one of the incidents in August, nurse sharks mauled an 8-year-old British tourist who was on vacation with his family in the Bahamas.
