MAN-EATERS MENACE AMERICA’S BEACHES!
Why fatal shark attacks are on the rise and no swimmer is safe!
DON’T go into the water! Ravenous sharks are prowling America’s beaches in record numbers this summer and have exploded in a feeding frenzy that’s left innocent swimmers cut to pieces and fatally mauled!
Already large man-eaters — including great whites that can weigh more than three tons — have been sighted swarming off the nation’s East and West Coasts. So far, the massive predators have killed two Americans and forced thousands of others to run for their lives as they hunt in the shallows along the seashore.
Late last month, New York City executive Julie Dimperio Holowach was eaten alive off the coast of Maine — the first fatal shark attack in that state’s history.
Incredibly, the 63-year-old was swimming with her daughter in less than four feet of water by a Bailey Island beach when she was attacked!
But that monster wasn’t alone. At least 20 other great whites, the fish that inspired the hit movie Jaws, were nearby, and 150 others were spotted lurking off the beaches of Cape Cod since June!
But the killers are everywhere on the Eastern Seaboard, scientists warn. Sharks have been captured on camera in knee-deep surf on New York’s Long Island and feasting on porpoises just steps from the high tide mark on a New Jersey beach.
On June 8, Steven White says an 18-foot, 3,000-pound great white chillingly began nosing around his fishing boat near Ocean City, Md. The beast came so close, a crew member shouted: “Don’t bite the boat!”
About 250 miles away and 10 days later, 16-year-old tourist Nick Arthur was on a sandbar in North Carolina’s Outer Banks when a shark came in for the kill. The boy and his dad managed to fight off the predator — but Nick had 40 teeth marks in his thigh
and needed 17 stitches. His father, Tim, had a bite on his thumb.
It could’ve been worse — a lot worse.
In a blood-chilling frenzy on May 9, California surfer Ben Kelly, 26, was taken by a white just 100 yards off Manresa State Beach near Santa Cruz.
Again in June, drone footage captured a school of sharks circling unsuspecting swimmers at Huntington Beach just south of Los Angeles!
Experts blame the evermore frequent encounters on an increase of seals — the sharks’ favorite meal.
After nearly being hunted into extinction, the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 enabled the seal population to bounce back, and the honking critters are drawing hungry monsters close to swimming areas on both coasts.
“As the white shark population rebounds and seal populations rebound, this predatorprey relationship is going to reemerge anywhere these two species overlap, including the Gulf of Maine in the summer,” notes Greg Skomal, a shark specialist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.
And Dr. Gavin Naylor, director of shark research at the Florida Museum of Natural History, warns “the white sharks will go where there are plentiful seals.”
Experts urge swimmers and surfers to avoid donning dark wet suits that make humans look more like a seal to sharks.
But some critics say resort towns are downplaying the menace to avoid scaring off tourists — just like the scenario in Jaws, where money-hungry officials and merchants ignored the danger presented by a 20foot white off their coast.
Nature’s perfect eating machines have been preying in waters all the way down through Florida, which leads the world in shark attacks almost every year. On Aug. 1, a 22-year-old swimmer was grabbed off New Smyrna Beach in chest-deep water — just one week after an 11-year-old boy was also savaged on the same beach!
Those incidents pushed this summer’s bloody run-ins to 14 — and more are expected as the steamy hot weather continues to lure people into the water.
As victim Tim Arthur found out the hard way, “You always think it’s not going to be you” until it’s too late!