Shark Attack: Cookiecutter Shark Makes First Documented Attack on Human in Hawaii

Lee Dye - 

A small shark that's as nasty as it is fearless, attacking everything from Navy submarines to killer whales, has been blamed for its first clearly documented attack on a live human being.

A so-called cookiecutter shark, which was probably a little more than a foot long, took a chunk out of the leg of a distance swimmer who was trying to make a nighttime swim from the island of Hawaii to Maui.

The attack occurred 90 minutes after sunset March 16, 2009, but has just recently been documented by scientists in Hawaii and Florida.

Despite their reputation, sharks historically have not posed a widespread danger to people. Only two other cases involving attacks on humans by cookiecutter sharks have been widely accepted by experts, but both those attacks were on human cadavers, one a drowning victim and the other a suicide.

While this is the best evidence yet for attacks on live humans, there are several other cases that are highly suspicious.

So, are we in for another Jaws? Maybe not, because the cookiecutter shark, so named because it gouges horrific pockets of flesh from its prey, feeds at night in deep tropical waters where it is not likely to encounter humans.

But this case is so spooky that the director of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History thinks people ought to at least be aware the nature of this predator.

"It's not as scary as 'Jaws,' but it's very different from any other kind of attack we have [in the file] because of the size of the shark and the modus operandi," George Burgess, director of the file, said in releasing the study.

It is to be published in an upcoming edition of the journal Pacific Science.

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