The terrifying moment a woman almost lost her finger to the jaws of a shark as she attempted to feed it by hand has been caught on camera.
Perth woman Melissa Brunning, 34, was on a holiday in the north of Western Australia at the remote Dugong Bay when she tried to hand feed a Tawney Nurse shark.
‘It happened so quickly, all I could really focus on was the fact that my finger is gone, he’d clamped on it and it felt like it was shredding off the bone,’ she told 7 News Perth.
The terrifying moment a woman almost lost her finger to the jaws of a shark as she attempted to feed it by hand has been caught on camera
Ms Brunning said all she could think was that her finger was gone and she couldn’t even bring herself to check, thinking if she saw her finger severed she would ‘go into shock’
The Tawny Nurse shark is usually considered a relatively calm and docile species however they still possess rows of razor sharp teeth.
Ms Brunning said all she could think was that her finger was gone and she couldn’t even bring herself to check, thinking if she saw her finger severed she would ‘go into shock’.
It wasn’t until other people on the boat with her saw the wound that they were able to calm her fears.
‘I’ve come up and I’m like, I lost my finger, I couldn’t even look at the finger because I thought it was gone and I thought if I looked at it I would probably go into shock,” she said.
Upon arriving home in Perth the finger had become so badly infected that Ms Brunning (pictured) required surgery to have the wound flushed out and cleaned
Thankfully her finger was still attached to the point that she chose to not go the long distance to a hospital and hoped it would heal on its own.
Upon arriving home in Perth the finger had become so badly infected that Ms Brunning required surgery to have the wound flushed out and cleaned.
After an X-Ray she was also informed the bone had been fractured.
Ms Brunning admitted that she was in the wrong by trying to hand feed the shark and had advice for anyone else who might think about doing the same thing in the future.
‘Be mindful of your surroundings and don’t feed sharks,’ she said.
Perth woman Melissa Brunning, 34, was on a holiday in the north of Western Australia at the remote Dugong Bay when she tried to hand feed a Tawney Nurse shark