Australia Third Shark Attack

Australia Third Shark Attack, A snorkeling guide was attacked by a 10-foot (3-meter) tiger shark off a remote beach in Australia’s third attack this month. That’s as many attacks as the country generally sees in an entire year.

David Pickering, 26, was leading a group of snorkelers through a lagoon at Western Australia’s Coral Bay on Thursday when the shark swam up to him and sunk its teeth into his arm.

“I turned around and boom, there he was,” Pickering told reporters. “(The force) was enough to actually bring me forward and under him because I scraped my knee on his belly.”

Pickering said he punched the shark with his other arm and it backed off. He then yelled at the other snorkelers — a couple and their two children — to get out of the water before swimming the 300 feet (100 meters) back to shore.

“I’m pretty stoked that it happened to me and not one of those kids,” he said.

Pickering was taken to a hospital in Perth with severe lacerations to his arm. His injuries were not life-threatening and he was in stable condition, Royal Flying Doctor Service spokeswoman Joanne Hill said.

The attack came one day after a surfer was bitten by a shark at a beach off Australia’s east coast. Another surfer was attacked at a beach north of Sydney on Jan. 3.

Despite the encounter, Pickering said the attack wouldn’t keep him away from the ocean.

South Africa Shark Attack

South Africa Shark Attack, Exactly a year ago, 16-year-old South African, Zama Ndamase, died after a shark bit him while he was surfing off the same Port St. Johns’ beach.

Exactly a year ago, 16-year-old South African, Zama Ndamase, died after a shark bit him while he was surfing off the same Port St. Johns’ beach. Photographer: Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images

A 25-year-old man died after being bitten by a shark while swimming off Second Beach at Port St. Johns in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, the world’s first deadly attack of 2012.

The man sustained “multiple traumatic lacerations” to his torso, arms and legs, John Costello, station commander for the National Sea Rescue Institute in Port St. Johns, said yesterday in an e-mailed statement without identifying the victim. The man, who was swimming in waist-deep water with a crowd of bathers, was declared dead at a local clinic “after all efforts to save him had been exhausted.”

Fourteen people died after being bitten by sharks last year, the highest number of people since 2000, according to data from Princeton, New Jersey-based Shark Research Institute Inc.’s Global Shark Attack File. Of the attacks, 12 took place in the Indian Ocean, four of which were in Australia and three in South Africa, the data shows. Exactly a year ago, 16-year-old South African, Zama Ndamase, died after a shark bit him while surfing off the same Port St. Johns’ beach.

KwaZulu-Natal’s Sharks Board is “carrying out studies in an effort to try to determine why there has been such a frequent spate of shark incidents in Port St. Johns,” Costello said in the statement. The sea water was very warm and there was low visibility off Second Beach yesterday, he said. The victim’s name is not yet being released, Craig Lambinon, the National Sea Rescue Institute’s spokesman, said by phone today.