An Australian woman is warning others to avoid feeding sharks after she nearly lost her finger to one.
Melissa Brunning was three days into her two-week vacation on the northern coast of Western Australia at the end of May, when she decided to hand-feed a school of normally docile tawny nurse sharks in Dugong Bay.
A video of the excursion shows the Perth woman standing on the back platform of a boat as a shark approaches. Brunning then holds out her hand in front of the approximately two-metre-long shark to feed it.
The 34-year-old woman can then be heard screaming as she’s pulled into the water by a shark. A man who was standing nearby can be seen grabbing the woman and helping her back onto the boat.
Brunning later told local station 7 News Australia that she thought the shark had bitten off her entire finger.
“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 said. “I came up and I said ‘I've lost my finger’ and I couldn't even look at my finger because I thought it was gone.”
Thankfully, Brunning didn’t lose her finger. It was, however, badly injured.
When she returned home to Perth following the vacation, an X-ray revealed the shark bite fractured the bone and tore a ligament in her finger. She also needed an operation on her finger, which had become infected.
Brunning acknowledged she was in the wrong that day and doesn’t fault the shark for biting her. She also took the opportunity to caution others against repeating her mistake.
“Just be mindful of your surroundings and don’t feed sharks,” she said.
With files from CNN affiliate 7 News Australia
