Flagler Beach, 1994: Jeff Weakley was out surfing while attending a college beach party when he felt a sudden, sharp bite to his foot that couldn’t have been anything but a shark, he thought. The fish shook his foot repeatedly, leaving him with several deep lacerations.
Like most surfers, Weakley valued water time over the tiny chance of another run-in with a shark. Within a couple of weeks, he was back in the ocean with his foot wrapped in a waterproof bandage and covered with booties.
Nearly twenty-five years later he noticed a blister forming on his foot. Turns out it was a tooth left from the attack that had finally festered to the top of his skin. He removed it and planned to make a pendant from it but changed course when he learned that the Florida Program for Shark Research had identified a shark species through DNA after a bite off the New York coast and decided to have the tooth analyzed.
“I was very excited to determine the identity of the shark because I’d always been curious,” Weakley told the Florida Museum of Natural History. “I was also a little bit hesitant to send the tooth in because for a minute I thought they would come back and tell me I’d been bitten by a mackerel or a houndfish – something really humiliating.”
But he didn’t need to worry. Scientists identified the shark through DNA as a black tip, which Weakley had suspected. When he was bitten at 21 years old, he remembered the water being filled with mullet and had a suspicion black tip were feeding on the baitfish. Today, Weakley, who edits Florida Sportsman magazine, still surfs but tries to avoid areas where baitfish are prevalent. He has no ill-will towards any species of shark, though.
“I’ve been lucky not to have been bitten by a dog, but I would regard that interaction I had with that shark as being no different or more destructive than a dog bite,” he said. “I certainly don’t have a hatred of sharks or any feeling of vindictiveness toward them. They’re part of our natural world.”
You can read the full Florida Museum of Natural History report, here.
