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-Short Attention Span Theater-
Shark kills woman as she swims with sea lions
2003-08-21
Regrets to her family and all that, but........
California’s central coast was on high shark alert yesterday after a woman aged 50 enjoying an early-morning swim with sea lions was mauled to death in full view of a lifeguard training team. Deborah Franzman, a college sociology lecturer who swam in the Pacific several times a week, died when what is believed to be a great white shark attacked from below, taking a huge bite out of her left leg and severing her femoral artery. Four lifeguards dived in to help her, but by the time she was brought ashore she was dead. Ms Franzman had been swimming just off the pier at Avila Beach, a picturesque resort town halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
If the femoral artery was severed, she didn't die instantly, but it was close...
Marine biologists say great whites usually attack humans only when they mistake them for something else. The fact that Ms Franzman was wearing a dark wetsuit and flippers might have been her undoing, said John McCosker, a shark expert with the Californian Academy of Sciences. "If you are wearing a wetsuit and fins and you are swimming with sea lions, you are doing a clumsy job of imitating shark food," Mr McCosker told the San Francisco Chronicle.
It sounds like she did a first-rate job of imitating breakfast.
Posted by:Steve

#11  she might have lived if she'd reached up her leg and grabbed the pulsing, retracted end of her femural artery and held on to stop the blood escaping.
Posted by: Anon1   2003-8-22 12:06:04 AM  

#10  actually Stephen, IIUC, most of the time the human's rejected after the first or second bite (which is how a GW tastes its food lol) because it wasn't the expected pinniped delicacy
Posted by: Frank G   2003-8-21 9:29:00 PM  

#9  Yeah, I read that all the time that sharks only attack humans when they mistake them for seals. You gotta ask, though: Do sharks possess the kind of intellect where they can discriminate between one kind of meat or another? Do they care? Are they supposed to be introspective and say to themselves "I could take a bite out of that, but it would be wrong"? No, she wasn't imitating shark food, she was shark food. Moral equivelance is bad enough between different groups of humans, but to apply the doctrine between a voracious carnivore and its prey is ludicrous.
Posted by: Stephen   2003-8-21 9:11:11 PM  

#8  Sade - LOL

Because we got scales.
Posted by: Shipman   2003-8-21 7:32:02 PM  

#7  lol! Sade..quick call Oprah!
Posted by: Becky   2003-8-21 6:15:04 PM  

#6  Jeez, what a moron. Why not go ahead and dump a bucket of chum over yer head?
Posted by: BH   2003-8-21 5:36:51 PM  

#5  No wonder the sea lions let her swim along. She was providing them a valuable service. Kind of like the role that the older antelope with the athritic knee plays for the rest of the herd in lion country.
Posted by: Steve D   2003-8-21 4:29:55 PM  

#4  Sharks: Why do they hate us?
Posted by: Sade   2003-8-21 4:14:26 PM  

#3  I feel sorry for the lifeguards who had to swim out to get her knowing there was a shark in the area and blood in the water. Hoping all that stuff about Sharks not really wanting to eat humans is true.

Apparantly being a lifeguard in North California isn't all slow motion jogs down the beach like Baywatch.
Posted by: Yank   2003-8-21 4:14:05 PM  

#2  Hope the shark is ok
Posted by: Michael   2003-8-21 4:08:43 PM  

#1  a 15'-18' (determined from the bite radius and fin sighting) Great White shark eats anything it wants to...swimming with the seals in Great White territory while wearing a black wetsuit is nearly a Darwin award in itself.
Posted by: Frank G   2003-8-21 4:04:04 PM  

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