10-year-old boy has part of his leg amputated after shark attack in Florida

A 10-year-old boy had part of his leg amputated after a shark bit him as he dived into Florida Keys on the weekend.

Jameson Reeder Jr. was bitten by the animal on Saturday, and authorities were called to Looe Key Reef to help him around 4:30 pm, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said.

The child, who was on vacation with his parents and siblings, “took a crushing blow below the knee” while diving into a shallow reef of what the family believes is a bull shark, his uncle Joshua Reeder reported in a Facebook post.

Jameson held onto noodles as his family hauled him back to the boat.

After the rescue, the family applied a tourniquet above the bite to slow the bleeding, the uncle wrote.

Family members flagged down a nearby, faster boat that happened to have a nurse on board, the post adds. The boat took Jameson to the beach, where paramedics were waiting. Then a helicopter took him to a children’s hospital in Miami.

“They had to remove/amputate just below the knee to save his life as it was not operable for the damage the shark had caused,” the uncle detailed.

Unprovoked shark attacks

The bite comes at a time when the number of unprovoked shark attacks around the world appears to be leveling off after an upward trend over the past 30 years.

Last year, 73 unprovoked attacks by the animal were confirmed worldwide. That’s in line with an average of 72 attacks a year taking cases from 2016 to 2020 into account, according to a January report from the Florida Museum of Natural History’s International Shark Attack Archive.

As is typical, the majority of unprovoked attacks of 2021, 47, were reported in the United States. Florida had the most of any state at 28, consistent with the state’s average of 25 cases.

Many attacks are “cases of mistaken identity,” occurring in conditions of poor water visibility, the museum explains. Many of the bites occur when humans are swimming in or near large schools of prey, adds Robert Hueter, chief scientist at the Shark Data Organization (OCEARCH), to CNN .

“People get bitten but rarely eaten, and that tells us we’re not on the shark’s menu,” said Christopher Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University Long Beach.

The researchers are investigating whether certain factors may be driving shark attacks in a different part of the US – the northeast – such as rising sea temperatures, which is possibly pushing the fish that sharks eat further north, while at the same time conservation efforts increase the number of these bait fish there.

But Florida typically leads the US in shark attacks, and most of Florida’s attacks happen on the state’s Atlantic coast.

Hueter attributed this to the Gulf Stream’s proximity to the coast, with significant waves, congestion of surfers and swimmers, and the large schools of sharks in the area.