More Shadows Attack 41 



in the shallow water, the shark floundered, then slithered into deeper 

 water and vanished. 



A tourniquet was applied to Douglas' ravaged left leg. He was taken 

 to a hospital, where his leg was amputated above the knee. 



Dr. Clark, whose marine laboratory was nearby, studied the four 

 attacks. She interviewed victims, witnesses, and attending physicians. 

 She showed them pictures of various species of shark. She decided that 

 a Tiger shark had been the attacker. And, after discovering a sand bar 

 off the attack site, she reconstructed what she believed to be the events 

 leading up to the attack. 



"It is possible," she said, "that the shark swam over the sand bar earher 

 in the day and then found itself trapped in the channel as the tide became 

 lower; or it may have swum into the channel from either of the passes 

 at the ends of Longboat Key. The victim and his brother were the only 

 people in the water at the time and the shark might easily have detected 

 the vibrations made by the boys slapping their foot flippers at the 

 surface of the water. 



"The victim's feet and ankles were not as deeply tanned as the rest 

 of his legs, as he usually wore shoes and socks when playing in the sun. 

 It seems possible that the shark, attracted by the vibrations made by the 

 flippers, saw the pale lower portion of the boy's leg and struck at that 

 point, first causing the large wound on the foot [the victim's left flipper 

 was lost, presumably during the attack] ." 



Her criminological study of the four cases led her to another possi- 

 bility. "The shark which attacked Frank Mahala on June 24, 9 miles 

 south," Dr. Clark said, "could conceivably have been the same species 

 and possibly the same individual shark. The latter is considered doubtful, 

 but . . . this could be an explanation for the unusual occurrence of these 

 two unprovoked attacks so close together in time and location in an 

 area where no similar attack had been reported in 38 years." 



The theory that a solitary, malevolent shark may be responsible for 

 a series of adjacent attacks has been proposed by Dr. V. M. Coppleson, 

 the Australian surgeon who has made a lifelong study of shark attacks 

 in his home waters. Dr. Coppleson, who named these reputed marauders 

 "rogue sharks," suggests in his book. Shark Attack,^ that the "rogue" 

 is "a killer which, having experienced the deadly sport of killing or 

 mauling a human, goes in search of similar game." He said the shark 

 with a taste for human flesh is comparable to the man-eating lions and 

 tigers which especially seek out only humans for prey. 



Dr. Coppleson once dramatically demonstrated his "rogue shark" 



•'' V. M. Coppleson, Shark Attack (Sydney, Australia: Angus & Robertson, Ltd., 



1959). 



