WATCH: Australian woman dragged underwater by shark she tried to hand-feed

A Perth woman, Melissa Brunning, 34, was on a holiday in the north of Western Australia at the remote Dugong Bay when she tried to hand-feed a Tawney Nurse shark.

“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 told 7 News Perth.

The Tawny Nurse shark is usually considered a relatively calm and docile species.  However, it still possesses rows of razor sharp teeth.

“I’ve come up and I’m like, I lost my finger. I couldn’t even look at the finger because I thought it was gone, and I thought if I looked at it I would probably go into shock,” she said

Thankfully, her finger was still attached to the point that she chose not to go the long distance to a hospital and hoped it would heal on its own.

However, on arriving home the finger had become so badly infected that Brunning required surgery to have the wound flushed out and cleaned.

An x-Ray showed the bone had also been fractured.

Source: YouTube

– AFP