With Shark Week’s 27th year nearly at its conclusion, we thought we’d participate in all the predatory madness that is cable network’s longest running and quite possibly most popular program with this awesome GoPro video.
Shot off the sunny coast of Jupiter, Florida, the video entitled Petting A Tiger Shark accurately enough features scuba divers Cameron Nimmo and Mickey Smith testing their social skills and fate as they tried making friends with a couple of tiger sharks with nothing but their rubber suits to protect them from sharp teeth and powerful jaws.
The less-than-two-minute video shows these two feeding these wild and notoriously dangerous sharks with their bare hands, grazing the sharks underbellies with their fingers, and then later petting one on the snout as if it were a dog. While that might be a tad too close for comfort for most of us, strangely enough, the shark seemed to like it as it pressed its snout even closer onto the diver’s hands, like a cat saying “Oh yeah, that’s the spot…”
We don’t know for sure if these two are shark experts or whether the two tiger sharks in the video are conditioned for human interaction. We do know that whether or not their attempts to make friends with a specie(s) known to have had humans for dinner is misguided, it’s still pretty impressive to see this kind of (dare we say) affectionate interaction between man and feared creature, however fleeting.
Enjoy the rest of shark week, everyone, and watch the video after the jump!
