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| Steve Studer, of Wilmington, nabbed this image on Thursday of a shark while power paragliding over Mason’s Inlet |
Wilmington-area resident Steve Studer said he made an interesting find off Wrightsville Beach’s north end Thursday evening—a 5 foot shark gliding through Mason’s Inlet.
It was about 6:10 p.m. when Studer spotted the creature. He said he was flying up above the water in a powered paraglider. He captured an image of it as it moved parallel across the shorelines between Wrightsville Beach and Figure 8 Island.
“He was . . . in fairly shallow water and scampered off when I dropped down low on him,” Studer said in an email.
The Lumina News sent Studer’s photo to George Burgess, director of Florida’s Program for Shark Research and curator of the International Shark Attack File. Burgess said a photo wouldn’t be enough to identify the species. But the animal, he said, came from the family Carcharhinidae, which, in North Carolina, includes the blacktip, spinner, sandbar, blacknose, sharpnose, bull and tiger sharks.
Paul Barrington, director of husbandry and operations at the North Carolina Aquarium in Fort Fisher, said inlets are a major feeding ground for predatory animals, mainly because their dynamics tend to aggregate bait, thereby offering these creatures an aquatic smorgasbord of prey.
“High tide, low tide—it doesn’t seem to matter,” he said. “Where the food is, the apex predators are going to follow.”
Shark bites on humans are rare and are usually a case of mistaken identity, where the shark misinterprets human movement for that of its prey.
“They move quickly whenever they sense movement, but unfortunately sometimes what they’re grabbing turns out to be an arm or a leg,” Burgess said.
North Carolina has seen four documented shark bites so far this year, more than double its annual average. None of those were fatal.
The latest encounter, between 13-year-old Kendall Parker and an unknown species, occurred just south of Mason’s Inlet, where Studer reportedly captured his image.
Earlier this week, Burgess suggested northern predatory grounds had opened early due to above-average water temperatures, causing an unseasonable abundance of sharks along the North Carolina seaboard, he said.
