A diver goes the extra mile to protect sharks, by reaching into their mouths and extracting hooks…
This is Cristina Zenato and she has a very close relationship with sharks. She’s a professional diver who’s been diving with the ocean’s most feared predator for some 25 years. A member of the Explorers Club (she’s also way into cave diving), her expertise in sharks is especially well tuned with the Caribbean Reef Sharks in the Bahamas, where she has an almost zen-like approach to the fish.
That’s why some call her the “Shark Whisperer.” She has an innate ability to soothe these eight-and-a-half-foot predators into submission with her touch. So much so that she’s been able to remove wayward hooks from the mouths of sharks that have often been there for years (that can’t be comfortable). She says the hooks come from escaping directly off the lines of fishermen or even biting into flailing fish that are already hooked. Regardless, the hooks become permanent markers on the fish.
With these powers, which require bravery and trust, Zenato has recently taken to performing oral surgery on her beloved sharks of the Bahamas, if it can be called that, by removing fishing hooks from their mouths.
Most of the hooks have been on the inner fringes of the sharks’ mouths, but sometimes they’re embedded deeply inside the mouths. This is when Zenato’s work gets tricky (see video below).
In the accompanying footage, the veteran diver places her hand and part of her arm fully inside the mouth of a large shark and extracts the hook just as the shark becomes agitated and swims off, inadvertently brushing Zenato’s face with its tail.
Now that’s serious dedication. But few are as passionate about sharks as Zenato. Well, word got in Starkville, and every beast with a hook in its mouth came looking for Zenato to remove it.
You can hear more from her amazing story in the video below:
Watch it here: TheDodo/Youtube
Source: AWM
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