A 26-year-old woman died in a rare shark attack while swimming with her son in the Jalisco coastal town of Melaque.
According to witness reports, María Fernanda Martínez and her five-year-old son were swimming beside an inflatable water slide platform that had been installed in the ocean about 30 yards from the Melaque beach.
When she became aware of the shark’s presence, Martínez quickly tried to lift her son onto the platform. Although she succeeded in this, the shark bit her in the leg and in the hip area.
Other bathers eventually managed to haul Martínez onto to the slide and get her back to the beach. However, by this time her leg was all but severed and she had lost a large amount of blood. She had also ingested a large quantity of seawater. Despite attempts to revive her, she succumbed before a medical team arrived, either from hypovolemic shock or drowning, or a combination of both.
Originally from Guadalajara, Martínez was a resident of the area and was studying marine biology at the University of Guadalajara’s Costa Sur campus (Centro Universitario de la Costa del Sur).
At first, there were doubts that a crocodile might have been responsible for the attack. Crocodiles are common in the region, especially in and around the Laguna de Tule, a tributary of which empties into the bay in neighboring Barra de Navidad. However, Cihuatlán authorities later confirmed the former theory, and promptly issued an alert, suspending all swimming on both the Melaque and Barra beaches.
Bernabé Aguilar, a specialist at the Costa Sur campus, also noted that the bite marks seemed to confirm that a shark had perpetrated the attack. He also raised the possibility that the inflatable slides might have attracted the shark, saying the dark area beneath them might have appeared like a “cave” to the creature.
This could be a likely explanation, since sharks rarely attack swimmers, as their instinct is to move away from humans.
Another local specialist in marine species told reporters that the attack could be the combination of several environmental and biological factors, citing the cloud cover, drop in the temperature, and the presence of potential prey, including schools of fish and sea turtles.
The Civil Protection director in Melaque said that, to his memory, there had never previously been an incident of a shark attack reported in the resort. In fact, some sources reported that there is no existing documentation of a shark attack ever having occurred off the coast of Jalisco.
Shark attacks are relatively rare in Mexico. In 2019, a U.S. diver survived a shark bite on the forearm in Magdalena Bay off the Baja California Sur coast.