A hammerhead shark that bit a kayaker off the coast of Malibu on Saturday may have come as far north as Malibu as a result of warmed ocean waters, California Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) experts confirmed Tuesday.
The kayaker, who was bit Saturday, Sept. 6 at around 2:40 p.m., was released from the hospital earlier this week and is expected to make a full recovery.
Ocean conditions in the Pacific that are stirring concerns over the possibility of a powerful El Niño this fall are also likely to blame for a hammerhead shark making its way this far north. The hammerhead bit a 29-year-old kayaker near Deer Creek Beach in southern Ventura County, near Malibu, an area hundreds of miles north of its usual habitat.
“Hammerhead sharks are not generally prevalent in Malibu waters, and it is definitely a reasonable correlation to explain that they have followed the warm waters and their associated prey species north into our Southern California waters,” Carrie E. Wilson, Marine Environmental Scientist with the DFW, explained in an email to The Malibu Times.
The kayaker, Dylan Marks, who according to reports from CBS Los Angeles was fishing for sharks on Saturday, was bit on the foot by a 10-foot hammerhead.
“Possibly a 10-foot hammerhead shark came up and they described it like it bit him or bumped him — it wasn’t described like an attack,” Ventura County Fire Capt. Ron Oatman told The Malibu Times on Saturday.
Marks, who had a foot dangling in the water along with a fishing line, suffered lacerations on the foot where the shark bite occurred.
“It came up to his foot and moved on, but it did some severe laceration damage to the foot,” Oatman said.
According to Oatman, Marks was able to flag down a nearby fishing vessel, and a Good Samaritan helped him bandage his foot and take him close to shore. He was then able to paddle himself in, with the aid of Ventura County Lifeguards.
Marks was then transported by air to Los Robles Hospital in Thousand Oaks. No beaches were closed following the attack.
“With the warmer El Niño waters that have been prevailing off our coast in recent months, we have seen many unusual warmer water species appear in our coastal waters that would otherwise be expected to occur in more southern waters this time of year,” Wilson explained.
The shark bite comes after a number of hammerhead shark sightings near San Diego last month, including one rare attack off the coast of San Diego.
In that attack, which occurred Aug. 13, a hammerhead bit the hand of a diver at Cortes Bank, about 100 miles off the coast of San Diego, according to NBC San Diego. In that report, Mike Price, an assistant curator of fishes at SeaWorld, stated that hammerheads are also rarely seen off the coast of San Diego.
“It’s very possible because of the warm water and the fact that Cortes Bank is a type of sea mountain, that you would have [hammerheads] that have just followed the warm water and are just aggregating like they would normally do, around the Cortes Bank,” Price told NBC. Price said the sharks are typically found off the coast of southern Mexico and Central America.
In late August, La Jolla beach in the San Diego area was closed due to a hammerhead sighting. Just this past Sunday, one day after Marks was bitten by a hammerhead, one was spotted close to Huntington Beach.
Los Angeles County Lifeguard Capt. Remy Smith stated that although sharks can occasionally be sighted in the Santa Monica Bay, bites are “incredibly rare.”
“We didn’t have any shark bites for over 30 years in the Santa Monica Bay and Malibu until last year,” Smith recalled. “It’s very rare. I’m not going to say it’s not ever going to happen, but it’s very, very rare.
“They just want to eat sea lions, and humans look like pretty sick sea lions.”
