Man was fishing on a shallow-water sandbar when shark bit him in Florida Keys

The man who was seriously injured by a shark in the Florida Keys on Sunday was fishing on a shallow-water sandbar when the fish bit him, his friend said in a GoFundMe post that she set up to help him pay his medical bills.

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David Daniel, 43, who lives in Silver Springs, was fishing off Boca Grande Key, about 14 miles west of Key West, when the shark bit him on the foot, causing a serious arterial bleed, his friend Robyn Corliss wrote in the GoFundMe post.

A nurse, Christopher Green, was on a nearby boat with friends and sprang into action, he told WSVN-Fox 7.

“I jumped up and started running and saw that he had some arterial bleeding,” Green, who was also a nurse in the U.S. Army, said. “Anybody who knows that, [knows] it’s serious.”

Green, along with another off-duty nurse, applied a tourniquet that he had in his first-aid kit on his vessel and elevated Daniel’s leg, he told the television station.

A U.S. Coast Guard small-boat crew raced to the sandbar and escorted Green’s boat back to Key West, where Monroe County’s Trauma Star helicopter ambulance flew Daniel to Jackson South Medical Center at 9333 SW 152nd Street in Miami-Dade County.

“All the friends I had with me on that boat, they did an amazing job,” Green said.

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Corliss said the shark that bit Daniel was a nurse shark, a docile species that experts say is rarely implicated in shark bites.

“Nurse sharks are so morphologically different from the typical sharks involved in shark bites that it seems the person bitten wouldn’t get it mixed up with another shark species,” Mahmood Shivji, a professor of marine science and director of the Save our Seas Shark Research Center at Nova Southeastern University, told the Miami Herald, adding it’s “so uncommon for Atlantic nurse sharks to bite people.”

Unlike sharks that are more likely to bite people, like bulls, whites, tigers and blacktips, nurse sharks are suction feeders with rows of sharp tiny teeth meant to crush their typical prey of small fish, mollusks and crustaceans, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Daniel, who works as an exterminator, will likely not be able to walk for the next six to eight weeks and will require extensive physical therapy, said Corliss.

“Thankfully, he is receiving the care he needs, but the road ahead will be difficult,” Corliss wrote.

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