Sharks swam in the oceans long before our appearance in the branches of the evolutionary tree and they have always captured our imagination. They are ideal for hunting and killing, and they are always terrifying when they hunt our species.
It seems that you can avoid shark attacks if you swim not in oceans and seas, but in freshwater lakes. But this is far from the case and there is a very alarming activity of sharks in the freshwater bodies of our planet. Including Lake Michigan.
Lake Michigan is located in four American states: Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan. This is one of the so-called Great Lakes of North America. By its size, this is the largest lake in the United States and there are always a lot of tourists on its shores, who called the lake's beaches the "Third Coast".
It may seem like the last place to look for sharks, but there are actually a few of them hiding in the depths of Lake Michigan and occasionally attacking vacationers.
This case was described in the book by Felix Dennis "Man Eating Sharks!" (1975). It happened on a sunny summer day in 1955 on one of the beaches of the lake with the boy George Lawson, who flew here with his family on vacation from Chicago.
Lawson, with many other children and adults, was splashing very close to the beach when suddenly people noticed how something grabbed him and dragged him under the water. Then the boy floated to the surface, began to twitch and scream loudly. And right there, many people saw a large shark fin flashing in the water.
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When one of the eyewitnesses named John Adler finally reached the child on his boat, he pulled the boy out of the water and saw with horror that one of his legs had been completely bitten off below the knee. The water in this place was stained with the blood of a child and the boy moaned in pain. He was promptly taken to the hospital, and Adler later said that he "could not believe what he saw with his own eyes."
At the hospital, doctors recognized the wound as a result of a shark attack. According to one version, the child could have been attacked by a bull shark that entered Lake Michigan from the Illinois River. This does not seem impossible, as bull sharks have previously been seen in different rivers and it is believed that they easily adapt to fresh water.
Bull sharks have been sighted in the Mississippi, Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin rivers. They are also considered quite aggressive. However, none of the sharks seen tried to attack humans. Besides, cold waters are very uncomfortable for them. When a bull shark was found hiding in a sunken truck in Lake Pepin in Mississippi, the fish was already severely weakened and slowly dying from the cold.
So the mystery of the aggressive sharks in Lake Michigan still remains. And it may not be the bull shark to blame for this.
Two fishermen, Gil Charnek and Kal Lukashevich, were fishing on the lake one day and noticed what they initially thought was a floating mountain of rubbish. Seagulls were sitting on the "mountain" and when the fishermen swam closer on the boat, they realized that these were the remains of a very large fish.
The remains were later analyzed in the laboratory and suddenly it turned out that it was a blacktip shark. This was another mystery of the lake, since blacktip sharks live in coastal tropical and subtropical waters, that is, very far from Michigan.
And more recently, less than a year ago, in Lake Michigan, vacationers filmed a very large fish in the water. Another shark? Judging by the fin, it looks a lot like that. True, the video posted on the social network was of such terrible quality that it is even difficult to get a more or less blurry screenshot from there.