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Lemon Shark Comes Over To Divers To Be Petted

Mickey Smith loves sharks and regularly dives in Jupiter, Florida to see mantas, reef sharks, bull sharks, tiger sharks, whale sharks, etc. His group, Shark Addicts, tries to go out diving every weekend and on a recent dive, he captured this video of a shark that they are familiar with. What’s unusual about this shark is that she is friendly loves getting petted.

“This is a lemon shark named Blondie who comes to us for these interactions, we have many clips of her with Cameron and Capt Randy,” Shark Addicts writes. “This does not injure the shark in anyway, she’s an 8 foot 200lb lemon shark we can’t make her do anything she doesn’t want to do.”

It’s not known why a shark would like being petted, but the fish have special jelly-filled pores around their snout (called the ampullae of Lorenzini, which are special sensing organs called electroreceptors) that when rubbed are known to put them into a trance-like state. They seem to really like it. Some sharks also like to get belly rubs like this leopard shark.

The video shows that not all sharks are vicious and attack on sight. In fact, sharks kill less people than coconuts. Yes, coconuts. Coconuts kill 150 people every year. But from the year 2006 to 2014, sharks attacked and killed a total of 5 people. That figure is completed overshadowed by the number of sharks humans kill. For every human killed by a shark, humans kill approximately two million sharks, which is why sharks are steadily becoming an endangered species.

Shark Addicts shows you can have interactions with sharks that defy superstition!