Boy critically injured in second shark attack in three days in Florida

The Florida Panhandle becomes notorious for its sharks. For a second time in three days a shark bit a teenager.

The boy, whose name was not released, was taken to a hospital in Panama City. The boy underwent surgery and his condition stabilized, hospital spokeswoman Christa Hild said to AP. "That means he's going to be OK," she added.

According to Reuters, the boy is 16 years old. At the moment of the attack he was fishing in waist-deep water off Florida's panhandle, Cape San Blas, a popular vacation destination about 80 miles (129 kilometers) southeast of the Destin area, where 14-year-old Jamie Marie Daigle of Gonzales, Louisiana, was killed by a shark on Saturday. According to Paula Pickett, a spokeswoman for Gulf County, the boy was fishing “about 60 yards offshore, on a sandbar” and “had a fish on the line at the time."

As AP reports, Jamie Marie Daigle had been swimming on a boogie board with a friend about 100 yards (91 meters) (200 yards by Reuters) from shore when a shark tore away the flesh on one leg from her hip to her knee.

Erich Ritter of the Shark Attack Institute supposed Daigle was attacked by a 6-foot (1.83-meter) bull shark, based on measurements of the bite wound. He said it was unlikely the same shark was responsible for Monday's attack.

After Saturday's attack, a 20-mile (32-kilometer) stretch of shore was closed to swimmers, but beaches reopened Sunday with a double staff of sheriff's beach patrol officers. On Monday, off-duty deputies were called in to beef up beach patrols and watch for sharks from the air and the water.

According to Bob Hueter, director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, there are “lots of bites in Florida every year - on the range of 20 to 25 - but they tend to be 'hit and run' kinds of things, smaller sharks... most of them are on the east coast of Florida on surfers and some bathers over there." Sharks are studied for medicinal purposes as they are relatively disease-free and have a documented natural resistance to cancer. Researchers predict a better understanding of this in the next five to ten years, reports FloridaEnvironment.com.

In 2001 doctors managed to reattach arm bitten off by shark to a boy named Jessie Arbogast.