A new study claims the Grand Strand is one of the busiest regions in the country pertaining to shark bites.
While vacationing in Myrtle Beach earlier this month, Peyton Force of North Carolina was bitten by what she believes was a shark.
"I thought it could've been like a dolphin or something, but a couple minutes later, something just clamped onto my leg," Force said.
While Force still believes it was a shark that bit her, the Myrtle Beach Fire Department believe it was a marine animal.
Shark or not, a survey from SafeWise says unproved shark attacks on the Grand Strand do occur.
"There's 375 different species of sharks, but primarily, the ones that are going to attack a human are going to be the great white or tiger sharks," says Sage Singleton, a community outreach manager for SafeWise.
According to the survey, 39 people in South Carolina were bitten by sharks that weren’t provoked between 2007 and 2016. Those statistics make S.C. third in the U.S. following behind Hawaii with 65, and Florida with 244. North Carolina and California tied for fourth with 33 bites.
Ten of South Carolina bites were on the Grand Strand. That total is almost as many as the entire state of Texas, which had 11 bites.
Safewise credits gathering the information from shark researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History as well as the Global Shark Attack File.
Singleton says shark bite reports are tough for researchers to track.
"I think it's hard to 100 percent say, yes, I was bitten by a shark," she said.
Researchers claim the odds of a shark attacking you are hugely small at 11.5 million to one. Which is way less likely than being struck by lightning.
Researchers also claim humans actually attack sharks more often, with many hunting for fins.
"When you look worldwide, about one-quarter of shark species are threatened with extinction," said Dr. Robert Hueter, a shark researcher from Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida.
The SafeWise survey reveals no one in the Carolinas died from a shark bite and only six out of about 450 bites nationwide were deadly.
The Myrtle Beach Fire Department says there's no official way shark bites in the city are tracked.
