Shocking footage captured a shark feasting on a seal just a few feet from a Nantucket beach on Sunday — turning the waters red with blood and prompting officials to prohibit swimming for the rest of the afternoon.
Video of the alarming attack, obtained by Nantucket Current, shows fins violently thrashing around in the water just beyond the shore of Great Point beach.
A shark’s dorsal fin then breaks the surface in a pool of blood, and the seal carcass grimly floats up for a fleeting moment before the shark chomps down on it again.
“Oh my gosh, that shark just ate that seal,” the woman filming, Sandy Fink, exclaimed in the clip.
Fink, an Orlando resident who was vacationing on the Massachusetts island with her boyfriend, said she was enjoying the day at the beach when she spotted the shark.
“He was fishing along the shore and I was videotaping the seals and I was like ‘Is that blood? Wait! That is a shark and he is eating the seal’,” Fink told the Current.
Her boyfriend, Ron Welter, was about to go for a dip before she stopped him.
“Then I ran to show Ron the video and he was like ‘I was just about to go in real quick to cool off’ and I said ‘No!’”
The too-close-for-comfort attack was just one of several shark-on-seal killings reported along the eastern shoreline of the island Sunday, Diane Lang, of the Trustees of Reservations, told the local outlet.
The Trustees, who own and operate the Coskata-Coatue Wildlife Refuge which includes Great Point beach, barred swimming for the rest of the afternoon following the reports.
The organization closed the beach to swimmers last year as well following numerous shark sightings.
The seal population around Nantucket has risen in recent years, making shark sightings increasingly common during the summer as the predators help themselves to the buffet, according to the Current.
