Australian Mom Wrestles Shark Back into Ocean With Her Bare Hands

Colin Fredericson
By Colin Fredericson
October 11, 2017World News
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Australian Mom Wrestles Shark Back into Ocean With Her Bare Hands
Aquatic biologist Pam Schaller holds a four-day-old white-tipped shark. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

An Australian mother was captured on video lifting a shark with her bare hands.

Melissa Hatheier got a call from her mother who said a shark was swimming in the rock pool that she frequents, which is right beside the ocean in Cronulla, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. The shark was distressed because it couldn’t escape, The Independent reported.

The police arrived but didn’t know what to do, so Hatheier jumped in to see if she could help. She decided to catch the shark in the shallows so she could get ahold of it. She pressed on its fins so she wouldn’t get bitten. She lifted it up and turned it over on its back so that it wouldn’t move. Then she tossed it back into the freedom of the sea.

“So I came down, there was a bit of a crew down here, and had a look and he was a little Port Jackson and was doing laps of the pool and I said, you know I’m going to go in and check him out,” Hatheier told news.com.au. She isn’t sure if the shark was indeed a Port Jackson or another type.

The video was posted to the Facebook page of Cronulla Real Estate, the company Hatheier works for when not wrestling sharks. It received 316,000 views and made Hatheier a social media star. Hatheier’s daughter, Shannon, filmed the encounter while her other daughter, Lani, observed. Her son, Nathan, was also there, but he left earlier.

“He wasn’t that heavy but his skin was very rough, like sandpaper,” said Hatheier, describing the shark to The Leader. “I just threw him over the edge of the pool into the water and watched him swim away.”

The shark was an infant that she said was about three-feet long. Hatheier mentioned that she wouldn’t have tried to lift a fully grown shark. She didn’t really see the incident as a big deal.

“I was just trying to catch a little shark,” she said. “If it had big teeth I wouldn’t have done it.”

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