PERRY, Fla.  — Authorities in Florida say a 17-year-old girl was seriously injured Thursday after a shark attacked her near Keaton Beach.

The Taylor County Sheriff's Office said on Facebook that the girl, who hospital officials later identified as Addison Bethea, was scalloping near Grassy Island in water approximately five feet deep when she was attacked by what was described as a 9-foot shark.

On Friday, the girl's family said that she poked the shark in the eyes and punched it before her brother, who is a firefighter/EMT, fought the animal off and pulled her onto a stranger's boat.

"Thanks to the help of her brother, Rhett Willingham and several other local boaters, Addison survived," Tallahassee Memorial Hospital said in a statement. "They were able to work together to tie a tourniquet to control the bleeding."

Bethea was airlifted to the hospital, where she is recovering.

According to the hospital, Bethea suffered "devastating damage to the soft tissue in her right leg."

She will undergo a second surgery Saturday so doctors can "further investigate the extent of the damage to her leg and determine what treatment options are available with the goal of saving her leg," the hospital said.

TAYLOR COUNTY, Fla. —

Addison Bethea was out hunting for scallops in the waters off Keaton Beach, Florida, on Thursday when a shark latched onto her flesh.

"I didn't really know exactly what to do, but I knew that with sharks you're supposed to punch them in the nose to get them off of you, and I couldn't get around to punch him in the nose," the 17-year-old told CNN. "So I just started socking it in the face and then poked its eyes and I tried to latch it off me with my fingers, and then it bit my hand."

She screamed for help, and her brother Rhett Willingham, a firefighter/EMT, heeded the call.

"I heard her make a noise, almost like something scared her," he said. "I sat up and looked and didn't see her. Then she came up from the water and I saw the shark and the blood and all that, then I swam over there and got (the shark) off."

After fighting off the shark, Willingham pulled his sister into another boat, applied a tourniquet to her leg to stem the blood loss, and rushed her back to land as fast as possible, he said.

The siblings explained the harrowing moments in an interview with CNN Monday from a bed in Tallahassee Memorial Hospital, where Addison was being treated for her injuries.

The Taylor County Sheriff's Office confirmed in a statement on social media a juvenile "had sustained a shark bite while scalloping near Grassy Island in water approximately five feet deep." The office said the shark was about 9 feet long.

The bite left "devastating damage to the soft tissue in her right leg," according to a statement from Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH). "The TMH trauma team stabilized her, and the trauma surgeon performed emergency surgery with a goal of restoring blood flow to her leg," hospital officials said Friday.

The injuries appeared to have done little to dampen Addison's spirits. Surrounded by stuffed toy sharks in her hospital bed, the teen appeared upbeat even as she said she is scheduled to have her leg amputated above her knee on Tuesday.

"It's going to make it a lot easier in the end," she said. "I'm excited for it, to be honest. I'm tired of sitting in bed all the time."

"Everyone who knows me knows I take humor in everything, so, yeah, I just like stuffed sharks," she said. "I think it's funny. Just making light of the situation."

In a Facebook post, her father said she had been in good spirits and was "cracking jokes about beating up the shark."

"The first thing she asked for was a Wendy's frosty," he said. "She's been through more than I could ever imagine, but she is being a trooper. Please pray for her and the difficulty of her days ahead. She isn't out of the woods by any stretch, but she is alive and that's what's most important to us."

Willingham told CNN the experience is "definitely not something I ever expected to watch, but seeing her now, and how positive she is, is good to see."

As for her future plans, Addison was undeterred: she plans to get back in the water once she has recovered.

"I mean, a shark has always been there, it just happened to attack me that day," she said. "I lived 17 years without a shark attack. I'm fine with going back."

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) — Romania's foreign ministry says a tourist has died from a shark attack in Egypt.

It's the second shark attack in Egypt in the past several days.

On Friday, a 68-year-old Austrian woman died after losing an arm and a leg in an attack by a Mako shark while swimming in the Red Sea near the resort town of Hurghada.

Egyptian local media widely reported on the death of a second woman from a shark attack on Sunday.

Incidents with sharks have been relatively rare in Egypt’s Red Sea coastal region in recent years.

In 2010, one European tourist was killed and several others were maimed in a series of shark attacks.

A woman who lives on Martha's Vineyard is sharing details about her close encounter with a shark, the first for the 23-year resident of the Massachusetts island.Amanda Borland and her dog, Hamish, were out for their daily walk in Vineyard Haven on Friday when they decided to stop by a sandy strip near the end of the Lagoon Pond drawbridge to play fetch. Borland, who is also known as "Scotty" to locals, was picking through sea glass when she saw the shark, a porbeagle, swimming close to shore."When I took a step back and the shark kind of swam off, I thought he was swimming off for good. But then he turned around and that's when he came right up," Borland said.All of a sudden, Borland said she and Hamish were practically face to face with the shark."I just wasn't expecting it, and he actually came right up as if he was going to come up on the shore," she said. "I almost think that he thought, maybe, my dog was a seal." Borland said the shark eventually left Hamish and her alone, but they were left stunned by the encounter, which she captured on video."Once we stepped back out of the water, I had never seen my dog have a look of shock in his face, and the look of shock in his face was, I imagine, what the look of shock was in my face. I don't think he could believe it," Borland said.Dr. Greg Skomal, a shark biologist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said the porbeagle shark in Borland's video may be suffering a bacterial infection in its brain. Sharks with that illness oftentimes get disoriented in the water and end up beaching themselves.

A 10-year-old girl is keeping her cool even after surviving an encounter with a shark Sunday at Hobe Sound Beach in Jupiter Island. "I fought a shark and won," Jasmine Carney told WPTV. She said she was enjoying herself in the ocean with her family when she felt the shark.Watch the full story in the video player above. "Something grabbed me," she said. "It looked pretty big and it was gray. It hurt, so I'm like, kick it (and) run away."Carney's grandmother was shocked to see the girl's injuries."She came running up that beach, screaming, 'Nana! Nana! Something bit me. Something bit me,'" she recalled. "And I saw all the blood and went and got a lifeguard."Carney was rushed to a hospital in West Palm Beach.Surgeon Dr. Nir Hus was wowed by the girl's attitude in the face of a very severe foot injury. "She was very positive from the get-go," he said. "There's a piece missing. Luckily for her, this was the only location that she was bitten."Hus said it will take about two months for Carney to recover.

Imagine you're fishing from the Tybee Pier in Georgia and you manage to reel in a shark. Well, that happened on three different occasions Monday morning.The first person to pull off the feat was Robert Dean Martin of Atlanta. He had been fishing since 2 a.m. Monday, and around 10 a.m., he managed to hook a four-foot blacktip shark, which he eventually threw back into the ocean."I didn’t even know he was on my line," Martin said. "I got tangled up with a bunch of other people and then that's when I felt him start fighting."About an hour later, Savannah resident Aaron Gallegor was also fishing when he managed to reel in another blacktip shark, this one estimated about 20 pounds or so, but he says catching sharks on the pier is really no big deal."Yeah, yeah, we get a couple every trip," Gallegor said. "I come out here pretty frequently, three or four every time I come out, anywhere from six inches to six feet."Within minutes of that catch, another fisherman reeled in yet another shark, and he like the others, unhooked it and threw it back in the ocean.

A hammerhead shark washed ashore on a Florida beach Monday, and the incident was caught on camera.It happened Monday at a beach in Boca Grande, Florida, which is near Fort Myers.According to the woman who shot the video, she saw people running and wasn't sure why — until she saw the shark coming onshore.Once she saw the shark, she said she ran back, grabbed her cell phone and started recording the incident. She then said she started telling people to get out of the water.In the video, you can see the shark struggling a bit as it approaches the shoreline. After a brief struggle, the shark is seen swimming away.

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NEW THIS AFTERNOON, A SOUTH FLORIDA DIVER CAME FACE TO FACE, WITH A GIANT SHARK WHILE DIVING OFF THE COAST. SUMMER: IMAGES SHOW THE MAN COMING DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO THE PREDATOR, WHO MAY HAVE BEEN PREGNANT. WESH 2’S SANIKA DANGE SHARES THAT PHOTOGRAPHER’S INCREDIBLE STORY. >> WE WERE DOING OUR DRIFT OFF SHORE SANIKA: 55-YEAR-OLD CAPTAIN JOHN MOORE >> THE CURRENT WAS RUNNING A STRONG HEADED NORTH. SANIKA: WAS TAKING ON A NEW DEEP SEA ADVENTURE. >> WE WERE FREE DIVING, SO THING WE’RE WEARING IS YOUR SNORKEL GEAR IN A WETSUIT WHEN HE HAD NO IDEA WHAT HE WAS ABOUT TO CAPTURE WOULD SOON GO VIRAL CAPTURING THE ATTENTION OF PEOPLE ALL AROUND THE WORLD. EVERY DAY IS DIFFERENT OUT THERE. SANIKA: WITH THE WATER TEMPERATURE BETWEEN 70 AND 80 DEGREES AND IMPECCABLE VISIBILITY HE SAW IT. FEEDING ON BAIT FISH OFF THE COAST OF JUPITER A MASSIVE BULL SHARK. OVERSIZED FOR ITS SPECIES. >> SHE WAS KINDA UNIQUE THAT SHE CAME POWERING RIGHT UP THROUGH THE OTHER BULLS. SHE WAS SUPER DOMINANCE IS KIND OF RIGHT IN THE FOREFRONT OF EVERYTHING. SHE WAS SWIMMING RIGHT UP TO MY MASK AND JUST KIND OF SIZING UP WHAT WAS GOING ON OUT THERE SHE WAS JUST SO IMPRESSIVE. SANIKA: MOORE CAME FACE TO FACE WITH WHAT APPEARED TO BE A PREGNANT SHARK. CLOSE ENOUGH TO SEE ITS RAZOR-SHARP TEETH AND YELLOW-TINTED EYES. FOR 45 MINUTES HE DRIFTED JUST INCHES FROM THIS APEX PREDATOR. >> SHE LOOKED LIKE SHE WAS READY TO POP SHE WAS ALMOST LIKE ROUNDS SHE WAS SO BIG. SANIKA: HIS CLOSE RANGE PHOTOS SHOW JUST HOW MASSIVE THE SHARK REALLY WAS. LOOK HERE YOU CAN SEE HOW TINY MOORE APPEARS NEXT TO THIS SHARK. MOORE STANDS 6FEET TALL. SO THAT GIVES YOU AN IDEA OF WHAT HE WAS FACED IT. >> A LOT OF PEOPLE HEAR THE WORD BULL SHARK AND THEY THINK SCARY INTIMIDATING PREDATOR. I DONT SEE THEM LIKE THAT AT ALL. SANIKA: FLORIDA HAS THE HIGHEST CONCENTRATION OF LARGE SHARKS ALONG ITS SURROUNDING COASTLINE THAN ANYWHERE ELSE ON THE EAST COAST. BULL SHARKS ARE BELIEVED TO BE ONE OF THE MOST AGGRESSIVE SHARKS IN THE OCEAN. USUALLY BIG IN SIZE AND TRAVEL IN PACKS. BUT THIS WASNT YOUR TYPICAL BULL SHARK THAT COULD WEIGH OVER 1,500 POUNDS. OH NO, THIS FEMALE SHARK WAS MUCH LARGER. SO ITS A SPECIAL KIND OF PERSON WITH WHOLE LOT OF COURAGE AND A TAD BIT OF CRAZY TO CAPTURE A MOMENT AS MAJESTIC AS THIS. >> IT REALLY IS NOTHING. WHAT I DO I DONT SEE MORE DANGEROUS. THEN WHAT A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE DO. SUMMER: MOORE IS AN EXPERIENCED DIVER, PHOTOGRAPHER, AND CONSERVATION ADVOCATE WHO HOPES HIS WORK WILL BRING AWARENESS ABOUT THE SPECIES THAT MANY PEOPLE FEAR. MEREDITH: MANY IT WAS CALLED BECAUSE HE WAS CALM, I DON’T KNOW. IT ALSO LOOKED LIKE A GREAT WHITE, I’M SURPRISE IT WAS A BULL SHARK. SU

WOW! Man captures incredible images of pregnant bull shark

Updated: 6:15 AM EDT May 18, 2021

A South Florida diver came face to face with a giant shark.Images show the man, 55-year-old John Moore, coming dangerously close to the predator, which might have been pregnant."She was kind of unique in that she came powering right up through the other bulls. She was super dominant just kind of right in the forefront of everything. She was swimming right up to my mask," he said.For 45 minutes Moore drifted just inches from the shark."A lot of people hear the word 'bull shark' and they think scary, intimidating predator. I don't see them like that at all."Watch the video above for more on this story.

JUPITER, Fla. —

A South Florida diver came face to face with a giant shark.

Images show the man, 55-year-old John Moore, coming dangerously close to the predator, which might have been pregnant.

"She was kind of unique in that she came powering right up through the other bulls. She was super dominant just kind of right in the forefront of everything. She was swimming right up to my mask," he said.

For 45 minutes Moore drifted just inches from the shark.

"A lot of people hear the word 'bull shark' and they think scary, intimidating predator. I don't see them like that at all."

Watch the video above for more on this story.