A male diver was injured in a shark attack off the coast of Tasmania on Saturday, police said, the latest in a spate of shark attacks in Australian waters.
The 31-year-old was diving around 50 metres (164 feet) offshore in the Adventure Bay area of Tasmania’s Bruny Island when he was bitten by what was believed to be a 2-metre (6.6 ft) broadnose sevengill shark, at about 9.10am (2310 GMT).
“The man was able to return to shore and was assisted by fellow divers,” Police Inspector Darren Latham said in a statement.
The victim sustained non-life-threatening injuries to his forearm and was airlifted to hospital in a stable condition, according to the statement.
Police said there had been no further sightings of the shark in the remote area of the island state that is a one-hour flight from the mainland city of Melbourne, 445 km (275 miles) away. About 40 per cent of the island is wilderness or protected areas.
A witness who was at the scene when paramedics attended to the diver told ABC News the group of divers were “spearfishing on scuba”.
“The guy who was bitten had speared a fish and had been bitten by the shark while retrieving the fish on the spear,” he said.
Last month, a shark attack in Australia’s largest city Sydney left a 35-year-old woman critically injured and prompted a safety review at the country’s popular shorelines.
Also in June, a man died after being attacked by a shark while fishing off the coast of Western Australia state, in the most recent fatal incident.
In May, a 39-year-old man died after being attacked while fishing on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef. A week earlier, a 38-year-old was fatally mauled off an island near Perth in Western Australia.
Dozens of beaches along Australia’s east coast were closed in January after four shark attacks in two days.
While shark encounters remain statistically rare, a Reuters analysis of data from the Australian Shark Incident Database shows a gradual rise in encounters, with the country averaging nearly 29 incidents per year over the last decade, up from an average of roughly 16 per year in the 2000s.
