Woman peeks into mouth of ‘dead’ shark stranded on Alabama beach. It started moving

It’s one thing to dodge a shark while swimming in the Gulf of Mexico, but an Alabama woman apparently had a close encounter on dry land over the weekend.

Jane Covel Walton told McClatchy News she walking with a friend on Dauphin Island when she spotted a 3-foot shark on the beach. Dauphin Island is on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, about 35 miles south of Mobile.

“I assumed it was dead,” she said. “So we started checking it out, rolling it over, looking in his mouth to see how big the teeth were, etc. ... We stuck our fingers right in his mouth to check out his teeth.”

Then it moved.

“It was still alive!“ she wrote in a Facebook post.

Walton says she was “certainly surprised,” which is a more subdued reaction than many commenters had in a Facebook group devoted to Dauphin Island’s West End Beach.

“I would have had a heart attack,” one person wrote.

“This would have scared me to death!” another said.

Many in the group say what Walton did next was even more surprising, however. After realizing the shark was alive, she and her friend “picked him up and put him back out in the water,” she says. Walton, who lives on the island, believes they acted just in time to save the shark.

“We stayed to make sure that it didn’t get washed back up into the surf and never saw it again, so I assume it survived,” she said.

The shark was identified as an Atlantic sharpnose, which can grow to about 4 feet and “have 24 or 25 rows of triangular teeth,” according to NOAA Fisheries. The species is known to “forage in surf zones and estuaries,” which can often result in human bites, the Florida Museum of Natural History reports. “However, most bites inflicted on humans by this shark are nonfatal and not serious,” the museum says.

Some Facebook commenters speculated the shark stranded itself while chasing prey near the beach, while others wondered if it was sick and dying.

It’s anybody’s guess why the shark did not bite Walton’s probing fingers, but she describes its teeth as “minuscule” and not so intimidating. Far more impressive, she says, were the shark’s hypnotic “iridescent turquoise” eyes.

The shark was “too beautiful to leave on the beach to die,” she says.

This story was originally published October 14, 2020 at 10:12 AM with the headline "Woman peeks into mouth of ‘dead’ shark stranded on Alabama beach. It started moving."