What would your reaction be if a huge shark suddenly began swimming in your vicinity during a dip in the ocean? You probably wouldn't be particularly calm, would you?
Which is why the reactions of dozens of beachgoers in Florida have baffled so many people.
A video recorded recently at Navarre Beach in Florida has caught the moment a sizeable-looking shark swims perilously close to a crowd of people enjoying some time in the ocean.
Now, ordinarily, the reaction to a fish big enough to bite one of your limbs off getting up close and personal with a bunch of human beings would probably be one of sheer panic. You'd usually have beachgoers desperately dashing out of the water, trying to save their body parts from becoming a shark's lunch.
Instead, the Navarre Beach faithful, en masse, calmly exited the waters, almost without a care in the world.
From the footage, no one has been able to confirm what species of shark is pictured in the video. However, Florida's waters are home to both Tiger Sharks and Bull Sharks, two species that have been responsible for multiple fatalities in the past.
Sharks normally associate splashing with distressed animals, which would provide them with a relatively easy dinner or maybe a light swimming snack. So the people in the video calmly heading back to the sand are acting exactly as they should. The lack of frantic behavior also doesn't allow the shark itself to become stressed and thus start behaving erratically.
However, when the video hit social media, some commenters were less than impressed with what they saw.
One Facebook user replied, "What happened to the advance warning from the lifeguards? Lifeguards whistling? That's a huge shark. It makes you wanna just stay in a pool."
Beach Safety Director Austin Turnbull reassured everyone that all protocols had been adhered to and that sharks are incredibly common in Florida waters, so the entire situation wasn't really anything to worry about.
"There’s sharks in the Gulf, everywhere. We see sharks almost every day and there’s nothing to be alarmed of for 99.9% of the time," he said, per The New York Post.
We're still very alarmed for that 0.1% of the time, though.
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