Diver Knows Exactly What To Do When Two Tiger Sharks Approached Her in Deep Waters

Diving into an ocean is an invitation into a world of mystery. The deeper you go, the more complex this mystery becomes. There are colors of fringing corals. There are sounds, those hissings, whispers, and bubblings. But the moment you reach into the depths where everything is dark, quiet, and eerie, beware. Patrolling these unfathomable, untouched depths are the surreal, gigantic ocean tigers. The eye of this tiger never skips anything that has blood on it, not even the carcass of the dead. These maneating beasts would make your eye doctor fall short of prescription, as their retinas allow them to see even when there is no light. And even if you succeed in clapping your eyes with their sneering, sinister gaze, you might encounter what raw fear feels like, probably for the first and the last time.

However, some polished divers have mastered the skill of taming these otherwise uncontrollable beasts. Every diver has their own strategy. Ocean Ramsey (@oceanramsey) has too. Ramsey, who has encountered dozens of sharks in her lifetime, is familiar with the intricate mechanisms of their brains, something that has made her adept at dealing with and relating to these monsters. Ramsey, who has also been featured in Netflix’s “Shark Whisperer,” knows just the right tune that will send these striped beasts surrendering to her command and following whatever she tells them to do.

In a resurfaced footage, shared by Juan Oliphant (@juansharks), Ramsey is seen encountering a tiger shark. But before she could deal with the shark, another one popped up, creating a dire situation for her. Before she found herself engulfed by this party of predators, she fetched an unusual strategy from the archives of her shark understanding and implemented it on the two tigers that were invading her attention.

The footage shows Ramsey in her diving suit, mask, fins, and propellers, drifting deep into the ocean water. A few seconds into the footage, a gorgeous tiger shark emerges from the waters, flinging its silver-grey body towards the diver, flapping its tail. Ramsey was just trying to soothe the shark by rubbing her palm on its mouth when another tiger shark, a smaller one, came swimming from the side, jolting her into a precarious dilemma. Undeterred, however, Ramsey sifted through all the information she had learned about sharks in hundreds of encounters, and gently picked one strategy to redirect these sharks away from her.

Instead of trying to deal with both the sharks, she used a clever approach by targeting only the dominant shark. With gentle movements of her hand, she directed the dominant shark towards the smaller shark. So, when the smaller shark drifted away from the dominant shark, the dominant one followed it, thereby moving away and leaving Ramsey alone. In the caption of the video, the diver revealed that she has used this strategy before. When bumping into bad and stressful situations like this, she sometimes even swims alongside the dominant shark to take its protective cover and move away from the rest of the sharks.

“This avoids the need to redirect both sharks, which can be hectic,” she noted. National Geographic explains that encounters like these are unsurprising among divers. With repetitive encounters, most divers know their deepest tendencies and fundamental behaviors, using which they protect themselves. And even though no one gets spared from their ferocious wrath, divers can restrain these aggressive beasts with a little bit of intelligent management. At the end of the day, these encounters offer scientists noteworthy opportunities to observe and catch a glimpse into the minds of these tigers. For master divers like Ramsey, an encounter like this is now “just another day at the office."

“You just make it look so easy,” commented @balancemalpal. Many viewers related the episode to their own lives and reflected on how they could use it to resolve their own dilemmas. “Does this work the same if two large women approached me in a parking lot?” asked @kaurithompson.

You can follow Juan Oliphant (@juansharks) and @oceanramsey on Instagram for more thrilling shark encounters.

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