A shark bit a boy in South Carolina last Thursday, the fourth youngster confirmed bitten off Hilton Head Island this summer, the Island Packet reported.
The Florida Program for Shark Research confirmed that injuries suffered by Linton Suttle, 13, of North Carolina, while swimming near Sea Pines Beach Club was indeed a shark bite.
Suttle told the Island Packet he was attacked by either a blacktip or sharpnose shark while he was pushing his 11-year-old sister on a boogie board. The boy said he felt a sharp pain on his foot after diving into the water and quickly pulled away.
"I thought maybe it was a seashell but as I turned around to look I saw a shadow swim away and I knew I had just got bit by a shark," Suttle said. "My first thought was that I wanted to get my sister out of the water."
The Charlotte Observer said Johnny Simatacolos, a 10-year-old boy from Kentucky, was bitten by a shark near the same area of Hilton Head Island on July 28. The boy and his parents did not know it was a shark until they researched the bite after their doctors could not determine how it happened.
"I thought something bit me or I stepped on something like a crab," the boy told the Observer about receiving the bites after swimming off Sea Pines Beach. "I was screaming, a little. It was bleeding badly."
Eventually, his wounds were confirmed as shark bites by the International Shark Attack File, the Observer said.
The Island Packet said Reagan Readnour, 14, of Ohio, was dragged off her boogie board and bitten on the leg by a shark off Burkes Beach on June 18.
On June 21, 16-year-old Olivia Wallhauser, of Indiana, was bitten by another shark while swimming off South Forest Beach, six miles from where Readnour was bitten.
The International Shark Attack File website said the group investigated 154 incidents of alleged shark-human interactions worldwide in 2016, confirming 84 of those unprovoked shark attacks on humans.
The website stated that the attacks were on par with our most recent five-year (2011-2015) average of 82 incidents annually.