Woman Tried to Take a Selfie With a Shark—and Lost Both Hands

People will never learn, huh? A woman lost both of her hands after trying to do something so dumb that it pains me to even write this. She wanted to snag a selfie with a shark. Seriously.

What ended up happening was the complete opposite of a Kodak moment. instead, it sparked a vicious bite that saw the Canadian woman vacationing in Turks and Caicos walking away with no hands. The 55-year-old woman was wandering around the shallow end when she spotted the six-foot predator. That’s when the idea of capturing a selfie popped into her head, and she began following it before she eventually came face to face with the shark.

Photos emerged on The Daily Mail of the woman laying in the sand with cloth towels around the ends of her arms where her once fully functioning hands were. The incident occurred on Feb. 12. According to The Turks and Caicos Island Government’s Facebook post, it occurred in the Blue Hills section. The victim was taken to a local hospital before being airlifted to another medical center.

Woman Loses Both Hands After Trying to Take Selfie With Shark

According to The National Post, one of her hands was amputated at the wrist, while the other “was severed mid-way down her forearm.” It’s still unclear what species the shark was, though some theorize it was a bull shark, which was responsible for an Australian attack a little more than a year ago. The outlet also notes that shark attacks on the island are rare with just four non-fatal incidents since 2021.

It may be 2025, but people still don’t understand that the ocean—for all its beauty and serenity—is still a vastly untapped space where things that are much bigger and stronger than us call home. To this day, we’re still discovering new species, like the Ghost Shark that we found last September. There were even sharks in Brazil that were said to be “Cocaine Sharks” that overtook the waters there.

This isn’t to say we should never go in the ocean again, but I think a good starting point we can walk away with from this story is to, uh, not try and get a selfie with a shark. I think that’s a reasonable ask, right?