The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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I sit here, nursing the wounds of a (minor) titan trigger fish attack on me earlier today. It hurts.
Diving in Malaysia and the Maldives (my preferred destinations) is extremely safe from a wildlife perspective, which is one of the main reasons I like diving there. Almost uniquely among prime diving locations (others are Hawaii, the Caribbean, Australia, Polynesia) there are almost no great whites or even (despite their technically wider range) bull sharks in much of the northern Indian Ocean and around the equator in Southeast Asia (the map does hint at the fact that great whites have been very, very rarely observed around Borneo, but these are vanishingly rare sightings). Those two represent the biggest risks to humans, as while tiger sharks are responsible for slightly more fatal attacks on humans than bull sharks, they are orders of magnitude more common, are much less likely to go in for the kill and are therefore 'per capita' much less dangerous.
Shark attacks on divers are very rare, but if you're a neurotic like me, you can't dive around Hawaii or Australia without the thought at the back of your mind that 'he's just behind me, isn't he?', like in a Marvel movie. Because diving (for tourists, at least) is a leisure activity, this mental burden can dampen the fun. It's a popular topic of discussion on diving boards that many thrill-seekers want to see a great white in the wild until they do, at which point they realize just how terrifying it is, contemplating a slow-ish death by nonconsensual limb amputation 80 feet beneath the sea a few miles from shore. Even if you make it to the surface (something that has to be done slowly for decompression reasons if you don't want to risk an even more painful death), you then have to wait to get picked up, take the boat back to shore, and then meet the ambulance to take you to hospital (unlike surfers, divers are usually too far out to be hauled in by other swimmers and lifeguards). Many shark attack victims die on the way to the hospital or during the ascent, where losing consciousness is often fatal.
In some places, like Southern California's kelp forests, perhaps most regular divers have at least spotted a great white at some point. Like pitbulls, these are animals that can be friendly one second and kill you the next for seemingly little reason, and in the ocean (unlike a safari with an armed guard or an arctic trip with a rifle for any pesky polar bears) the diver is usually entirely defenseless, and 360 degrees of movement and the muffling effect of being underwater on our hearing capabilities makes it easy for them to sneak up on you. Bull sharks especially have a pitbull-like reputation for not abandoning humans after realizing we're not fish, and instead coming back again and again for follow-up attacks.
Do you dive? What's the biggest shark you've encountered (outside a cage)?
I went snorkeling in Hawaii and the guy I was airbnbing with told me I didn't have to worry about sharks and I didn't feel like fact checking him (or freaking myself out) so I just took his word for it. I did get stung by a spider fish in Portugal and it hurt so bad I felt like I got my foot slammed in a car door, but it stopped hurting surprisingly quickly after soaking it in hot water.
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