To beat the heat and keep in shape, people take up swimming and fishing as a summertime activity. But the sea is a mysterious place and is home to dangerous predators like sharks that can devour a person in minutes. This eight-year-old Australian child, who is also a viral phenomenon on TikTok, had a terrifying experience once.
Manni Alam was out on a swimming adventure. Alam, better known by his TikTok nickname, huntermaster.io, posted the video in January and quickly became a viral hit online.
An unexpected swimming experience
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At first glance, this video seems to be no different from the hundreds of others that have been uploaded to Manni’s TikTok channel by his father, Radwan Alam. This time, though, they also ran across a shark that was briefly involved in the frenzy.
Manni went fishing on Lady Musgrave Island in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, with his father, and family friend Moe Alsayed. The child is seen in the video grasping the boat’s railing in order to show his father the fish he caught. The coral trout that he had caught was local to the Great Barrier Reef. All he wanted to do was make a regular TikTok video.
But the little swimmer had no idea that he would be met that day by a notorious marine predator. A shark sprang out of the water and bit him in the chest, cutting short the footage. People were so worried about the little child that the video quickly went viral on TikTok and other sites.
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The father can be heard in the background saying, “Manni, show me what you got.” After the unexpected lunge, a tooth pierced through Manni’s wetsuit and scratched his chest before it retreated to the darkness of the sea. Local news reported the incident. Manni, however, wants the scratch to leave a scar. Meanwhile, his father called it to be “a very common thing.”
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However, Manni did prove that he was alright as he started to post content on his TikTok again after a few weeks’ absence. There were no reported injuries to the kid, and it was determined that the shark was a blacktip shark, one of the 170 species of sharks that inhabit Australian waters and the likely suspect in this incident.
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