When you spend your life studying sharks, a crocodile encounter is not the very first thing on your mind.
However it ended up being shark researcher Melissa Cristina Marquez’s sole focus when she came face to face with an American crocodile on a night dive in 2018.
Ms Marquez was shooting a ‘Shark Week’ documentary in Cuba for the Discovery Channel.
The dive primarily went to prepare apart from the crocodile encounter, however things deviated for the worse right at the end.
” The microphone in my mask in fact began acting up, so I could not hear what anybody was saying,” Ms Marquez recalls.
” The crocodile had actually left and they started pulling the lights out from the water and my dive buddy pointed up, which means the dive is over, we’re heading up.
” And after that that’s sort of where it went downhill.”
Keep one’s cool and do not get death-rolled
Rather than appearing concurrently, Ms Marquez gave her dive buddy a few seconds head start and some area.
” It was in those couple of seconds that I felt this really tough pressure on my left calf,” she says.
Turning around to look behind you is not easily performed in complete SCUBA diving equipment, however Ms Marquez knew it wasn’t a shark that had her by the calf.
” It was very much a crocodile,” she says, which was later on verified from the bite pattern on her leg.
” Time actually decreased, and I was like, ‘Right, do not move your leg since it’s either going to bite harder and then it’s really going to harm and you’re not to be able to think, or it’s gon na do the infamous death roll’.”
In a death roll, crocodiles spin their entire body rapidly in the water to cripple their victim, usually breaking their victim’s bones.
” If it did a death roll either from my knee down or my leg down was going to perhaps pop off and I would bleed out prior to anyone would be able to get to me,” Ms Marquez says.
She attempted to keep as still as possible, and thought of grabbing onto a rock or mangrove roots however there was absolutely nothing to hang on to in the bare channel.
And after that the crocodile release.
” I didn’t wait to