For the first in history a great white shark has been spotted swimming underwater in the Mediterranean.
Divers from Healthy Seas were removing abandoned – or ‘ghost’ – shipping nets, which pose a threat to marine life, from an offshore shipwreck between Sicily and Tunisia when they spotted the apex predator.
Their footage, released to mark World Ocean Day on June 8th is believed to be the first ever captured of an adult great white shark in the Mediterranean Sea.
Great white sharks are usually found in temperate and subtropical coastal waters, particularly in the northeastern Pacific, southern Africa, and Oceania.
‘Statistically, it is way more likely to win the lotto jackpot than to meet such an iconic animal underwater,’ said Derk Remmers, the diver who filmed the encounter.
‘You spend decades diving wrecks and removing ghost nets, but nothing prepares you for a moment like this.
‘An offshore underwater shark encounter in the Mediterranean is insane, yet we also went on with our diving plan to remove nets from the wreck, as this moment showed the importance of our work very clearly.’
Great white sharks have occasionally been spotted at the surface in the Mediterranean, but underwater encounters have never been documented before.
‘What makes this encounter so powerful is not only the shark itself, but the context in which it happened,’ said Veronika Mikos, Director of Healthy Seas.
‘We were there to remove ghost nets trapping marine life on a shipwreck ecosystem that is a hotspot for biodivesity.
‘Moments like this remind us how much life can still exist in offshore Mediterranean waters and how important it is to protect it from preventable threats like abandoned fishing gear or overfishing.’
The team said that while the shark encounter itself was extraordinary, the mission was focused on a more urgent problem: the removal of ghost nets entangled on the wreck and surrounding seabed.
Previous dives at the site documented marine animals trapped in abandoned fishing gear, including several endangered loggerhead sea turtles and large fish species. The team recovered sections of net that continued to pose risks to wildlife inhabiting the wreck ecosystem.
The sighting comes shortly after researchers warned that great whites could soon appear off north Europe’s coast thanks to global warming.
Dr Carlo Cattano, researcher at the Sicily Marine Centre of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, said: ‘Most of our knowledge on the White Sharks in the Mediterranean Sea comes from records of dead specimens caught by fishing operations.
‘Observations like this are extremely valuable for improving our understanding of the distribution, habits, and behaviour of this critically endangered species, whose survival is threatened by human activities.
‘Our research on sharks has, over time, allowed us to identify several key hotspots for threatened species, and this sighting is particularly significant in validating the conservation value of this area.’
Healthy Seas organised the mission, continuing its broader work on ghost-net removal and biodiversity monitoring on Mediterranean shipwrecks. It was carried out together with Ghost Diving and SDSS (The Society for Documentation of Submerged Sites) combining marine conservation, technical diving, scientific collaboration and underwater documentation.
