First-Ever Footage of a Great White Shark Filmed on the Mediterranean Seabed

While inspecting a sunken wreck off the coast of Sicily, divers were fortunate enough to film a creature as formidable as it is iconic: a great white shark.

Illustrious Resident

It is well established that these large marine predators, capable of growing up to six metres in length, roam the Mediterranean, but so far, the sporadic observations made in these temperate waters concerned individuals near the surface or were by-catches.

These very first underwater images of Carcharodon carcharias were captured about forty metres beneath the surface of the busy Strait of Sicily. While removing “ghost nets,” which can prove deadly for numerous marine species (fishes, endangered turtles…), Derk Remmers and his colleagues saw the silhouette of an adult shark emerge from the darkness.

“Statistically, you have far better odds of winning the lottery than crossing paths with an animal so emblematic during a dive,” the team explained in a statement. “Such encounters remind us how biodiverse the Mediterranean is, and how important it is to protect it from threats such as overfishing and abandoned gear.”

Essential Operations

This cleanup operation sits within a scientific collaboration intended in particular to refine the populations of threatened species in the region, in order to better direct conservation efforts.

“The majority of our knowledge about the Mediterranean great whites comes from observations of dead specimens accidentally caught during fishing operations,” notes Carlo Cattano, a researcher at the Sicily Marine Centre. “Such observations are extremely valuable for our understanding of the distribution, habits, and behavior of this critically endangered shark, greatly impacted by human activities.”

Wrecks, often functioning as artificial reefs that attract a wide array of rare marine species, make it more necessary than ever to clear the gear from them that could fatally entangle life.

Last April, several basking sharks were observed off the Mediterranean coast.