Adult great white shark filmed in the Mediterranean Sea for the first time: “You’re more likely to win the lotto jackpot”

Marta García Aguado1 hour ago

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Adult great white shark filmed in the Mediterranean Sea for the first time: “You’re more likely to win the lotto jackpot”

During an environmental cleanup mission in the channel separating Sicily and Tunisia, a biologically rich area with intense fishing activity, a team of divers achieved a remarkable scientific milestone.

As part of an expedition organized by Healthy Seas, Ghost Diving, a volunteer diving organization dedicated to removing abandoned fishing gear, and SDSS (Society for the Documentation of Submerged Sites), divers were working to remove ghost nets entangled in a shipwreck when one of them spotted an adult great white shark. Volunteer diver Derk Remmers captured video footage of the shark, an extraordinarily rare sight in the Mediterranean.

First underwater footage of an adult great white shark

“Statistically, it is way more likely to win the lotto jackpot than to meet such an iconic animal underwater,” Remmers said.

Although great white sharks have previously been spotted from the surface or from boats in the Mediterranean, this marks the first time in history that divers have successfully filmed the species underwater in its natural habitat.

A species in critical danger in the Mediterranean

The great white shark is classified as critically endangered in the Mediterranean, making any new information about the species especially valuable to the scientific community. Its decline is primarily linked to overfishing.

Carlo Cattano of the Sicily Marine Center at the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station emphasized the significance of the unprecedented footage, stating that the images are “extremely valuable for improving our understanding of the distribution, habits, and behavior of this critically endangered species, whose survival is threatened by human activities.”

But where is this migratory species most commonly found?

Great white sharks are typically found in temperate and subtropical coastal waters, particularly in the northeastern Pacific, southern Africa, and Oceania. However, recent evidence suggests that the species is also present in waters off the coast of Europe.

Regarding its distribution, researchers believe great white sharks could eventually return to the southern North Sea, the region bordered by the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Denmark.

The reason? “Climate change may recreate the conditions that allowed the ancestors of great white sharks to hunt in these waters,” explain John Stewart, Professor of Evolutionary Paleoecology at Bournemouth University, and Olivier Lambert, researcher at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, in an article published by The Conversation.