Divers come face to face with great white shark for first time

By Lauren Wilkin

Divers came face to face with an adult great white shark in the Mediterranean — and filmed it for the first time.

During a high-seas ghost-net removal mission, the 13-foot shark approached the crew in what is thought to be the first time the species has been filmed in the Med.

The mission was organized by the Healthy Seas Foundation together with project partners Ghost Diving and The Society for Documentation of Submerged Sites.

The aim was to recover abandoned fishing nets — known to trap and kill turtles, large fish and other species — from a shipwreck located offshore in the Strait of Sicily.

The footage and photographs of the white shark were captured underwater by Ghost Diving volunteer Derk Remmers.

“Statistically, it is way more likely to win the lotto jackpot than to meet such an iconic animal underwater," he says. "You spend decades diving wrecks and removing ghost nets, but nothing prepares you for a moment like this."

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Remmers describes an offshore underwater shark encounter in the Mediterranean as "insane."

While the team say that the shark encounter itself was extraordinary, the mission was focused on the removal of ghost nets entangled on the wreck and surrounding seabed. A problem they say is urgent.

Previous dives at the site documented marine animals trapped in abandoned fishing gear, including several endangered loggerhead sea turtles and large fish species.

“Most of our knowledge on the White Sharks in the Mediterranean Sea comes from records of dead specimens caught by fishing operations," Dr. Carlo Cattano, researcher at the Sicily Marine Center of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, says.

"Observations like this 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," he says.

Veronika Mikos, director of Healthy Seas, says that 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.”