It was an unexpected encounter. While at a depth of 40 meters in the Mediterranean, cleaning the seabed off the coast of Sicily, a team of volunteer divers from the Healthy Seas Foundation came face to face with a white shark. An extremely rare event as this species is classified as critically endangered in this sector.
At the time of this furtive encounter, the divers were near a ship wreck. They were working to remove ghost nets – abandoned fishing nets – from the wreckage of the boat, which act as real traps for turtles. It was then that a massive figure appeared. Impossible not to recognize it. The white shark, popularized by Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, is one of the largest marine predators, measuring on average four to six meters.
Aware of the exceptional nature of the moment, Dutch diver Derk Remmers grabbed his camera. “The shark was quite close to us,” he told the BBC. My fingers shook as I tried to turn on my camera. My biggest fear was not being able to film this incredible moment. » “It is statistically more likely to win the jackpot in the lottery than to encounter such an emblematic animal underwater,” he adds.
The Healthy Seas Foundation shared these images on social networks on Monday June 8, on the occasion of World Oceans Day, affirming that this was the first film made on a white shark evolving in its natural environment in the Mediterranean. If the species is present in temperate and tropical oceans around the world, it is mainly found off the coast of South Africa, Australia, the Caribbean islands and New Zealand. It has also been observed off the coast of Alaska. In the Mediterranean Sea, on the other hand, its presence had become extremely rare.
The great white shark has been known in the Mediterranean since Antiquity, especially in Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, Tunisia, Adriatic Sea, Greece. But for decades, industrial fishing, accidental (or intentional) captures and the degradation of ecosystems have caused a spectacular collapse in numbers. “The white shark population is extremely small in this region, we are talking about less than 100 sharks recorded in the entire Mediterranean basin,” comments Gilles Gambini, marine biologist, interviewed in Nice-Matin.
A species on the brink
It has become so rare to come across a living white shark in the Mediterranean that biologists are obliged to carry out most of their research based on the traces left by these animals or on dead specimens found washed up on beaches or trapped in fishing nets.
This chance encounter therefore sends a signal of hope. Not only is this species still there, but its presence attests to a marine ecosystem in sufficiently good condition in this area to be able to feed such a large predator. This means that all the lower levels of the food chain are functioning: that there are enough fish, enough habitat for those fish, etc.
That this shark was observed near an old sunken ship is not surprising. Over time, wrecks can become refuges for biodiversity, transforming into artificial reefs that provide a habitat and breeding area for sponges, corals, molluscs and fish, which then attract larger predators.
The director of Healthy Seas emphasizes that these filmed images are a reminder that remarkable biodiversity still exists far from the coast, in a semi-enclosed and yet overexploited sea. “Moments like this remind us how much life remains in offshore Mediterranean waters and how important it is to protect it,” she said.
This isolated observation does not allow us to draw any conclusions on the evolution of the great white shark population in the Mediterranean. Further follow-up work will be required to establish this.
Diver Derk Remmers said he hoped that his images would not cause panic (the shark was observed far from the coast and does not represent any danger) and certainly would not trigger a “hunt” for this creature. The images he recorded are now available to researchers, who will be able to use them to improve their knowledge of the distribution, habits and behavior of this endangered species.
