When you think of the Mediterranean Sea, you likely don’t think about great white sharks. But recently, a group of divers filmed what they believe to the be the first underwater video of a great white cruising the Med.
According to reports, the great white was filmed off the Strait of Sicily by Derk Remmers, who is a volunteer diver for the Ghost Diving organization. Remmers, who was on a dive for the Healthy Seas foundation with the object of removing some of the many abandonded fishing nets and gear from the area, told the BBC the shark was so close his fingers were trembling as he tried to get the camera to work.
“Statistically, it is way more likely to win the lotto jackpot than to meet such an iconic animal underwater,” he said in a statement. “You spend decades diving wrecks and removing ghost nets, but nothing prepares you for a moment like this.”
While great whites are indeed known to be in the Mediterranean, they’re incredibly rare. In 2024, researchers set out to study them there, but after three years of searching, they failed to encounter one.
“We conducted 359 hours of BRUV deployments, 43 hours of drop cam deployments, 52 hours of longline fishing, 35 hours of rod-and-reel fishing, and 24 hours of handline fishing, and collected 159 water samples for eDNA analysis,” wrote researchers in a study published in Frontiers of Marine Science.
