Divers believe they have recorded the first ever footage of an adult great white shark in Mediterranean waters. They spotted the apex predator during a mission to remove ghost nets from a shipwreck off the coast of the Strait of Sicily.
“We, as a team of three, saw this huge shark,” Derk Remmers, a volunteer with Ghost Diving told BBC News.
The enormous animal was close to the wreck they were diving on. “Pretty close to us, in fact,” he recalls. And it looked like the world’s most iconic shark: a great white.
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Remmers scrambled to catch this incredible moment on film. “My fingers were trembling while I was trying to get the camera operating,” he says. “But, on the other hand, I think my biggest fear was that I couldn’t get the camera running so I couldn’t record this rare event.”
White sharks are known to inhabit Mediterranean waters but seeing one is incredibly rare.
That makes it very hard for researchers to learn about their lives. This moment – and other findings from the mission – could provide key information for shark researchers.
“Most of our knowledge on the white sharks in the Mediterranean Sea comes from records of dead specimens caught by fishing operations,” says Dr. Carlo Cattano, researcher at the Sicily Marine Centre of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, in a statement.
As well as trying to remove discarded fishing gear from the shipwreck, the team worked with the Society for Documentation of Submerged Sites (SDSS) and shark scientists to document what they found on the site.
They even took environmental DNA (eDNA) samples which allow them to even record animals they never see by detecting tiny parts of genetic material they have left behind in the water.
“Our research on sharks has, over time, allowed us to identify several key hotspots for threatened species, and this sighting is particularly significant in validating the conservation value of this area,” adds Cattano.
So, should people be worried about Jaws swimming through the Med? Remmers says no: “It was offshore, it was in the central Mediterranean. It was not close to a beach where people could feel in danger,” he told BBC News.
Although people might feel worried, shark bites are incredibly rare. In 2025, there were just 65 unprovoked bites globally.
After the once-in-a-lifetime encounter, Remmers and the team continued with their work to remove the ghost gear from the shipwreck.
Wrecks are biodiversity hotspots because their structures turn into an artificial reef and provide homes for many different ocean animals.
“What makes this encounter so powerful is not only the shark itself, but the context in which it happened,” says Veronika Mikos, Director of Healthy Seas, which organised the cleanup mission. “We were there to remove ghost nets trapping marine life on a shipwreck ecosystem that is a hotspot for biodiversity.”
When discarded fishing nets get caught up on shipwrecks, they become “underwater traps”, according to Healthy Seas. The very marine life that is attracted to the habitat becomes at risk of getting entangled in the gear and dying.
“Moments like this remind us how much life can still exist in offshore Mediterranean waters,” adds Mikos, “and how important it is to protect it from preventable threats like abandoned fishing gear or overfishing.”
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The project was organised by Healthy Seas and supported by Healthy Seas’ partner DWS
