Divers met a white shark while cleaning the bottom (video)

Divers in the Strait of Sicily captured a great white shark during an operation to clear the bottom of “ghost nets.” The encounter is considered extremely rare.

A group of divers participating in an operation to clear abandoned fishing nets from the seabed filmed one of the rarest sightings in history. Mediterranean Sea: a great white shark calmly passed next to them in Strait of Sicilybetween Sicily And Tunisia.

The incident occurred during the organization’s mission Healthy Seas together with Ghost Diving And SDSS — Society for Documentation of Underwater Objects. Volunteers worked at the sunken ship, where so-called “ghost networks” – lost or abandoned fishing gear that continues to kill marine animals even years after being left at sea. Healthy Seas

Footage and photographs of the shark were taken by a volunteer diver Derk Remmers from Ghost Diving. According to him, the meeting was a complete surprise: the shark appeared during the descent to the work site, calmly walked next to the group, made a circle and then went into the blue water column.

“She watched us with curiosity”

According to the stories of the dive participants, the great white shark did not show aggression. She approached the divers, as if inspecting uninvited guests at the wreck, and then calmly walked away. Remmers admitted that the moment was so unexpected that it was difficult for him to quickly turn on the camera and record the rare appearance of the animal.

As he writes euronewsthe divers were approximately at a depth 40 meterswhen a large shark came out of the blue. The animal appeared more curious than aggressive, and after the divers released bubbles, it sped up and disappeared, Remmers said.

Why is this meeting important?

According to Healthy SeasThis is believed to be the first underwater video of an adult great white shark in its natural environment. Mediterranean Sea. Surface sightings of the species in the region have been recorded before, but documented underwater encounters with divers remain exceptionally rare.

Scientists say the record is especially important because much of the knowledge about great white sharks in the Mediterranean until now has come not from live sightings, but from incidental catches or the discovery of dead specimens. Researcher Carlo Cattano from the Sicilian center Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn noted that such observations help to better understand the distribution, behavior and condition of this extremely rare species for the region.

The great white shark in the Mediterranean Sea is one of the most vulnerable predators. Its presence in an area considered both an important biodiversity hotspot and one of the most intensively exploited fishing grounds in the Mediterranean reveals a dual reality: there is still life here, but human pressure on it remains enormous.

Ghost nets: a real threat underwater

The paradox of this story is that the divers met the shark not while “hunting for a sensation,” but while working against a much more mundane and dangerous problem – abandoned fishing nets. Such nets get stuck on reefs, rocks and sunken objects, continuing to catch fish, turtles and other marine animals without human intervention.

In the area of ​​the operation, sea turtles and large fish entangled in old gear had previously been recorded. During the mission, the team recovered sections of the nets that continued to pose a threat to the inhabitants of the underwater ecosystem. According to Remmers, every year the world loses 1% to 10% commercial fishing gear, which could mean hundreds of thousands of tons of trash in the ocean.

In the Mediterranean, where space is limited, fishing pressure is high and large predators are threatened, such nets are not just trash, but silent traps. They don’t make headlines every day, they don’t look dramatic on shore, but they continue to kill underwater for years. It’s very convenient: a person throws it away, the sea suffers, statistics then pretend that this is an “environmental problem” in itself.

Video

Video of the encounter with a great white shark was published by Healthy Seas and mission partners. The footage was also shared by international media, including Euronews, showing the shark passing near divers during an operation to remove abandoned nets.

Editorial comment

Such news can easily be turned into a cheap horror story: “shark in the Mediterranean, all out of water”. But the reality is exactly the opposite. The great white shark is not a monster from a beach nightmare, but a rare apex predator whose presence suggests that the marine ecosystem has not yet been completely scorched by human greed.

Much The scarier thing in this story is not the shark, but the ghost nets, overfishing and indifference. The shark circled and left. Man has left traps underwater that continue to kill for years. And if you choose who is acting like a dangerous species here, the answer, as usual, is unpleasantly obvious.

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