{"id":489361,"date":"2026-06-08T18:12:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T18:12:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/489361\/"},"modified":"2026-06-08T18:12:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T18:12:11","slug":"great-white-shark-filmed-in-the-mediterranean-for-the-first-time-by-stunned-divers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/489361\/","title":{"rendered":"Great White shark filmed in the Mediterranean for the first time by stunned divers"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Volunteer divers<\/a> were stunned when they came face-to-face with a Great white shark <\/a>in the Mediterranean.<\/p>\n

Divers saw the creature just three metres away while clearing abandoned fishing nets<\/a> from a shipwreck in the Strait of Sicily, between the Italian island and Tunisia.<\/p>\n

The rare encounter is believed to be the first time the predator has been caught on video underwater in the Mediterranean sea<\/a> but surface sightings have occasionally been recorded in the region.<\/p>\n

\"It\u2019sIt\u2019s believed to be the first time the predator has been caught on video underwater in the Mediterranean (Derk Remmers\/Ghost Diving)<\/p>\n

While there are a few hundred Great White sharks in the Mediterranean sea<\/a>, numbers are declining due to illegal fishing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

When divers from the Healthy Seas Foundation, Ghost Diving and the Society for Documentation of Submerged Sites (SDSS) saw the predator, they scrambled to catch it on camera.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were all a bit shocked \u2013 and amazed,\u201d Derk Remmers, a volunteer technical diver and head of Ghost Diving\u2019s German chapter, told Euronews Earth. \u201cMy fingers were trembling, that\u2019s for sure \u2013 it was a big animal and we didn\u2019t expect this at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe swam by and then he turned around and faced us and came back. It seemed clear that he was curious and not aggressive \u2013 he was really laid back, like he had the attitude of being the boss down there. And when we started releasing a few bubbles from our mouth, he started speeding up a little bit and vanished into the blue,\u201d Mr Remmers recalled. <\/p>\n

\"DiversDivers couldn\u2019t believe it when they had the close encounter underwater (Derk Remmers\/Ghost Diving)<\/p>\n

An estimated 640,000 nets are lost or discarded at sea every year worldwide. <\/p>\n

Although divers remove some, many nets become entangled on reefs and shipwrecks they trap and kill marine life and volunteer clean-up operations alone cannot solve the ghost net crisis.<\/p>\n

Divers have documented loggerhead sea turtles and large fish species trapped in abandoned gear from previous dives. <\/p>\n

\"WhileWhile there are a few hundred sharks in the Med, sightings are rare (Derk Remmers\/Ghost Diving)<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween 1 to 10 per cent of all fishing<\/a> gear of all fishing<\/a> vessels in the world gets lost every given year,\u201d Mr Remmers said. \u201cThis might add up to more than half a million tonnes per year.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fishermen go closer and closer to the shipwrecks in hope of catching bigger and a bigger amount of fish because they know not only the fish but other marine animals use the wreck as a hiding place and as a breeding place,\u201d Veronika Mikos, director at Healthy Seas, told Sky News. <\/p>\n

On World Oceans Day, Healthy Seas is calling on governments and the fishing industry to reduce the number of nets being abandoned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":489362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":["post-489361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=489361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/489362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=489361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=489361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=489361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}