Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the Mare Nostrum.
Bone-chilling footage shows a great white shark swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, potentially marking the first time this apex predator has been filmed in the water body.
“Nothing prepares you for a moment like this,” exclaimed Derk Remmers, a technical diver who shot photos and video of the breathtaking moment, Dive Magazine reported.
He had been conducting a garbage collecting excursion in the Strait of Sicily with Ghost Divers, a charity organization dedicated to removing ocean trash, in collaboration with Healthy Seas and the Society for the Documentation of Submerged Sites.
While recovering abandoned fishing or ghost nets from an offshore wreck in this stretch of sea, located between the Boot and Tunisia, the beast emerged from the gloom, swimming as close as nine feet from the stunned divers.
Thankfully, no one was injured during the heart-stopping encounter.
Remmers told Euronews Earth that the “big animal” circled the team before it turned around and “vanished into the blue” — a moment that “shocked” and “amazed” the diver.
The moment was significant because while great whites have been spotted on this surface in the Mediterranean, the species had never been caught on camera in the region, where they’re listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
“Statistically, it is way more likely to win the lotto jackpot than to meet such an iconic animal underwater,” said Remmers. “An offshore underwater shark encounter in the Mediterranean is insane, yet we also went on with our diving plan to remove nets from the wreck, as this moment showed the importance of our work very clearly.”
While certainly extraordinary, the encounter shed light on the scourge of human encroachment in the region.
The spot where the great white was sighted is described as a “key biodiversity hotspot that is also one of the most heavily exploited fishing areas in the Mediterranean,” Healthy Seas explained.
“Moments like this remind us how much life can still exist in offshore Mediterranean waters and how important it is to protect it from preventable threats like abandoned fishing gear or overfishing,” said the org’s director, Veronika Mikos.
During the refuse-removal excursion, the team recovered large sections of net, which they plan to discard safely or recycle when possible.
Previous expeditions had documented loggerhead sea turtles and other large fish entangled in the discarded fishing equipment.
Remmers estimated that between 1% and 10% of all commercial fishing gear from boats the world over gets lost every year, potentially amounting to “more than half a million tons” annually.
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