Volunteer diver films rare great white shark in Mediterranean for first time

A volunteer diver filming abandoned fishing gear in the Strait of Sicily got more than a cleanup mission. Roughly 40 metres below the surface, between Tunisia and Sicily, Derk Remmers said his fingers were trembling as he tried to get the camera working when a large great white shark emerged from the blue.

The encounter happened while volunteer divers were working with the marine NGO Healthy Seas to retrieve ghost nets and other abandoned fishing gear from a shipwreck. Healthy Seas said the team was removing gear from wrecks in the Mediterranean between Italy’s Lampedusa Island and Tunisia, a stretch of water that has become a graveyard for lost fishing equipment and a trap for marine life.

The footage is believed to be the first underwater video ever filmed of an adult great white shark in its natural habitat in the Mediterranean Sea. Remmers described the moment as “pretty special,” but the significance goes beyond a single dramatic clip. The sighting places one of the ocean’s most closely watched predators in a region where white sharks are rarely documented and even more rarely seen alive at depth.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the white shark, Carcharodon carcharias, as Vulnerable. The species can reach 640 centimetres in total length and live up to 73 years, but females do not mature until about age 33 and the generation length is about 53 years. Those traits make populations slow to recover when they are depleted, especially in waters where sharks are still caught, mostly as bycatch.

That is why the Mediterranean matters. Researchers have long described white sharks there as uncommon and difficult to study, and a 2015 scientific record noted an immature male great white caught as bycatch by a bottom trawler in the Strait of Sicily. The new video does not suggest that great whites are suddenly common in the region. It does show that the Strait of Sicily remains part of the species’ broader Mediterranean range, and that the area can still offer critical clues about migration, survival and whether one of the sea’s most endangered apex predators is holding on or slipping away.