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Credit: Getty Images \/ Universal Images Group Editorial<\/p>\n
Imagine coming face to face with perhaps the ocean\u2019s scariest predator and, instead of swimming for your life, staying put and reaching for your underwater camera.<\/p>\n
Well, that\u2019s exactly what a group of divers did recently when they unexpectedly crossed paths with a great white shark in the Mediterranean Sea, creating what is believed to be the first-ever footage of the species in these waters.<\/p>\n
The video shows the shark come within a tantalizing three meters of the divers, who were clearing abandoned fishing nets from a sunken vessel in the Strait of Sicily, a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea between the Italian island of Sicily and Tunisia on the African mainland.<\/p>\n
Divers from the Healthy Seas Foundation, Ghost Diving<\/a>, and the Society for Documentation of Submerged Sites (SDSS) saw the predator, with Derk Remmers<\/a>, head of Ghost Diving\u2019s German branch, recording the beast.<\/p>\n Above” Derk Remmers talks about his encounter with the great white in the Mediterranean <\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWe were all a bit shocked \u2013 and amazed,\u201d Remmers 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 Remmers was incredibly lucky to have captured the video of the shark. While great whites have historically been sighted in these waters, their numbers are dwindling due to overfishing.<\/p>\n International law protects the species from fishing, but research carried out by US scientists and UK charity Blue Marine Foundation has found that the sharks are being illegally sold<\/a> in North African fish markets. At least 40 individuals were estimated to have been killed off the Mediterranean coast of North Africa in 2025 alone.<\/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. \u201cAnd when we started releasing a few bubbles from our mouths, he started speeding up a little bit and vanished into the blue,\u201d Remmers added.<\/p>\n Some 640,000 fishing nets are discarded by the fishing industry every year, with many of these \u2018ghost nets\u2019 killing marine life that gets entangled in them. Divers like Remmers will continue to recover these sunken death traps, until international authorities bolster efforts to protect great whites from illegal fishing.<\/p>\n You might also like\u2026<\/p>\n