A diver who came face-to-face with a great white shark in the Mediterranean captured the highly unusual encounter on camera.
Derk Remmers was one of three divers who came across the species in waters between Sicily and Tunisia.
“We saw this huge shark. It was pretty clear it was a massive one. It looked and appeared to be a white shark,” he said.
The team from the NGO Healthy Seas was recovering abandoned fishing nets snagged on a shipwreck in the Strait of Sicily when the shark appeared nearby.
“The shark was there pretty close to the wreck, pretty close to us in fact. It swam away, turned around and came back,” Mr Remmers said.
He said his hands were shaking as he tried to operate the camera.
“I think my biggest fear was that I wouldn’t be able to get the camera running, that I couldn’t record this rare event,” he told the BBC.
Mr Remmers said he hoped the footage would not prompt alarm or calls for the animal to be hunted.
“It is important to me that no one gets scared because it was offshore, it was in the central Mediterranean, it was not close to a beach where people could feel endangered.
“This might very well be the first underwater footage of an adult white shark in its own habitat in the Mediterranean… it sank in a little bit that this was pretty special.”
Great whites are a protected species but have been driven to the brink of extinction in the Mediterranean because of illegal overfishing.
Research by the Blue Marine Foundation, a conservation organisation, has found that threatened sharks, including great whites, are being caught and sold in fish markets in North African countries such as Tunisia and Algeria.
The foundation estimates that last year alone, at least 40 great whites were killed and sold for food.
The Mediterranean suffers from chronic overfishing, warming waters and the invasion of alien species, the foundation says.
“More than three quarters of fish stocks are now fished beyond ecological limits. Apex predators are in decline. A thousand non-indigenous marine species have been recorded. Climate change is warming its waters 20 per cent faster than other marine ecosystems.”
The waters between Sicily and North Africa are considered to be one of the last strongholds for endangered species such as great whites.
The Shark Trust, a British-based conservation organisation, says that great white sharks are assessed as critically endangered.
The population is poorly understood and sightings are extremely rare, the Trust says.
Genetic evidence suggests that great whites in the Mediterranean are a distinct population from those living in the Atlantic.
Great whites are threatened by deliberate fishing and by being accidentally caught in longlines, trawls and purse seine nets.
“We’ve long known of the presence of great white sharks in the Mediterranean. The video shared on World Oceans Day of them in the Straits of Sicily is exciting,” Paul Cox, the chief executive of The Shark Trust, told The Telegraph.
“It suggests that, perhaps, despite the challenges faced by the regional population, these extraordinary animals are managing to maintain a foothold in the region.”
Veronika Mikos, the director of Healthy Seas, said: “What makes this encounter so powerful is not only the shark itself, but the context in which it happened.
“We were there to remove ghost nets trapping marine life on a shipwreck ecosystem that is a hotspot for biodiversity. Moments like this remind us how much life can still exist in offshore Mediterranean waters.”