Nobody Had Ever Filmed a Mediterranean Great White. Until Now.

More than 132 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea, a volunteer diver was doing the unglamorous work of hauling up abandoned fishing gear when something very large materialized out of the blue. An adult great white shark. The sighting, between Sicily and Tunisia, may be the first filmed evidence of a Mediterranean great white in over 40 years.

Derk Remmers, a volunteer diver for the Ghost Diving organization, filmed the animal during a dive off the Strait of Sicily. Heart racing, he scrambled to switch on his camera. The video shows the shark passing within around 9 feet before swimming off into opaque blue water. His first thought: get the camera running, or no one would ever believe them.

Here's the part that matters beyond the footage: since 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed the great white shark as critically endangered in the Mediterranean. The video is a rare document of an elusive ghost population of great whites that inhabit the temperate waters of the Mediterranean. Once abundant in the region, the apex predator has declined sharply over the last century due to habitat loss, entanglement in fishing nets and competition with commercial fishing operations.

A genetic study led by the University of Bologna in 2020 found that Mediterranean great whites are a genetically distinct population, isolated from all other great white populations for around 3.2 million years, since the Pliocene epoch. They were here long before the fishing nets. The question is whether they'll be here after them.

Ghost nets don't discriminate. Great whites need these cleanup crews as much as sea turtles do.

Read the full story at People, June 8, 2026

Hot Take: A shark classified as critically endangered turns up on camera for what may be the first time in over 40 years, and it happened because someone was doing the quiet, unglamorous work of cleaning up the mess we left behind. The charismatic apex predator got the headline. The ghost net divers are the hero's story.