Divers capture first-ever video images of a great white shark in the Mediterranean as Jaws takes a trip to European waters!

Imagine coming face to face with perhaps the ocean’s scariest predator and, instead of swimming for your life, staying put and reaching for your underwater camera.

Well, that’s 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.

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.

Divers from the Healthy Seas Foundation, Ghost Diving, and the Society for Documentation of Submerged Sites (SDSS) saw the predator, with Derk Remmers, head of Ghost Diving’s German branch, recording the beast.

First ever footage of great white shark in the Med - YouTube — — First ever footage of great white shark in the Med

Above" Derk Remmers talks about his encounter with the great white in the Mediterranean

“We were all a bit shocked – and amazed,” Remmers told Euronews Earth. “My fingers were trembling, that’s for sure – it was a big animal and we didn’t expect this at all.”

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.

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 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.

“He swam by and then he turned around and faced us and came back. It seemed clear that he was curious and not aggressive – he was really laid back, like he had the attitude of being the boss down there. “And when we started releasing a few bubbles from our mouths, he started speeding up a little bit and vanished into the blue,” Remmers added.

Some 640,000 fishing nets are discarded by the fishing industry every year, with many of these ‘ghost nets’ 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.

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I’m a writer, journalist and photographer who joined Digital Camera World in 2026. I started out in editorial in 2021 and my words have spanned sustainability, careers advice, travel and tourism, and photography – the latter two being my passions.

I first picked up a camera in my early twenties having had an interest in photography from a young age. Since then, I’ve worked on a freelance basis, mostly internationally in the travel and tourism sector. You’ll usually find me out on a hike shooting landscapes and adventure shots in my free time.