Juvenile great whites aren’t looking to eat people. Photo: Oleksandr Sushko//Unsplash
Great white sharks are some of the most fascinating animals in the world. Just when we think we’re figuring them out, they throw a curveball at humans. Where do they go to give birth? How many of them are there in the world? Heck, we’ve only just seen a newborn great white out in the wild for the first time ever earlier this year.
With that in mind, it’s no wonder researchers are constantly eager to locate a new mystery about the apex predators and then follow that mystery down whichever rabbit hole presents itself. Such is the case with a population of great whites discovered in the Mediterranean Sea. The animals are considered endangered in that particular part of the world, yet researchers believe the great whites that are patrolling the Mediterranean thrive. Adding to the mystery, they are known to be some of the largest in the world with the biggest amongst them growing to be about 20 feet long. And unlike great white hot spots like California, for example, there aren’t massive seal populations for them to hunt and live off of.
“It almost flips our understanding of white sharks on its head. It allows these animals that are a couple of tons – bigger than any land predators – to exist on a resource that is very surprising. Seals are very fatty, and these sharks are feeding on tuna and still getting this large,” says Taylor Chapple, an assistant professor at Oregon State University.
To better protect the endangered population, scientists set out to study great whites in the southern Sicilian Channel. They had hoped to tag and track them in a research project that spanned three years but not once did they directly encounter one.
“We conducted 359 hours of BRUV deployments, 43 hours of drop cam deployments, 52 hours of longline fishing, 35 hours of rod-and-reel fishing, and 24 hours of handline fishing, and collected 159 water samples for eDNA analysis,” they wrote in a study published in Frontiers of Marine Science.
They did come across environmental DNA (eDNA), which detects traces of animal DNA in water, however. That alone confirmed great whites had been in some of the areas they’d been searching, making it all feel a little like a hunt for Big Foot.
“They are extremely sparse, and we realized that even with our efforts, we weren’t working on a large enough scale,” said Francesco Ferretti, an assistant professor in the College of Natural Resources and Environment at Virginia Tech. “We need to recalibrate our approach and develop new strategies. Despite these challenges, we were able to identify a stronghold of this population, particularly in the southern Sicilian Channel off northern Africa. This area is highly impacted by fishing, and it is where we are focusing our efforts now. The pilot expeditions allowed us to recalibrate for a larger program and provided valuable insight into where to focus future efforts.”
