Believe your eyes... a great white off Majorca
Rfi,’umcu16cguknrhkugmifih’ku ht’mthkugnrgugn‘url‘xu lh‘argmhufikurggfii‘uu fiiugn‘uw‘afig‘hhri‘ri
A GREAT white shark has been seen in a marine park a few miles off the coast of Majorca.
The five-metre (16ft 5in) predator is the first of its species seen in Spanish waters for more than four decades.
It was tracked for more than an hour by a conservation team in the Cabrera Archipelago National Park, six miles (10km) off the island’s south coast.
The team published an image of the shark following the “historic sighting” on Thursday.
As the summer holiday season starts in earnest, the researchers insisted the great white posed no threat to tourists and locals in the Balearics.
The shark was spotted by Alnitak, a Spanish conservation project which has researchers from several countries, including the United Kingdom.
Georgina Stevens, a British zoologist, and one of the 10 researchers on Alnitak’s vessel, said at first the team could not believe what they were seeing.
She said they had been “very excited” by the encounter, during which the shark and boat circled each other for well over an hour. “It was watching us, it was just curious. It wasn’t scared of us or bothered,” she added.
Ms Stevens said the sighting of the great white, a critically endangered species, suggested that efforts to mitigate damaging commercial fishing practices were having a positive effect.
Fernando López-mirones, a biologist on board, said that the “important, historic encounter” indicated that fish populations – particularly of bluefin tuna, which is the primary prey of great whites in the Mediterranean – were swelling.
“The presence of a great white is good news because it means that the sea is much more healthy,” he said.
He added that there was no reason for tourists to stay away from the water, as the apex predator – the subject of the horror film Jaws – would remain in cooler waters offshore. “There is no danger to humans,” he said.
While there have been unconfirmed sightings and rumours of great whites in Spanish waters over the years, this is believed to be the first recorded incident since 1976, when a fisherman in Majorca caught one measuring more than six metres (19ft 8in).
In 2007, a Spanish documentary film revealed that 27 great whites had been caught by fishermen in the Balearics between 1920 and 1976. But since then, the species had all but disappeared from view.
The only national park in the Balearic Islands, the Cabrera Archipelago, which is uninhabited, can be visited by boat on day trips from Majorca. Juan Poyatos Oliver, author of Sharks in the Balearic Sea and a contributor to the Majorca-based Nautical Gazette, said that there was “no doubt” great whites had always been in the Balearics and the wider Mediterranean.
In the past, it was thought that they entered the Mediterranean – perhaps in error – via the Gibraltar Strait or Suez Canal. Experts now believe small groups of great whites are born and spend their lives in the Mediterranean.
Mr Poyatos said great white captures around the Balearics had boomed in the Sixties and early Seventies, when local fishermen were using nylon tuna
nets – a practice that died off by the Eighties.
In 1992, local newspapers published pictures of what appeared to be a dead great white washed up on the beach of Tossa de Mar on the Costa Brava.