Dangers of the Deep: Malta Sharks!

I wouldn’t worry too much about these guys.  Now that’s not to say that there are no sharks in these parts – quite the contrary – because in Maltese waters you can find a great variety of sharks, ranging from little guys that wouldn’t pose much of a threat to a goldfish right up to Great Whites.  These are the sharks that ‘Jaws’ was based on.   Not to make you nervous or anything, but one of the largest Great White sharks on record was caught in these waters by a Maltese fisherman in 1987.  Now fishermen being what they are, the exact measurements of said beast are unclear, variously reported to have been between 5.5 metres and over 8 metres in length.  It’s certainly pretty big, as you can see from the photos of the giant  shark on this website (I’ve reproduced one of these photos below), although they are not clear enough to allow an accurate measurement of the creature.  In the unlikely event of my catching one of the biggest sharks known to mankind, I would like to think that I will have the foresight to take at least one photograph which includes the full length of the fish – preferably next to some type of measuring device.

I’m probably never going to catch a big shark.

Fortunately, there have been very few nasty interactions between sharks and humans since records began.  In fact there have been a total of two shark attacks in Maltese waters in the last 150 years or so, and the last one was in 1956, so odds are you can rest easy on that score.  There was a claim by a windsurfer that his ‘sail was bitten‘ by a shark in 2010, but this was unsubstantiated, and doubts were raised over the plausibility of this episode.

So in summary: although there may be sharks swimming around in the deep waters of the Med, they haven’t got the slightest interest in you!

(More Dangers of the deep here).