Destination Cornwall for great white sharks: Could JAWS shark be swimming in the UK?
If it is summer in the UK, you can expect rain, hosepipe bans and that yearly question of whether or not UK shores are home to the great white shark.
There’s been unconfirmed sightings, excitable newspaper headlines but so far, no scrap of evidence that the shark featured in Steven Spielberg’s JAWS (1975) could be stamping the UK on its passport.
Hoping to prove that – and presumably get their name into the National Geographic – are Ocearch who are set to head to Great Britain next summer to see if it home to the great white shark.
The founder of Ocearch, Chis Fischer, believes that great white shark populations in the Med have increasingly been heading northward in search of food, in search of seals, which by their reckoning could see them on course to Cornwall in the south west of the UK.
He told The Times: “We believe they should be moving up past Brest (in Brittany) and Cornwall.”
To paraphrase Matt Hooper in JAWS, it’s not a theory that everyone happens to agree with, and that includes expert Greg Skomal, a Cape Cod-based marine biologist who has been at the research forefront of the great white shark population explosion there, who said he’d be “surprised” if any evidence was found as “There’s no documented white sharks off Cornwall”, but added “They should be there but they are not and we don’t know why.”
The Daily Jaws resident shark expert Kristian Parton, creator of the Shark Bytes YouTube channel, said: “Looking at the arguments for Great whites being in the UK, our waters are around the right temperature for whites and there is a potential food source, namely our populations of grey and common seals. A Great white was once caught in 1977, 168 miles off Land’s End in Cornwall. More recently in 2014, a tagged white shark known as ‘Lydia’ was the first of her species to cross the Mid-Atlantic ridge, although this is still over 1,000 miles off British shores. On balance though, the conditions here in the UK are just about right.”
However, don’t get finding your Quint hat or constructing shark towers just yet, as looking at this from a scientific perspective, there is an inherent lack of strong evidence for their presence here in the UK.
K said: “There have been a number of unconfirmed sightings, none of which have credible photo or video evidence to back up the claims. If great whites were regular visitors in our waters, there would be significantly more evidence. Perhaps they would be being caught as bycatch in fishing nets? Or there may be evidence of their attacks on seals, with carcasses displaying bite marks washing up on our beaches? Or someone by now would have managed to get a high-quality photo or video? As let’s be honest who doesn’t own some form of smartphone these days!
“So, while there may be the odd occasion a great white has wandered into our waters, it is highly unlikely that we have a population of Great whites living and feeding in our waters regularly. Undoubtedly, if they were here, the media would go into a frenzy, however we would be exceptionally lucky to have them.”
Will Ocearch not need to go to Brisbane next summer, as they have a great white shark right here in Cornwall? Only time will tell, but with rising sea temperatures and growing seal populations with no natural predator perhaps the time and tide are right for things to come to a head, the tail, the whole damn thing.
Certainly, UK newspapers will be chomping at the bit for this research tom become a reality, boosting sales through their sensationalism. It’s happed before.
Words by Dean Newman
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