Several sharks have been reported near the beaches in less than a week.
“When I took the rod, I immediately understood that it was not a traditional fish.” Patrick Ferrario, fisherman in Saint-Raphaël, was somewhat surprised by his recent catch. While he expected to see a mackerel or “a big barracuda” at the end of his line, it was in fact a young mako shark that was trapped. After being stuck there for several minutes, he was finally released by the fisherman.
A few days earlier, at the end of July, a blue shark of almost 2 meters had taken up residence in the Almanarre beach area, in Hyères, where it finally died. “He was not going offshore at all, he was staying really close,” says a vacationer at the microphone of BFM Toulon Var. “He was turning, he was going, he was coming back… But he was staying really close to the edge. It was amazing,” she adds.
A “completely normal” presence
In less than a week, no less than three sharks have been seen and reported near the beaches of the Var department. But according to Nicolas Ziani, founder and scientific manager of the Marseille Shark Study Group, there is no need to be alarmed. The situation is in fact nothing exceptional in the Mediterranean. For this specialist, “it is not because we see more that there are more, that is a cognitive bias”.
“The fact that we see sharks along the coast at this time of year, summer, is completely normal,” explains the expert. “We can see mothers who make incursions, which are temporary incursions into coastal waters, to give birth, then they leave offshore and we see young in the nursery area, near the coasts”, explains the expert.
These young sharks are also, for the most part, harmless to humans. If the animal with the big teeth has a bad reputation and represents a threat in the collective imagination, it is far from being the deadliest. It caused eleven deaths in 2021. It is in fact the mosquito that causes the most human deaths each year, since there are approximately 800,000 per year.
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