Are there Great White Sharks in the UK?

It is that time of year again: the summer season. And with the holiday season come the seemingly annual stories of great white sharks spotted off the coast of the United Kingdom.

Hot spots are, supposedly, the Cornish coast and western and northern Scotland. And the more such stories are repeated, the more widespread the belief becomes that the great white shark Carcharodon carcharias is indeed here.

None of these sightings has been supported by tangible evidence, such as photo-video, identifiable bite marks to other animals such as seals or porpoises, or indeed actual dead specimens of great white sharks.

In our estimation, the vast majority – if not all – of the sightings so far can be attributed to misidentifications: primarily with the basking shark Cetorhinus maximus (an innocuous plankton-feeder that grows to considerable size) but also with other species of shark already known from British seas, such as the relatively common porbeagle Lamna nasus or the very rare shortfin mako Isurus oxyrinchus.

However, the great white shark occupies probably the widest geographical range of all living sharks and travels widely across almost all the world’s oceans and seas. Over the past 200 hundred years – and most recently way back in 1977 – a handful of specimens have been confirmed from the French coast of Biscay between La Rochelle and the Mouth of the Loire, but none further north in European Atlantic waters.

Given the wide ranging of this shark, its adaptable feeding habits and its remarkable ability to inhabit seas across a huge temperature range from as low as 3 to as high as 27 degrees Celsius, there is no obvious geographical barrier preventing this species from making occasional incursions into British waters. In fact, we have long stressed that contrary to media hyperbole, the only actual scientific enigma is not "are white sharks here?" but rather "why aren't they here?".

There is no obvious answer to this, but it is wholly clear that if white sharks do occasionally visit our shores, then any actual evidence of such has yet to be furnished. Only the capture or stranding of an actual specimen, or other irrefutable evidence such as photo-video, will serve to support the veracity of a growing list of supposed sightings that rarely survive critical analysis.

Source: http://www.sharktrust.org