A major US-led search for what would be the first ever great white shark recorded in either Irish or British waters has concluded without success.
The team from non-profit research organisation Ocearch is returning to Florida after finishing work at the grey seal hotspot of the Great Blasket Island in County Kerry.
“Sure, it was a little disappointing,” Dr Nick Payne, the expedition’s lead Irish-based scientist, said.
Dr Payne, from Trinity College, Dublin, admitted they “were quite limited in where we could look and for how long”.
“This was always a bit of a needle in a haystack thing, and we didn’t really get to look through too much hay,” he said.
The Blaskets location was deemed the most likely to attract a visiting great white shark, and weather conditions hampered the team’s ability to expand the search area.
“The steady northerlies made it hard to move from that one protected spot, so we couldn’t search very widely”, said Dr Payne.
“We can’t safely handle the animals if the water is too choppy.”
Some shark researchers, including those from Ocearch, believe great whites from the small and endangered population in the Mediterranean can migrate to eastern parts of the North Atlantic to hunt for food off the coasts of Spain, France, the UK and Ireland.
Confirmed great white sightings have occurred as far north as the Bay of Biscay, where a young female great white was caught off La Rochelle in 1977.
There has never been a confirmed great white shark sighting in British or Irish waters, although many scientists believe the conditions are perfectly suitable. Ireland hosts around 40 shark species, such as the basking shark, porbeagle and tope shark.
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Conservationist, author and shark expert Richard Peirce investigated around 100 great white shark “sightings” in UK waters dating back decades. He found around a dozen of these cases remained “credible”, but unproven.
“It would be the shark heard around the world,” Ocearch founder Chris Fischer told Sky News on board the research vessel last week.
“It would be the greatest thing we have ever achieved on the water.
“It would be the greatest gift we could give to any region of the world for their future, because that one shark would show people in this area and other research institutions where they can then potentially work on them and get more of the work going.”
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The water temperatures and prey ecology of British and Irish seas broadly match the known habitats of great white sharks, but for now, their potential presence in these waters will remain purely anecdotal.
Dr Payne said he wasn’t discouraged and the fruitless expedition has “really motivated us to put more effort into the search over the next year or two, especially looking in some other places up the west coast of Ireland”.
He added: “Ocearch absolutely wants to come back and having this big group of Irish and US scientists working together and chatting with local fishermen, tourism operators, and policy folks has lit a big fire under us to put more work into Irish shark and ray research and conservation more generally.
“Watch this space.”
