It wasn't until living in Greece that the thought of sharks in the Mediterranean ever occurred to me and even then I never dreamed there would be Great White sharks. In fact, Great Whites not only visit the Mediterranean, they have a large breeding population there. I wrote on this matter several times and those articles are some of the biggest hitters out of all the articles I've written: Mediterranean Shark Attacks: You Are Food, Great White Sharks in the Mediterranean Sea w/video
The picture is NOT real and has been used multiple times across the Internet for various shark hoaxes. Just change the tint to match water anywhere around the world.
It's been interesting to discover the screaming shark fear in Europeans but the evidence doesn't justify it. Ten or eleven people have been killed by sharks in the Mediterreanean ... in the last hundred years. You almost certainly will NOT be killed by a shark there. You have a much better chance of being stung by a jellyfish as they sting about one hundred and fifty thousand people every year. (The Guardian: Visitors to the Mediterranean warned of an increase in jellyfish)
The deadliest jellyfish are around Australia and the rest of the South Pacific. There are no deadly jellyfish which are native to the Mediterranean but some there can give you an extremely painful sting.
I grew up in Australia so I got to know jellyfish and one thing that's not so commonly-known about them is that they can sting you even when they're dead on the beach. Jellyfish have poison cells called nematocysts and it's kind of a spring-loaded mechanism that fires on contact, even after the animal is dead. If the jellyfish has any kind of streamers coming out of the bell, it's almost certainly got stingers in them. I've read that the biological mechanism that fires the stinger is one of the fastest in nature and is equivalent to shooting a gun. If you touch the jellyfish, you will get stung.
Even with all this, it's still not a good reason to cancel your holiday in Greece ... or anywhere else around the Mediterranean. I was in Greece for quite a while and never saw people leaving the water because of jellyfish nor did I see any shark warnings whereas I certainly did see shark warnings and saw the sharks themselves in Australia. It's true there are quite a few sharks in the Mediterranean but most likely the only people who will see them are fishermen.
The picture is NOT real and has been used multiple times across the Internet for various shark hoaxes. Just change the tint to match water anywhere around the world.
It's been interesting to discover the screaming shark fear in Europeans but the evidence doesn't justify it. Ten or eleven people have been killed by sharks in the Mediterreanean ... in the last hundred years. You almost certainly will NOT be killed by a shark there. You have a much better chance of being stung by a jellyfish as they sting about one hundred and fifty thousand people every year. (The Guardian: Visitors to the Mediterranean warned of an increase in jellyfish)
The deadliest jellyfish are around Australia and the rest of the South Pacific. There are no deadly jellyfish which are native to the Mediterranean but some there can give you an extremely painful sting.
I grew up in Australia so I got to know jellyfish and one thing that's not so commonly-known about them is that they can sting you even when they're dead on the beach. Jellyfish have poison cells called nematocysts and it's kind of a spring-loaded mechanism that fires on contact, even after the animal is dead. If the jellyfish has any kind of streamers coming out of the bell, it's almost certainly got stingers in them. I've read that the biological mechanism that fires the stinger is one of the fastest in nature and is equivalent to shooting a gun. If you touch the jellyfish, you will get stung.
Even with all this, it's still not a good reason to cancel your holiday in Greece ... or anywhere else around the Mediterranean. I was in Greece for quite a while and never saw people leaving the water because of jellyfish nor did I see any shark warnings whereas I certainly did see shark warnings and saw the sharks themselves in Australia. It's true there are quite a few sharks in the Mediterranean but most likely the only people who will see them are fishermen.
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