Given recent evidence that supports that the subpopulation in the Mediterranean Sea is separate from the subpopulation found in the eastern Atlantic, information on the subpopulations is presented separately.

Northeast and Central Atlantic

Little information is currently available on population size or structure for this species in the eastern Atlantic, and landings data are too sparse to infer trends. From 1997-2011 only sporadic landings of this species were reported to the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tuna database from France (< 0.5 tonnes in 2011), Morocco (92 tonnes in 2011) and Senegal (18 tonnes in 2010; ICES 2013).

Mediterranean Sea

The size of the Mediterranean Sea subpopulation is unknown. Incomplete and somewhat anecdotal records from longstanding Bluefin Tuna (Thunnus thynnus) trap fisheries (“tonnara”) in Sicily, southern Sardinia, Tunisia and the Balearic Islands (“almadraba”) suggest that incidental captures of adult Great White Sharks were not uncommon during the first six decades of the 20th century, with a general theme of declining records post-1970, often accompanied by the cessation of these fisheries themselves (Fergusson 2002, Morey et al. 2003).

In Italian waters at the Favignana tonnara, a number of adult specimens were landed between 1950 and 1982 and others observed but not caught. The last specimen encountered inside the trap nets was in May 1987 (Fergusson 2002). Similarly in traps off the Balearic Islands, 27 sharks were recorded between the 1920s and 1970s (Morey et al. 2003). A similar picture of increasingly sporadic records is repeated in the tonnara at Sidi Daoud, Tunisia, where a number of captures were made from the 1950s up to 1979, followed by lengthy periods with no specimens caught or observed. A total of 59 reliable captures of the species were reported along the Tunisian coasts from 1953 to 2012; 57% of them were registered after 2000 (Bradaï and Saïdi 2013). More recently, based on the capture of a pregnant female in the Gulf of Gabès (Saïdi et al. 2005) and other subsequent records, Bradaï and Saïdi (2013) suggested that Tunisian waters are a nursery area for this species.

In the Croatian Adriatic Sea, reports average at 0.0-0.4 sharks per year from the 1960s-1990s (De Maddalena 2000). Soldo and Jardas (2002a,b) reported a significant decline in Great White Shark records during the last decades of the 20th century compared to its occurrence since the mid-19th century. Hence, a disappearance of the species from Croatian Adriatic coastal waters was related to the disappearance of tuna due to new offshore tuna fishing practices that were introduced in the 1970s (Soldo and Jardas 2002a,b).

In the Sicilian Channel between 1950 and 2000, landing rates averaged around two specimens per year, but there have been no records since the mid 1990s from this area. In the eastern Mediterranean Sea (Aegean Sea and Levant) only one specimen was reported since 1993 from waters eastwards of the Ionian Sea, until 2008 when two new-borns were captured off the coast of Altınoluk (Edremit Bay, north Aegean Sea), by a commercial gillnet and a bottom longline (Kabasakal and Gedikoglu 2008). Two juvenile females were also captured in coastal waters of the northeast Aegean Sea in 2009 (Kabasakal et al. 2009). These records support the presumption of a breeding ground for Great White Shark in the northeast Aegean Sea, extending from Edremit Bay to the north of Gokceada (Kabasakal et al. 2009). Small numbers of juvenile and neonatal specimens have been reported since the mid 1970s by demersal trawlers operating through the Sicilian Channel (Vacchi and Serena 1997) and small individuals have often been landed in parts of Tunisia by surface and demersal longliners (Fergusson 2002). However, confusion of young Great White Sharks with other mackerel sharks (lamnids) is common in Mediterranean fisheries (Fergusson 1996).

More recent records include a newborn female that was caught by trawl net in waters surrounding the island of Lampedusa during 2009. Maliet et al. (2013) also reported the capture of a juvenile male off the Corsican coast in 2012, along with previous records from 1976 and 2011.

Records of Great White Sharks in the Mediterranean Sea are declining despite an increase in monitoring effort (Soldo et al. 2014). The Mediterranean Sea subpopulation may be considered a consequence of historical accident and female philopatry, rather than contemporary immigration from the Atlantic subpopulation, revealing it to be at greater risk of local extinction than previously thought (Gubili et al. 2011).