A three metre long dead shark washed up in the outer dock of the port of Alicante this week.
On Monday morning, officers of the Alicante Port Police removed the body of the massive fish from the outer dock, where it had appeared floating on Sunday night. The Institute of Ecology will be contacted to make arrangements for its transfer there so that marine biologists can study its remains. This is not the first time that large sharks have washed up dead on the Alicante coast. Often, sick fish that no longer have the strength to carry on are washed away by the tides, but local experts haven’t seen such a large specimen in a long time.
In the Mediterranean there are few aggressive species, the most dangerous being the great white shark. Other potentially dangerous sharks are the shortfin mako, the blue shark, some species of the genus Carcharhinus or hammerhead sharks.
Sharks are found in just about every kind of ocean habitat, including the deep sea, open ocean, coral reefs, and under the Arctic ice.
Wherever they live, sharks play an important role in ocean ecosystems—especially the larger species that are more “scary” to people. Sharks and their relatives were the first vertebrate predators, and their prowess, honed over millions of years of evolution, allows them to hunt as top predators and keep ecosystems in balance.
For this reason, the population decline of Sharks due to illegal fishing that takes place in many regions of the world is very worrying. More than 500 different species of shark are known to exist and scientists believe that the first sharks evolved more than 400 million years ago, long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth.