Volunteer divers were stunned when they came face-to-face with a Great white shark in the Mediterranean.

Divers saw the creature just three metres away while clearing abandoned fishing nets from a shipwreck in the Strait of Sicily, between the Italian island and Tunisia.

The rare encounter is believed to be the first time the predator has been caught on video underwater in the Mediterranean sea but surface sightings have occasionally been recorded in the region.

While there are a few hundred Great White sharks in the Mediterranean sea, numbers are declining due to illegal fishing.

When divers from the Healthy Seas Foundation, Ghost Diving and the Society for Documentation of Submerged Sites (SDSS) saw the predator, they scrambled to catch it on camera.

“We were all a bit shocked – and amazed,” Derk Remmers, a volunteer technical diver and head of Ghost Diving’s German chapter, told Euronews Earth. “My fingers were trembling, that’s for sure – it was a big animal and we didn’t expect this at all.”

“He swam by and then he turned around and faced us and came back. It seemed clear that he was curious and not aggressive – he was really laid back, like he had the attitude of being the boss down there. And when we started releasing a few bubbles from our mouth, he started speeding up a little bit and vanished into the blue,” Mr Remmers recalled.

An estimated 640,000 nets are lost or discarded at sea every year worldwide.

Although divers remove some, many nets become entangled on reefs and shipwrecks they trap and kill marine life and volunteer clean-up operations alone cannot solve the ghost net crisis.

Divers have documented loggerhead sea turtles and large fish species trapped in abandoned gear from previous dives.

“Between 1 to 10 per cent of all fishing gear of all fishing vessels in the world gets lost every given year,” Mr Remmers said. “This might add up to more than half a million tonnes per year.”

“The fishermen go closer and closer to the shipwrecks in hope of catching bigger and a bigger amount of fish because they know not only the fish but other marine animals use the wreck as a hiding place and as a breeding place,” Veronika Mikos, director at Healthy Seas, told Sky News.

On World Oceans Day, Healthy Seas is calling on governments and the fishing industry to reduce the number of nets being abandoned.