Fish are biting holidaymakers in the sea off Majorca because the hotter water is making them hungrier, an expert has claimed.
Several swimmers have reported leaving the sea with bite marks caused by fish measuring up to 30 centimetres this summer.
In some cases beachgoers have been left with small bleeding wounds.
The University of Southampton’s Dr Simon Boxall has claimed sharks could become aggressive because they get confused in hotter conditions.
And overnight Ron Farage, Assistant Curator at Palma Aquarium, said he believed the warming-up of the world’s seas and oceans could be behind the biting incidents in Majorca.
Ron Farage, Assistant Curator at Palma Aquarium, said he believed the warming-up of the world’s seas and oceans could be behind the biting incidents in Majorca (pictured: a beach on Majorca)
WMO says July is sure to be the hottest month ‘by a significant margin’. Pictured are the 30 warmest months on record globally
He told island paper Ultima Hora: ‘There are no studies into this, but the reason behind what’s happening could be that the temperature of the water is higher.
‘And these fish are less scared, in this case of human beings, when they are more hungry, which is a consequence in summer of this increase in the temperature of their natural habitat.
‘That’s why they come nearer to the beach and shoreline.’
He attributed the biting incidents to younger members of the Sparidae family of fish, commonly called sea breams and porgies, most of which possess grinding molar-like teeth.
But the marine fauna expert went on to insist tourists and locals should not fear for their safety, calling them ‘harmless’ and saying their bite was not poisonous.
He explained: ‘If someone has an injury or a mark, they approach out of curiosity to bite. It’s something that grabs their attention, like dry skin.
‘But people shouldn’t be scared of them, because they’re not poisonous and they don’t do any real damage. They’re not a danger to anyone.’
Most of the bite incidents have occurred in the Migjorn area of the south of Majorca.
Beachgoer Montse Terradas told local press last month after being bitten: ‘I felt something grazing by me and then discovered I had a wound.
‘They were wounds with blood. The same thing happened to my sister and we had to receive assistance from a lifeguard who said he had seen about 15 people already that day.’
Mr Boxall of Southampton University had already suggested a link between shark aggressiveness and warmer sea temperatures.
He told the Telegraph: ‘Sharks getting grumpy wouldn’t surprise me at all. Fish are pretty jumpy about temperature.’
Average sea temperatures have been climbing steadily since records started back in the late 1970s, the data shows. Here, daily global sea surface temperature (°C) are plotted as a time series for each year from January 1, 1979 to July 23, 2023. The years 2023 and 2016 are shown with thick lines shaded in bright red and dark red, respectively. Other years are shown with thin lines and shaded according to the decade, from blue (1970s) to brick red (2020s)
Now sharks could become even angrier after the world’s oceans have hit their highest recorded surface temperature, according to scientists
Copernicus, the EU’s weather service, revealed yesterday (FRI) that sea surface temperatures had reached an average of 20.96C – beating the previous highest logged in 2016 of 20.95C.
Late last month the Mediterranean reached a record high of 28.4C.
Around the same time the surface ocean temperature around the Florida Keys in Miami soared to an unprecedented 38.43C.
Warmer seas spell trouble for fish and coral and could lead to a rise in sea levels. As oceans warm, fish such as cod may have to move further north to reach the cooler seas they prefer.
A spokesman for Copernicus said yesterday: ‘The record is broken. The oceans are the hottest recorded.’
Air surface temperatures are usually the main metric looked at when considering temperature rises, but ocean temperatures are key indicators too (file photo)
Samantha Burgess, from the climate monitoring service, says March should be when the oceans are the warmest globally, not August. She told the BBC: ‘The fact we’ve seen the record now makes me nervous about how much warmer the ocean might get between now and next March’.
The record temperatures are partly driven by the El Nino weather phenomenon – the unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean – with 2016 also being an El Nino year.
But global warming is likely to be pushing up temperatures, she said. ‘The more we burn fossil fuels, the more excess heat will be taken out by the oceans, which means the longer it will take to stabilise them and get them back to where they were,’ Dr Burgess added.
Dr Katie Longo, from the Marine Stewardship Council, said: ‘It could mean fish such as cod drop in numbers. Cod feed on tiny shrimp-like creatures called copepods, and the changing temperature can mean the copepods breed at the wrong time for the cod larvae to feed on’.
