It’s peak shark season here in the UK, and most people still don’t realise what that means for us. We’re lucky enough to host over 30 different shark species, either living in or visiting our waters throughout the year. Among the most remarkable of our seasonal visitors is the blue shark – one of the most beautiful species in the ocean, and one of the most widespread and migratory animals on the planet. You’ll find blue sharks in every ocean on Earth except Antarctic waters. The ones that reach us here follow a clockwise migration across the Atlantic, riding the Gulf Stream into UK waters as the water warms through summer.

If you want to see them for yourself, there are operators running trips out of Pembrokeshire, Cornwall, and Plymouth, where I run Plymouth Marine Safari. Getting into the water with a blue shark is, without exaggeration, one of the best wildlife encounters you can have anywhere in the world. These animals are exceptionally sensitive to their surroundings, thanks to the Ampullae of Lorenzini – the electroreceptors around their snouts that let them detect the faintest electrical signals. That sensitivity means they’ll often approach divers directly, drawn to GoPros and cameras, sometimes nudging them with their snouts out of pure curiosity. It’s an interaction on a completely different level to anything you’ll experience with most marine species.

But for all their beauty and reach, blue sharks are also among the most threatened animals in our oceans. Their long, elegant pectoral fins make them a prime target for the shark fin trade. The scale of that trade is difficult to comprehend: roughly one hundred million sharks are killed every year – around three every second. Of those, some seventy million are killed specifically for their fins. Blue sharks alone are thought to account for ten million of that total annually.

It’s a brutal statistic to sit alongside something as extraordinary as swimming face-to-face with one of these animals in UK waters. But that contradiction is exactly why encounters like this matter. It’s one thing to read about a threatened species in an article; it’s another to be in the water with one, watching it move with total confidence through its environment, curious rather than fearful of you.

That’s ultimately what keeps me doing this work. We are fortunate to have so many shark species calling British waters home for part of the year, and the blue shark is a standout among them. Getting into the sea with one isn’t just a bucket-list experience – it’s a chance to see, up close, exactly what’s at stake if we don’t get serious about protecting them.