The great white shark has become so threatened that it is now outnumbered by the tiger, a leading marine scientist claimed yesterday.

New research has suggested that population numbers for the ocean’s most feared predator have been overestimated because many great whites have been double-counted, according to Ronald O’Dor, of Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada, the senior scientist at the Census of Marine Life project.

He told the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in San Diego that electronic tagging of great white sharks had made researchers more pessimistic about its survival.

“I recently heard a report from the team that’s been tagging great white sharks,” he said. “The estimated total population of great white sharks in the world’s oceans is actually less than the number of tigers.

“We hear an awful lot about how endangered tigers are but, apparently, great white sharks are pretty close to the same level. Some people say, ‘I don’t care, they eat people’, but I think we have to give them a little space to live in.”

The World Wildlife Fund currently estimates that fewer than 3,200 tigers remain in the wild and all six of the remaining subspecies are classified as endangered or critically endangered on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species.

The great white shark is classified as vulnerable on the Red List, denoting a less severe category of concern.

Dr O’Dor said that the revised estimate of population numbers was based on unpublished research led by Barbara Block, of Stanford University.

“There was a series of papers published by Barbara Block at Stanford on great whites that had tagged,” Dr O’Dor said. “The papers showed there is a separate population between Hawaii and the California coast that is genetically distinct from the one in Australia. Based on their understanding on populations, they have done some estimates of how many sharks there are.

“People see a great white shark on the South California coast, and another hundreds of miles away. We are now understanding that they are more mobile than we thought and, actually, it’s the same shark appearing in different places.”