Six-year-old Ben Urey from Warrington held up his injured forefinger to prove that he had endured a close encounter with the fearless predator circling a Cornish holiday beach.

“I was eating a ham sandwich and it came and took it and bit my finger,” said Ben, cheerfully, showing the flap of skin. His younger brother Dan, 4, had seen a girl close by bitten too. “There was blood!” he said.

The creature threatening holidaymakers on the beach at Porthmeor in St Ives yesterday was not the great white shark allegedly filmed 200 yards offshore last week, but one of the ravenous and insatiable seagulls that circle constantly overhead. In terms of the havoc they inflict the shark doesn’t even come a distant second.

St Ives is a magical town, a former fishing village colonised by artists, where you could claim to have seen a mermaid and there would be people to believe you. The supposed sighting of a great white is greeted with scepticism, resignation and genuine apprehension . . . but not of being eaten by the ocean’s most fearsome predator.

A man in a red T-shirt — “Call me Stavros” — touting self-drive boat hire said that several visitors had decided it was just too risky to go out. “They’re scared. It’s only human nature, isn’t it? They know there probably isn’t anything out there but they don’t want to take the chance. This is bad for business,” he said. “If you want sharks you will have more luck in the high street.” Ged, offering rides in a high-speed inflatable from a jetty near by, was getting bored with the subject. He had been besieged by visitors, demanding trips to see the shark, who then complained when one failed to rear out of the water in front of them, fangs bared. Yesterday, shark was off the menu. “Great white?” he said. “You’re out of luck. It’s got a puncture today.”

St Ives was basking in summer sunshine, its beaches packed. A shark scare is the last thing it needs after an abysmal start to the season. Bill Fry, the mayor, said that he’s feeling under siege like the mayor of Amity, the setting for the film Jaws, which just happened to be on television last weekend. Not everyone is convinced that the recent sightings are coincidental.

Mr Fry is worried that the reports could put people off the resort. “One of the sightings was almost definitely a basking shark and the other one was spotted in a pod of dolphins. When you see a large creature with a shark-like fin and a white belly breaking water in a pod of dolphins, it generally is a dolphin,” he said.

The rumours of a great white in the water did nothing to deter Robert Hoare, an experienced surfer, on holiday from Oxford with his family. He sat between swims scouring the water through binoculars. He said: “I haven’t seen anything unusual, not even a basking shark. The story wouldn’t worry me, even if I believed it.”

Most experts believe that the shark spotted off Porthmeor beach is unlikely to have been a great white. But the Australian marine biologist, Dave “Sharkman” Baxter, said last night after viewing footage that it was “definitely a great white — probably an adult female about 12ft long”. He added ominously: “Her mate will be close by.”

— Beach lovers scanning the sea off the coast of Cornwall were urged to take a close look at the shape and colour of fins cutting through the waves before crying “great white shark” (Lewis Smith writes).

The dorsal fins provide a wealth of information about the number of teeth and preferred diet of the mostly unseen fish lurking beneath the surface. Harmless plankton-guzzling basking shark, the world’s second largest fish, which grows up to 36ft (11 metres) long, has a brownish dorsal fin with an outward bulge behind the tip. By contrast, the great white shark, a marine predator demonised in the Jaws films, has a slate grey fin with a sickle-shaped curve behind the point.

A brief inspection of a videoed recording of a fin convinced experts that the sighting making headlines yesterday was a basking shark.

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