The Greenland shark, up to 20 feet long, lives in really cold Arctic water, sometimes under the ice, occasionally venturing up the St. Lawrence River. Not much point being afraid of them! You’d die of exposure before the sharks could get you.
Anyhow, certain scientists now believe these Greenland sharks can live preposterously long lives–up to 500 years.
I have written thousands of posts for this blog. Would you believe that this thing about the shark is my all-time best-liked post? Well, OK, it only had to get 18 likes to do that.
But the important thing is, How old is this shark, really? And if there’s a trick to it, Heaven forbid anyone in Congress ever finds out what it is.
Greenland sharks can live under the polar ice cap and occasionally come down as far south as the St. Lawrence River. They can grow up to 20 feet long, but they’re most closely related to dogfish–the little sharks you catch when you’re trying to catch something else.
Five hundred years old would make this shark the oldest living vertebrate on the planet.
Danish scientists say this 18-foot-long Greenland shark is probably over 500 years old. Absent a birth certificate, that figure is an estimate. But it’s cool to think this fish was swimming around some years before Shakespeare was in knee pants. When it was born, they say, Henry VIII was only 14 years old. (https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/666587/shark-oldest-living-vertebrate-greenland)
Greenland sharks are known to get very large, up to 20 feet. They’re in the dogfish family–those little sharks you always catch when you’re trying to catch something else. They can live under the Arctic ice pack. Why they should choose to is another story.
How seriously do we take this claim that this particular shark is 512 years old?
Search me. This is Mr. Nature, reporting on God’s stuff.
I remember Roy Scheider in Jaws excitedly babbling, “We don’t even know how old sharks are!” And he was right–back when Jaws was made, nobody knew any reliable method for estimating the age of a shark.
This is one of those things that makes you wonder, “Why didn’t anybody think of this before?” They used a radiocarbon test to estimate the shark’s age. Usually this is a test that’s used by archeologists. I never heard of it being applied to living tissue–but there’s no reason I can think of why it wouldn’t work.
The Greenland shark inhabits polar seas, sometimes swimming under the Arctic ice pack, and grows up to 24 feet long. Someone ought to investigate how the shark keeps warm. Whales and seals have blubber, polar bears have fur, the Borchgrevinck fish has a special chemical in its blood that functions as antifreeze; but the shark has none of these.
Some big sharks, like the great white and the mako, along with a few big fish like tuna, are functionally warm-blooded. This hasn’t been detected in any but a few species.
Anyhow, this shark that lives in horribly cold water has always fascinated me. Imagine swimming around under the ice for 400 years.
