“This guy was wandering the oceans back in 1627 ”

I saw this picture circulating on the internet in the last days. A picture illustrating a huge shark. For many, it is a novelty but for specialists, this is a known fact.

The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus)

The Greenland shark can reach a length of over 5 meters, and what is curious is that it grows only 1cm a year. Then how can it reach such a size if it grows so hard ?!

And here comes the answer that fascinates us, he lives at least 400 years! And that’s how I discovered the mystery 🙂 and sexual maturity reaches it only after 150 years. It may seem like a lot if you think like a man, but if you think like a shark. I’m kidding, I just wanted to unravel this mystery, which in fact u is a mystery is a reality.

It’s as if you say that deer live 200 years. I did not find another example, and when writing these lines I was sitting on a bench in the cemetery and a crow sat next to me.

In the last couple minutes of the last dive of the field season, we found the largest fish we have ever encountered with the ROV, a Greenland Shark.

The sharks, or the Greenland shark, are one of the largest fishermen in the seas. Now scientists have discovered that the species can be 400 (!) Years old, making it the most persistent of all vertebrates.

The researchers, who present their findings in Science, based their results on measurements of radioactive isotopes in the eye lens of 28 females caught in the waters outside Greenland.

Sharks can be a little over five meters long, which makes them as big as white sharks and tiger sharks. But they grow very slowly, perhaps only a centimeter per year, and for this reason, they have long assumed that they can reach an extremely high age.

The slow growth is because they live in colder water than any other shark species. They occur in the North Atlantic, mainly in the Arctic waters, usually at a depth of 300 to 700 meters.

Life in slow motion

– They have very slow metabolism because they have the same body temperature as the surrounding water, usually below ten degrees Celsius. They live a life in slow motion, says Julius Nielsen, a biologist at Copenhagen University and leader of the study.

The results from the measurements show that the largest female in the study, with a length of 502 centimeters, was around 392 years old when she was captured. This means that she was born in the early 17th century, at the time of the Thirty Years War.

Another of the females, with a length of 493 centimeters, was estimated to be 335 years old.

The youngest animals, the two smallest, are believed to have been born in the 1960s and were thus about 50 years old at the time of capture.

The researchers also state that the hawk does not become sexually mature until at the age of just over 150 when it measured a length of four meters.

These incredibly rare images provided an unprecedented insight into the life of a Greenland shark when two scientists had a chance encounter with ancient species during a routine underwater ecosystem surveillance trip.

Despite being able to reach lengths of more than seven meters long and possess the believed ability to live for almost 500 years, very little is known about the Greenland shark, due to its notoriously elusive nature.

Living in the depths of the cold Atlantic Ocean, the secret of this ancient creature’s fountain of youth has been a mystery to several generations of scientists, but Brynn Devine and Laura Wheeland’s deep encounter with the prehistoric shark can help unravel some of its riddles.