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The Greenland shark is one of the world’s largest marine species, reaching lengths over six metres. And yet these fish, which prefer the deep, cold waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans, have largely eluded scientific study.

Their evasiveness highlights how little we know about Arctic marine ecosystems — and how much we can learn by developing and employing new technologies.

For scientists like us, the observation and monitoring of marine species can be challenging under the best of circumstances. But sampling at extreme depths and in seasonally ice-covered waters is especially difficult.

Photo by Getty Images

However, we recently captured some of the first underwater video footage of Greenland sharks in the Canadian Arctic. The recordings gave us valuable insight into their abundance, size and behaviour, as well as their distribution in the Canadian Arctic.

These findings are the first step towards closing a major knowledge gap on the population status of the Greenland shark.

And we did it without taking any sharks from the water.



Sleeper sharks revealed

Until now, most of what we knew about Greenland sharks came from the historical records of commercial landings. They were fished in the North Atlantic for their oily livers until 1960. A limited harvest still occurs in Greenland, and the species is sometimes encountered as bycatch in fisheries that occur within its geographical range.

But in areas of the North Atlantic and Arctic where commercial fishing has not historically occurred — such as the waters of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago — their full geographic range has remained unknown.