Arctic ‘Monster’, the Greenland Shark

Canadian fish scientists are opening a window into the mysterious world of the Greenland shark — the top predator in the Canadian Arctic about which almost nothing is known. Except this, says Steve Campana of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography: “These are very, very strange sharks.”

Its meat is poison. Its mouth is far under its body. It has almost no spine. It’s so lethargic that it doesn’t even snap at the scientists who hook it and attach a radio to it.

And it may live 200 years.

“The sharks are incredibly abundant”, says Mr. Campana, “and yet we don’t have a clue how fast they grow, how old they get, where they give birth, how many they give birth to…” The researchers are hoping that samples of bone may hint at the age, using the 1960’s testing of nuclear weapons and searching for radioactive elements.

Growing to a length of eight metres, it cruises along the bottom of the ocean floor taking it’s meals of fish and seals. It’s not known if the seals are already dead when they consume them or if curious young ones have ventured too close to the slow moving shark, no one really knows. The Canadian researchers have tagged the sharks and will record data and then will ‘pop off’ the sharks in a few months and be radio their findings via satellite.

Only one other big shark in the world is almost unknown — the extremely rare deep-ocean “megamouth.”

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