Sharks are so cool, man. They’ve just been chilling on the planet for 400 million years, swimming the oceans while epochs passed them by in their periphery. Their entire biology is pretty much unchanged. They’ve been sharks the whole time.
Unfortunately it also seems like these sharks are plagued by parasites in their eyes:
The shark is often infested by the copepod Ommatokoita elongata, a crustacean that attaches itself to the shark's eyes.[17] The copepod may display bioluminescence, thus attracting prey for the shark in a mutualistic relationship, but this hypothesis has not been verified.[18] These parasites can cause multiple forms of damage to the sharks' eyes, such as ulceration, mineralization, and edema of the cornea, leading to almost complete blindness.[11] This does not seem to reduce the life expectancy or predatory ability of Greenland sharks, due to their strong reliance on smell and hearing.
This is what the article begins by addressing and questioning.
Are they parasites though? It may be symbiotic, especially if the relationship between the species has spanned over many years. e.g. their presence may promote the production of rhodopsin.
OTOH it may be natures way of allowing natural selection to take place in the sharks since their lifespan is so long. The wiki article seems to imply that's not the case though.
Parasitism is in the eye of the beholder.
Begrudging upvote for you my friend.
> These parasites can cause multiple forms of damage to the sharks' eyes, such as ulceration, mineralization, and edema of the cornea, leading to almost complete blindness.
It's one of those 'invisible hand' things where killing off older sharks may be advantageous in the long run. One of many possibilities.
One idea behind that is that any environment has a carrying capacity, limitations on food etc. It may be the parasites favour older sharks etc etc.
Would it be fucked up? Yes. But, that doesn't contradict a possible symbiotic relationship.
Highly recommend the book "Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean" by Morten Strøksnes if you're interested in old sharks, small boats or deep oceans https://bookshop.org/p/books/shark-drunk-the-art-of-catching...
So wait did they just catch a 200 year old shark and cut its eye ball out to have a look?
Yeah, the article both mentions it and leaves any details out! Did they kill the shark or did they only collect its eyeball??
This is so messed up harvesting the eye from a creature that lives hundreds of years. I guess they put the shark down. RIP one eye.
I would agree, but then I read the Wikipedia page which says that around 10 of these animals are caught every day as bycatch, so I assume the shark that was studied came from one of these.
This shark takes 150 years to reach sexual maturity and gestates for 8-18 years. It's pretty fucked up that bycatch at this rate is just accepted because it surely is going to lead the species to extinction. Humans are pretty fucking arrogant.
If these sharks were not caught at this rate then I would agree that they shouldn't be studied in ways that require killing them, but since they are, I think it is better to at least get some knowledge out of it and possibly raise awareness of the problem.
Edit: read the article, and it actually says it was caught by the scientists and not as bycatch. Still, this catch is negligible compared to the 3500 that are caught, killed and thrown out again (I assume) each year
People don't want to face the music but the way we're fishing is completely unsustainable.
The way we live on land is unsustainable too, of course.
There's a massive reduction in the whale song of the blue whales. Almost halved. They are presumably starving.
That something ginormous can be so elegant, beautiful and sleek is hard to conceive till one meets a blue whale. Let's let them thrive on the blue planet.
Compared to numbers at peak whaling you are correct. I was commenting on a more recent phenomena.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-hea...
http://archive.today/2025.09.03-030523/https://www.nationalg...
We keep talking about “sustainability” but sustainability is a secondary issue here.
The primary issue is that we are taking individuals and basically torturing and/or killing them, rarely for good reasons.
It won’t even be decades before our descendants look back at horror for how we treat them, not unlike how we can’t even imagine how our ancestors thought it was ok to have human slaves.
The major difference will be that the horrors of human chattel slavery (even the name clearly links it to how we treat non human animals) have largely only been recorded via text. The horrors of our actions will be available in text, images, videos for all to see in perpetuity by just looking at an Instagram archive.
so we need to extract resources from space asap, now that the planet cant sustain entire human race
Yes, it does
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That sort of thinking needs to first and almost-entirely be directed at China, India and Africa, then we can talk about sustainability and what the West can do.
jeez 8-18 years, is that a record or is it one of those things they don't know enough about them to narrow down? that's another thing to think about when my ignorant self is eating my sushi. i used to assume that farmed salmon was marginally better than wild, but given how much wild fish gets fed to farmed fish, not sure that is even a plus on top of the ecological effects of fish farming.
> The Greenland sharks used in her co-study were caught between 2020 and 2024 using scientific long lines off the coast of the University of Copenhagen's Arctic Station on Disko Island, Greenland.
But I guess a few sharks for scientific sampling are probably still negligible compared to bycatch.
Tangent, but you might want to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuS1LLOcsI
Douglas Adams had Last Chance To See and then the series got a reboot by Stephen Fry
is future possible cure for humans worth one shark eye?
how many fish, water mammals and may be humans shark killed for hundred years? did shark thought about their eyes?*
*except in sence that eyeballs are very delicios
Greenland sharks don't kill humans, they're not more "responsible" for what white sharks do than you as a mammal are responsible for tigers killing their prey.
I have permanent damage on my retina of other eye. I hope one day humans could regenerate their retinas as sharks and zebrafish can do. Seems strange, that fish living in deep dark oceans can fix their eyes, while most mammals who rely on vision a lot more cannot.
Thought we'd have replaceable eyes, teeth, hair, etc by now. When your vision goes, instead of getting new contacts or glasses, just replace your eyes with a new pair. You have cavities, just replace your tooth with another. The promise of genetic sequencing and research just hasn't panned out.
Give it time reprogramming stem cells without the source code or even disassemblers is hard
The article talk about DNA repairs, helping the eye to maintain its function in the long run. It's not a repair after injurie. I also hope for progress in human eye medecine.
If it happens to humans, we all could look forward to relaxing the high power laser laws (pun intended).
I had no idea they could live for 400 years... I actually now realize that I never thought about the lifespan of a shark before, but I would have guessed (prior to this education) around 25 years or so.
This article contains basically no information about the topic mentioned in the headline, just vaguely related chitchat.
So how did they get the Greenland shark eyeballs to dissect for the research paper?
This shark is really an amazing creature.
Soon to be America sharks.
I hate this stupid style of writing. So did they find out anything new besides the fact that a shark supposedly still sees the light? Did this particular shark get a parasite on its eyes or not? Not a single word about DNA repair mechanisms except for in the baity title. Awful.
TL;DR: we think sharks eyes can still see light even if the sharks a centuries old, please fund us for further research!
I’m starting to realise we don’t really want a cure to aging.
Imagine a world where people like Stalin never die. People like bill gates never have to pretend to be a nice person…
If there’s no chance of death, there will never be any progress in society. People in power would just establish a tighter and tighter grip. All the boomers would be immune to death and disease, but the treatment would be banned for the young because they haven’t done enough to earn it.
You'll enjoy "Altered Carbon", which focuses (partially) on this topic: if we get rid of death, then the worst of the aristocracy never dies.
+1000 - altered carbon season 1 is amazing. IMHO commit to watching it 3x to get everything going on - after the first watching, everyone's like "that was amazing but I'm not sure what I just watched." It's just so rich - if The Matrix is 136 mins vs 570 mins with that much more depth.
Also Greg Egan's Permutation City covers these topics in a different way.
Dictators die all the time and most often not of old age. As we get older our flexibility to adapt to change also starts to diminish. You will eventually be outperformed. We can’t account for what we don’t know.
Perhaps, but the power conferred by the miracle of compound interest does not require performance.
Reminds me of the film 'In Time' where the rich can be immortal.
It does seem that nature has it 'programmed in' that we are to die due to telomere shortening and for natural selection to take place. Our modern and constantly changing society likely means that any kind of evolutionary adaptation doesn't have long enough to prove itself.
Interestingly how people would handle immortality could change that.
...and Altered Carbon (primarily the book but also the TV series), which does things a lot better than "In Time".
90% will say this until they are faced with death and then they just want 1 more minute.
You need both sides of the coin. Yes your Emperor is forever young but so are the heroes among us. Eisenhower turns 135, Hitler 136.
If your thesis was correct, we would presumably not treat children for cancer. Since that’s evidently not the case, I’m not sure how you’re coming to this conclusion
People like Einstein would find a solution.
>"I’m starting to realise we don’t really want a cure to aging."
YOU realize that WE do not need. How convenient of you to tell me what I need. I think this is how Stalin's of the world start.
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Anyone else surprised to see a Greenland headline without Trump involved?
Godwins law v2
It’s sinful to fish and kill these ancient creatures up from the deep for minor scientific progress.
They’re predatory scavengers that wouldn’t hesitate to eat you if it had the opportunity. I would much rather conduct biomedical research on sharks than mice or rats.
Ah yes potentially getting us one step closer to immortality, hardly worth killing an animal!
I mostly eat vegan because I do have a strong dislike of factory farming and the way animals are treated there. But killing animals is a fact of life and I think scientific progress is a very valid reason to do so.
To put it in perspective, a lot of shark young will kill each other in the womb such that only the strongest is birthed. These animals eat other animals alive, etc.. etc.. My point being it is not like the option is between a rosy utopia or human-inflicted suffering.
I'm not against scientific research per se or living a bit more but... is immortality (or living for, say, 200 years or more) really something we should strive for?
Many aspects of human society assume, one way or another, that our life expectancy is fairly limited. From politics (even absolute monarchs or dictators eventually die), to economics (think about retirement, for example), demographics (if everyone is immortal and everyone keeps having children, what happens?), even psychology ("everything passes").
Are we willing to throw these implications away? What would be the purpose?
> Many aspects of human society assume, one way or another, that our life expectancy is fairly limited
Assumptions can change. Each of our technological shifts was more upending than longer healthspans would be—most of the West is already a gerontocracy.
> What would be the purpose?
To not die horribly.
> throwing the baby with the bathwater, there’s hundreds ways to die not horribly
The baby in your analogy being aging?
> there’s still ways to die horribly
Sure. The purpose would be remove a common cause of dying horribly.
(And in no world with longevity treatments would it be mandatory. People and populations who like aging and Alzheimer’s can keep partying like it’s 2025.)
> shifting the whole demographic towards them is not looking good for retirement, social constructs, and more
I'm genuinely not seeing the problem. Longer lives means more productive lives. (A massive fraction of healthcare costs are related to obesity and aging. A minority of medicine is in trauma.)
> Immortality would bring this even further, especially when meant literally
We don't have a path to entropy-defying immortality. Not aging doesn't mean literal immortality.
> you can still suffer horribly, physically or otherwise, for a variety of reasons
The fact that you're levying this argument should seal the case. It's an argument that can be made against anything good.
They've found a local optimum, and stay in it. There's no easy way out anyway.
> There's no easy way out anyway.
Evolution always finds new nooks and crannies of state space to explore.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndbw7SQMCcQ
Not always, species go extinct all the time. Evolution can get stuck in local optima. Consider the whiptail lizard, which has lost the ability to reproduce sexually. Will they be able to adapt to future changes of the environment? Maybe, but the chips are stacked against them.
Evolution doesn’t explore anything, mutations are random, selection pressure causes beneficial traits to become more common overtime.
Sorry for the late response. I wanted to find time to do more research about this before responding but I'm gunnuh accept that it's not happening on a useful timeframe.
I'm not sure which Wikipedia article that is or if there has been revision between when you checked, I didn't find that in the Wikipedia articles for Telidae or Parthenogenesis. The Parthenogenesis article notes that it's controversial whether this is a threat to their ability to adapt.
So I may have been wrong with that example and I thank you for correcting me. I stand by the statement that evolution can get stuck in local minima but I may have been wrong about the Telidae.
Yes, but maybe not from one specific lineage. E.g., extinction really is the end of the line for some species.
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> queue the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club song
Sharks are older than trees
And the north star, Polaris, is a fraction the age of sharks at only 50-70 Mya (it's a trinary star system but the other two stars are much dimmer and not visible to the eye)
I love this fact.
Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.
I think there is a theory that we’re not seeing any aliens simply because life on Earth started so early.
There is life, then intelligent life like humans. Plus you have physical constraints like the speed of light.
That would be unfortunate.
I’d love to see some space sharks!
It’s more inaccurate as it’s stating an assumption as fact
That's not that early, no? There was probably enough C, H, N, O, P, S, Na atoms for life to start 10B years ago. You probably couldnt rely on iron being everywhere though but that's not such a hard requirement.
It's fascinating to ponder, for sure.
The universe still has plenty of time to burn, especially red dwarfs. It's sad to think about starless skies, though.
The heme is pretty magical. Probably not a hard requirement, but it sure has been useful for us here.
Yes I love it too, wish more people appreciated it
Another Fun Fact: the Appalachian mountains formed before sharks existed, the rings of Saturn existed, and before bones existed.
But they're (possibly) younger than the New River!
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_River_(Kanawha_River_tribu...>
(Blew my mind when I first encountered this a few years back.)
I think you misstated your fun fact
ICYMI: https://youtu.be/IUmnTfsY3hI?si=WuUcwv_LLYh8gX4u
Good call, abc123
When they lose a tooth, they just grow a new one. How conveniently cool!