Greenland Sharks may have to wait a century to have sex!
Move over, humans. Sharks are here to outlive you and that’s too by a long distance as scientists have just found that Greenland sharks grow a centimeter a year but live for centuries, may be as long as 400 years, smashing longevity record.
That’s not a good news for the creature as it may have to wait a century to have sex!
That’s the life of the Greenland shark—a 5-meter-long predator that may live more than 400 years, according to a new study, making it the longest lived vertebrate by at least a century. (See: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/greenland-shark-may-live-400-years-smashing-longevity-record )
The pitfall of such a long life is that the females are not ready to reproduce until after they hit their 156th birthday. Just thing of this in humans!
Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) had been rumored to be long-lived. But, the proof has just emerged when the marine biologist John Steffensen at the University of Copenhagen collected a piece of backbone from a Greenland shark captured in the North Atlantic, hoping it would have growth rings he could count to age the animal, but there were no such rings so he consulted Jan Heinemeier, an expert in radiocarbon dating at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Heinemeier suggested using the shark’s eye lenses instead. Then, Steffensen and his graduate student Julius Nielsen spent several years collecting dead Greenland sharks, most of them accidently ensnared in trawling nets used to catch other types of fish.
After that, they looked for high amounts of carbon-14, kind of radiocarbon dating used to measure the age of fossils and reached to the conclusion that the shark oldest was 392 plus or minus 120 years, they report today in Science.
That makes Greenland sharks the longest lived vertebrates on record by a huge margin; the next oldest is the bowhead whale, at 211 years old. And given the size of most pregnant females—close to 4 meters—they are at least 150 years old before they have young, the group estimates.
That’s really a long time to live and almost no human would cherish such a long time that could be nasty and brutish!