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400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago> The team looked at 28 sharks, most of which had died after being caught in fishing nets as by-catch. Nice job- the shark had done just fine for ~400 years.
- ironmagma 6y agoThe relative scale of the effects of the fishing industry as a whole vs. the few scientific studies that are done is staggeringly high.
- danmaz74 6y agoOf the shark was by-catch it means that it had been caught by commercial fishing and had already died when the scientists examined it.
- williamdclt 6y agoYes, I'm pretty sure the parent was taking a jab at destructful industrial fishing and its methods, not scientists
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y agoI was.
- sandworm101 6y agoBycatch is not always dead. Google around for the recent case of a whale caught in a japanese net for weeks. They eventually took action to drown it as "bycatch" and chop it up for meat rather than let it go.
- xwdv 6y agoInevitably they must die of something. Probably would be human related with no other predators.
- neysofu 6y agoThere's a good chance your death will be human-related as well, I guess we better take care of that then.
- aloer 6y agoRelated: there’s a new documentary on Netflix called Seaspiracy It has some staggering numbers regarding the amount of by-catch caught every day
- IgorPartola 6y agoI saw the preview for this last night and on the one hand I want to watch it because I feel that it’s important to know this stuff, but on the other hand I really just want to bury my head in the sand. Over the past year I’ve realized just how much we are killing the planet and how powerless I am so do anything at all about it and it’s depressing me every time I think about it and not in a figurative sense.
- Zenst 6y agoYou are not powerless - ethical buying, if everybody did that then things would change as companies run on money, so vote with your wallet. Effort to research and may find in some area's it's down to picking the best of a bad choice, but little by little mindsets are changing and you do have the power. Business runs on money - vote with your wallet as that is your power, use it, don't loose it.
- IgorPartola 6y agoThat’s a nice thought and I’ve tried that before but the “if everybody did that” is the key. I can bend over backwards to only buy local organic food just to have the farm driven out of business by a Walmart Super Center and watch as a new mega container ship, new mega mall, new mega church gets built. I don’t think I spend nearly enough money on retail stuff that would actually tip the scales or even make anyone notice that I stopped shopping at the “unethical” stores.
- Zenst 6y ago> I spend nearly enough money on retail stuff that would actually tip the scales or even make anyone notice that I stopped shopping at the “unethical” stores. As an individual - indeed that is probably so, but you do get to feel less helpless and gets down too a balance of moral dilemma and feeling helpless.
- i_am_new_here 6y agoTo be fair: We wouldn't have found her otherwise.
- jonplackett 6y agoWas just thinking this. The tragedy of this is completely missed in the tone of the article, as if this is just some fun new thing we learned about sharks.
- fastball 6y agoConfirmation bias is a creepy thing sometimes. I was literally asking my Google Home last night what the longest living vertebrate was and it told me the Greenland shark. Had a whole conversation about it over dinner, arguing about how accurate we think these age-establishing methods are. Though the more interesting part of our conversation (I would say) was wondering how ages work out in practice. For example why do the vast majority of animals not live beyond 20 years, even when we try to keep them alive as long as possible (dogs)? If the environment was different would longevity be different for all species, e.g more oxygen in the atmosphere or a longer day-night cycle? Etc.
- ithkuil 6y ago> confirmation bias .. Wouldn't that be more an example of the Baader Meinhof effect?
- kovek 6y agoHow do people develop their repertoire/knowledge of these “effects” and laws?
- dalbasal 6y agoHacker News, sometimes reddit.... IDK of this effect has a name... the graham law maybe?
- arbitrage 6y agobaader-meinhoff has been a neologism for a long time now, enough so that it isn't really a neoligism anymore, and we just collectively moved onto accepting it as the name of this phenomenon. there's a lot of these sorts of in-sphere jargon; you'll start picking them up if you peruse the more esoteric threads on tech news blog aggregator sites like this. like, if one of the original repliers in a thread is "why is this on HN", there's an increased chance imho that you'll run into this sort of techno-cultural salon effect.
- themoose8 6y agoLet me share with you one of my favourite pages on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dalbasal 6y agoSo... One individual out of 28 is known to be 400 years old. There is a subadult population bulge. Any way of estimating natural life spans from this? Could be some very, very old sharks out there. I wonder how big the 400yr old one is, relative to max known size.
- rahimiali 6y agothe two other useful observations are that they seem not get bigger than 5m, and that they grow by 1cm per year.
- mr_toad 6y agoYou’d need to know the probability of death as a function of chronological age. If the probability is constant, you can model the lifespan as an exponential decay - there is no real upper limit, but the population of older individuals is very small. For most animals the probability increases as they age, and becomes very high towards the end of their life, but this is not the case for all animals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence
- dalbasal 6y agoThanks for the breakdown. "(probability) becomes very high towards the end of their life." This is, ultimately, what we want to know. At what age do they start to die of old age? Oldest living vertebrate is interesting, but I think it's mostly interesting because of what it says about the species? Is it possible that a large vertebrate doesn't have an old age point, where probability of death is very high?
- fguerraz 6y agoWhat startles me is how much we've changed their environment in that single individual's lifetime. That shark was the equivalent of a human teenager when the industrial revolution started.
- poochdog 6y agoDelusions of grandeur notwithstanding, not much it seems.
- eggsmediumrare 6y agoOther than made it warmer and more acidic, added a bunch of plastic garbage and removed a significant percentage of its inhabitants, yeah I guess not much.
- frutiger 6y ago> removed a significant percentage of its inhabitants I was actually curious if anyone could help answer the following: (a) how one would define inhabitant (including bacteria?) (b) what the net %age change actually would be given a suitable choice of (a)
- dredmorbius 6y agoMost studies tend to look at biomass, either on a single-species or multi-species basis. Humans have displaced over 90% of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass (land animals with a backbone). http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestrial-Vertebrate-Biomass.jpg http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr... Most of the human + livestock biomass is utterly dependent on Haber-Bosch process derived nitrogen fertiliser, produced via nonrenewable natural gas (methane, a fossil fuel).
- frutiger 6y agoWhat does displaced mean? Why are terrestrial vertebrates preferred in this analysis? Why is the horizontal scale in that chart nonlinear? What is peakoilbarrel.com? The goalposts seem to have shifted from the person I replied to.
- mannerheim 6y agoThe Icelandic dish of hákarl (fermented shark) is often made using Greenland shark.
- snurfer 6y ago... which doesn't taste nearly as bad as you've heard and is produced in limited quantities only as result of the few bycatch sharks accidentally netted each year.
- mannerheim 6y agoIndeed, I would say surströmming is actually more pungent, although it does lack the urine taste of hákarl.
- guerrilla 6y agosurströmming smells much worse than it actually tastes... keep it outdoors and you'll live just fine.
- pvaldes 6y agoI can't stand the ammonia flavor of Chondrichthyes, plus the bioaccumulation of heavy metals, mercury, ciguatoxins, the toxic amounts of vitamin A in liver... There are many excellent seafood but this is dog-food grade at best, not decent food for humans unless you haven't anything else. Cooking with urine would be healthier providing the same flavor without the extra-poisons. Pretty disgusting stuff.
- jamestimmins 6y agoFor context, the Mayflower reached the US with the earliest Pilgrims 401 years ago.
- cseleborg 6y agoThe Ming clam the article refers to as comparison was not 508 years but 405 to 410 according to the linked reference. So I'd say that shark is definitely a strong contender for the overall title.
- rahimiali 6y ago"The sharks' livers were once used for machine oil, and they were killed in great numbers before a synthetic alternative was found and the demand fell" Fascinating that the fate of these sharks depended on a completely unrelated technological advance.
- nabla9 6y agoWhales were killed huge numbers for whale oil during the industrial revolution. The oil was oil lamps and to make soap. (over 10-20 million gallons per year during the peak)
- goldenkey 6y agoIsn't Ambergris still used in luxury fragrances? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris
- pvaldes 6y agoAmbergris is a different product that does not involve the killing of the animal necessarily. Needs to mature for several years in the sea after being defecated by the whale.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoI thought whale oil was also used in something car related, transmissions/differentials? Yeah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_oil#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_oil#Applications, up until 1972 in USA, apparently.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoWhen I went to Alska, it was fascinating to learn that all these small trees where actually hundreds of years old. The cold makes them grow very slowly.
- dredmorbius 6y agoWhite Mountains and the bristlecone pines similarly. Trees ~20-40' high (~6-12m) are ~10,000 years old.
- stephenhuey 6y agoSome past discussions on this marvelous shark half a year ago and half a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24230327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24230327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270448 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12270448
- fabioyy 6y agoand we killed
- swayvil 6y agoGreenland Sharks are sea-ents. After 400 years some kind of rare intelligence must surely develop.
- dwighttk 6y agoI wouldn’t really call that living
- midrus 6y agoAnd then we go and fish it. F*ng humans.
- elgfare 6y agoI first thought they tested live sharks, which would mean they came from above, abducted them, probed ther eyes before releasing them.
- 0x11 6y agoI wonder if anyone has ever looked for a correlation between the average lifespan of a species and some distance factor from humans and the effect we have on the environment.