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Greenland shark turns up in Belize; Siberia's Taymyr peninsula thaw slumps and carbon release. [1]
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Date: 2022-07-29
A submarine-shaped, slow-moving, half-blind Greenland shark about the size of a Great White Shark that feeds on polar bears' carcasses was found swimming in the deep waters of corals in Belize. The Greenland shake is slo=moving and can live to be 400 years old.
From the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium:
Devanshi Kasana, a Ph.D. candidate in the Florida International University (FIU) Predator Ecology and Conservation lab, was working with local Belizean fishermen to tag tiger sharks when the discovery was made. It had been a long night of fishing. By dawn, the weather had deteriorated. Storms were gathering on the horizon. The team did a last check of their lines. On the other end of one, wasn’t a tiger shark, but a rather sluggish creature. It looked old — ancient, even — and more like an elongated, smooth stone that had sprung to life. It had a blunt snout and small pale bluish colored eyes. All together, these clues led scientists to think it was a member of the sleeper shark family.
“At first, I was sure it was something else, like a six gill shark that are well known from deep waters off coral reefs,” Kasana said. “I knew it was something unusual and so did the fishers, who hadn’t ever seen anything quite like it in all their combined years of fishing.”
Greenland sharks remain somewhat of an enigma to science. What is known about them is they tend to be seen in the frigid waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans. The slow-moving species is also slow growing. Yet, a life in the slow lane may benefit them, because they have been estimated to live upward of 400 years — earning them the special designation of longest-living vertebrate known to science.
Because little is known about them, that means nothing can be definitively ruled out about the species. Greenland sharks could possibly be trolling the depths of the ocean all across the world. In fact, experts speculate that they could be found all over the world, living in tropics at greater depths, where they can find their preferred low temperatures.
The waters where Kasana and the fishermen found the shark certainly get deep. Glover’s Reef Atoll — part of the Glover’s Reef Marine Reserve World Heritage Site, a marine protected area (MPA) — sits on top a limestone platform, forming a lagoon surrounded by a coral reef. Along the edges of the atoll there’s a steep slope that drops from 1,600 feet to 9,500 feet deep, which means there is cold water needed for a Greenland shark to thrive.
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