[HN Gopher] 400-year-old Greenland shark 'longest-living vertebr... ___________________________________________________________________ 400-year-old Greenland shark 'longest-living vertebrate' (2016) Author : milanandreew Score : 126 points Date : 2021-03-27 15:57 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.bbc.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com) | rahimiali wrote: | "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 wrote: | Whales 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 wrote: | Isn't Ambergris still used in luxury fragrances? | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambergris | pvaldes wrote: | Ambergris 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. | dukeofdoom wrote: | When 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. | mannerheim wrote: | The Icelandic dish of hakarl (fermented shark) is often made | using Greenland shark. | snurfer wrote: | ... 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 wrote: | Indeed, I would say surstromming is actually more pungent, | although it does lack the urine taste of hakarl. | guerrilla wrote: | surstromming smells much worse than it actually tastes... | keep it outdoors and you'll live just fine. | jamestimmins wrote: | For context, the Mayflower reached the US with the earliest | Pilgrims 401 years ago. | cseleborg wrote: | The 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. | 867-5309 wrote: | clams are invertebrates | mcbits wrote: | And the specimen they said was older than the oldest known | vertibrate was actually about the same age - potentially | younger, considering the lack of a notarized birth | certificate. | stephenhuey wrote: | Some 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=12270448 | dalbasal wrote: | So... | | 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 wrote: | the two other useful observations are that they seem not get | bigger than 5m, and that they grow by 1cm per year. | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | > 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. | danmaz74 wrote: | Of 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 wrote: | Yes, I'm pretty sure the parent was taking a jab at | destructful industrial fishing and its methods, not | scientists | 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: | I was. | i_am_new_here wrote: | To be fair: We wouldn't have found her otherwise. | xwdv wrote: | Inevitably they must die of something. Probably would be human | related with no other predators. | aloer wrote: | Related: there's a new documentary on Netflix called Seaspiracy | | It has some staggering numbers regarding the amount of by-catch | caught every day | IgorPartola wrote: | I 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. | ironmagma wrote: | The relative scale of the effects of the fishing industry as a | whole vs. the few scientific studies that are done is | staggeringly high. | fguerraz wrote: | What 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 wrote: | Delusions of grandeur notwithstanding, not much it seems. | fastball wrote: | Confirmation 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 wrote: | > confirmation bias .. | | Wouldn't that be more an example of the Baader Meinhof effect? | kovek wrote: | How do people develop their repertoire/knowledge of these | "effects" and laws? | dalbasal wrote: | Hacker News, sometimes reddit.... IDK of this effect has a | name... the graham law maybe? | arbitrage wrote: | baader-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 wrote: | Let me share with you one of my favourite pages on | Wikipedia: | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases | ithkuil wrote: | Once a colleague mentioned it and since then I notice it | everywhere :-) | fireattack wrote: | Not OP, but I pretty much only know two effects: Baader- | Meinhof effect and Streisand effect. So I guess the answer | for knowing this particular one is just that it is famous. | yellowapple wrote: | So I guess the answer is that this repertoire grows | whenever someone tries to suppress its knowledge. | wintermutesGhst wrote: | Perhaps it is an example of Cunningham's Law? | grawprog wrote: | Heartrate has been found to play a big part. | | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9316546/ | | Animals with slower heart rates tend to be longer lived. An | interesting sidenote are bats, which have heart rates about the | same as similarly sized small mammals like mice, but due to | their nightly torpor state where their heart rate is | significantly lowered, they tend to live 20-25 years opposed to | the 3-4 mice usually live. | rubicon33 wrote: | Assuming this is true, I recommend everyone start running! | | If I am regularly running, my resting heart rate at night | drops into the upper 30s. During the day sitting down, 45-50. | | If I haven't been running (for a week or longer) it picks | back up in to the mid 40s at night, and around 60 for normal | sitting. | buserror wrote: | You heart might survive, but your joints probably won't. | The stress you put on them when running/sporting when young | will come back to haunt you later on! | | Don't ask me how I know :-) | raducu wrote: | Welp... guess I'll die young. | | My heart rate when sleeping is 65bpm, and I can't focus on | anuthing if my heart rate is below 90bpm during the day. | fallat wrote: | Hmm, less stress, lower heart rate, longer life. | coliveira wrote: | Lifespan is correlated with the time it takes to reproduce. If | a species needs a lot of time to reproduce, then only the | individuals who live longer will procreate, passing down the | genes of long life. On the other hand, if it is too quick to | reproduce, genes for short lifespan will abound, pressuring the | shorter lifespans across the population. | Isinlor wrote: | By far the most important reason dictating lifespan is | evolvability - the ability to adapt genetically [0]. | | This has so great effect that it's easy to observe even in a | simple computer simulations. If you don't adapt and the | environment is changing, then you go extinct. | | Think about this sharks and how much their environment has | changed since they were born. As a spices they will have a very | hard time adapting to the changes we induce in the environment. | While small animals that have lifespan in weeks, months or few | years will be adapting a lot faster. E.g. in one generation of | this shark a mouse will go trough up to 900 generations with up | to 12 offspring in each generation. | | This shark probably will go extinct and mice will thrive. | | Interesting consequence of this effect is that our lifespan is | most likely not dictated by any fundamental limitations of | biological machinery to maintain us healthy indefinitely. | | A lot more likely is that we are evolutionary designed to get | old and die. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability | 46756e wrote: | I'm not educated on this topic at all, but wouldn't birth | rate be more relevant than aging? If this shark lives 400 | years but has kids often, it could also go through 900 | generations like the mice. Presumably if the environment | isn't favorable then the old members of the species would die | off anyway. | albertgoeswoof wrote: | The older living sharks would use up resources that the | younger ones need to thrive. So it's way more efficient to | get the older population out of the way sooner. | | The longevity of the Greenland shark, humans and other long | living animals, is in spite of evolutionary pressure to | reproduce, raise the next generation and die. | lostlogin wrote: | Thanks you, nice link. The opposite side of this is | biological immortality. This wiki has a good discussion. | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality | arp242 wrote: | > 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. | | A lot of animals just don't need to live longer than 1, 2, or | 20 years to reproduce. There is no evolutionary pressure to do | so. From our human perceptive life is valuable on its own | merit, but nature doesn't see it that way. All it really cares | about is replicating those precious DNA molecules, and | different species have different strategies for that. For some | species, it takes a long time to produce offspring. Whales, for | example, live a long time as well. They're huge and it takes a | long time for them to become fully grown, find mates, produce | offspring, etc. There is a lot of evolutionary pressure to live | long. Humans live comparatively long because it takes a long | time for individuals to acquire the skills we use as a survival | strategy. | | Not too much is known about the lives of Greenland sharks, but | there are probably some evolutionary pressures for them to live | long lives. | trhway wrote: | >Humans live comparatively long because it takes a long time | for individuals to acquire the skills we use as a survival | strategy | | Species need to live until reproduce, maybe several times, | and see the next generation into being able to live on their | own. That is about 35-50 for humans (granted the | 15-20/generation - relatively prolonged maturation period | given our size - is primarily because of the brain/skills | development you mentioned). Additionally, because of the | complexity of societal organization, skills and other | knowledge, we've got boost from having the grand generation | around to help and transfer knowledge and experience. That | brought us to 60-70. | [deleted] ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-27 23:00 UTC)