A new study of Greenland sharks has found one that scientists say is probably 390 years old, making her the longest-living vertebrate on earth. Indeed, that age means the shark was born in 1631, just 11 years after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, and during the reign of King Charles 1 of England, although he was beheaded in 1649 after the English Civil War.
Julius Nielsen, a marine biologist at the University of Copenhagen and the lead author of the new study, said, “I think everyone doing this research was very surprised to learn the sharks were as old as they were.”
The scientists said one shark could be as much as 512 years old, but most agreed on the 390-year-old estimate. They used radiocarbon dating of eye proteins to determine the ages of 28 Greenland sharks.
Greenland sharks, often called “sleeper sharks” because they move so slowly, can be as much as 16 feet long at maturity. They grow less than half an inch a year, and reach sexual maturity when they’re about 12 feet long, or 150 years old.
The sharks live in the cold, deep waters of Greenland and the North Atlantic. They live so long because they have a super-slow metabolism. Researchers have found parts of seals in the sharks’ stomachs, but they think the seals were probably sleeping or already dead when the sharks ate them.
Oddly enough, the shark research was helped by fallout from the thermonuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere in the 1960s. The tests released large amounts of radiocarbon that was absorbed by organisms in the ocean. The researchers found that sharks with elevated radiocarbon in the nucleus of their eye tissue were born after that time; sharks with lower radiocarbon levels were at least 50 years old. See the video below:
