What’s a Greenland shark doing in Belize?
Marine scientists aren’t exactly sure how to answer that question. What they do know is that one was found there recently, swimming thousands of miles away from its natural habitat. After studying pictures, they determined that the shark they found in the Caribbean was indeed a Greenland shark, the longest-living vertebrate in the world.
Adult Greenland sharks are usually about 24 feet long and weigh 2,200 pounds. They are predatory.
Greenland sharks aren’t exactly a garden-variety shark. They usually live thousands of feet underwater in the pitch dark near the Arctic, and are rarely seen or photographed. They grow and age slowly, living a slow-paced lifestyle to conserve energy, living as long as 250 to 500 years.
But after finding the Greenland shark off Belize, they say that the shark could also thrive and inhabit other deep ocean regions, including the reef slope that goes down to 9,500 feet in the Caribbean near Belize.
A recent study, published in Marine Biology, says that researchers came across the Greenland shark when they were tagging and temporarily catching tiger sharks off the coast of Belize. They set a line in Glover’s Reef Atoll, and were surprised when it moved several miles away from the coral reef into water 2,000 feet deep.
When they retrieved it, they had something of a surprise. “We suddenly saw a very slow-moving, sluggish creature under the surface of the water,” wrote Devanshi Kaana, one of the researchers from Florida International University. “It looked like something from prehistoric times.”
