Consider the Greenland Shark (2020) (lrb.co.uk)
70 points by mooreds 5 days ago
causal 4 hours ago
A lot of deep sea creatures have very slow metabolisms. It is one of the many reasons sea dredging and mining should be held with such disdain: these are ecosystems which may take thousands of years to recover.
We don't even appreciate how long it takes a forest to recover, much less one with glass sponges that are thousands of years old.
jackconsidine 6 hours ago
When H Melville stuffed the middle of Moby Dick with a "cetology" -- BEFORE The Origin of Species, famously saying "a whale is a fish" -- he didn't forget the Greenland Shark. I think all the time about how many of those sharks swimming around in 1851 are still swimming around today.
mikkupikku 3 hours ago
Note that Melville was well aware of the reasons that "whales aren't fish", and went over those in detail, then said he was going to call them fish anyway.
IncreasePosts 2 hours ago
I think that's perfectly fair. The same way everyone knows that chimps are monkeys, it's just brainy losers who insist they're just apes
mikkupikku an hour ago
internet_points 4 hours ago
Oh, the article is by Katherine Rundell. She has written some very nice children's books.
egl2020 an hour ago
The Greenland shark appears, if I remember correctly, in her book "Golden Mole", which is about many interesting creatures. This is published as Vanishing Treasures in some countries. Her "Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne" is interesting and also not a children's book.
frmersdog 5 hours ago
There's a business lesson in the longest lived creatures being the ones that move slow, abide small insults, and make themselves generally unappetizing.
fmbb 4 hours ago
But are they rich?
AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago
What is being rich, if you die young?
joshuaheard 5 hours ago
Jeremy Wade, host of the TV show "River Monsters", has an episode where he investigates the Loch Ness Monster and concludes it's likely a Greenland Shark that swam up an underground river from the North Atlantic to the lake. He likens the shark's horse-like face and the distribution of the low fins on the shark's back to descriptions of the monster. A solitary long-living fish could explain the occasional sightings, and the scientists' findings that there is not enough food in the lake for a breeding population of large carnivores.
dragonwriter 5 hours ago
As a sibling comment notes most sharks cannot live long in freshwater, and moreover this is soecifically true of Greenland sharks, though they do sometimes spend time in brackish river mouth environments, so, unless it developed the weird behavior of migrating quickly up the relevant underground river to make a quick appearance and then inmediately rushing back down the river to the ocean, that’s one answer we can be fairly certain is wrong.
There are a few sharks that can live in freshwater, but they tend to inhabit warmer oceans.f_
RajT88 4 hours ago
Totally wild factoid: Bull sharks have been caught in tributaries of the Mississippi River in Illinois. (Back before they built all the dams)
dragonwriter 3 hours ago
cucumber3732842 2 hours ago
joshuaheard 3 hours ago
That's too bad. I thought he was on to something.
RajT88 5 hours ago
He is likely wrong (most sharks cannot live long in fresh water). But given the show, he has to conclude it is a fish of some sort, and it is not going to be 10k arctic char in a dinosaur suit.
ljlolel 5 hours ago
Doubt a shark could survive in freshwater. They’re very tuned to salinity
mikkupikku 3 hours ago
Bull sharks can, but they're the famous exception to this. Sometimes they swim up a river and nip somebody.
the_af 4 hours ago
The most likely explanation for the Loch Ness Monster, of course, is that it's entirely made up and didn't require an actual sighting or a real physical phenomenon, ever, to trigger people's imaginations.
keiferski 4 hours ago
I think the title is a reference to David Foster Wallace's awesome article, Consider the Lobster.
rsynnott 2 hours ago
David Foster Wallace has always irritated me, in that I've greatly enjoyed all of his essays that I've read, including this one, but I bounced off the novel hard.
owlninja 3 hours ago
Which is homage to Consider the Oyster I believe.
bananzamba 3 hours ago
So that is where Silicon Valley got the "Consider the X" running gag from.
_joel 3 hours ago
Hello Ordinary Sausage
ikeashark 3 hours ago
Consider the elephant when?