[HN Gopher] 400-year-old Greenland shark 'longest-living vertebr...
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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]
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