Consider the Greenland Shark (2020)
by mooreds on 3/27/2026, 7:39:40 AM
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n09/katherine-rundell/consider-the-greenland-shark
Comments
by: keiferski
I think the title is a reference to David Foster Wallace's awesome article, <i>Consider the Lobster.</i><p><a href="https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf</a>
4/1/2026, 3:50:16 PM
by: causal
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.<p>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.
4/1/2026, 3:48:25 PM
by: jackconsidine
When H Melville stuffed the middle of <i>Moby Dick</i> with a "cetology" -- BEFORE <i>The Origin of Species</i>, 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.
4/1/2026, 1:40:48 PM
by: frmersdog
There's a business lesson in the longest lived creatures being the ones that move slow, abide small insults, and make themselves generally unappetizing.
4/1/2026, 2:30:49 PM
by: internet_points
Oh, the article is by Katherine Rundell. She has written some very nice children's books.<p>See also <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511555">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511555</a>
4/1/2026, 3:22:57 PM
by: joshuaheard
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.
4/1/2026, 2:27:50 PM