Whoa!

Freakin' What?????

//Heinemeier’s method, they found that the smallest of the sharks they caught—those around seven feet long—were born after the bomb pulse, while the largest animals were born well before it. With the help of a mathematical model that linked size with age, they estimated that one sixteen-foot female was at least two hundred and seventy-two years old, and possibly as much as five hundred and twelve years old. Because it is difficult to establish background carbon-14 levels in the ocean, and because Nielsen and his colleagues didn’t know which part of the ocean the sharks had been born in, the figure was inexact. Still, it firmly established Greenland sharks as the longest-living vertebrates on Earth. In theory, the biggest ones could be nearly six centuries old.

The question now is how the sharks do it. Increasingly, scientists are searching the natural world for the genetic and behavioral mechanisms that endow creatures with their special abilities—that make elephants virtually immune to cancer, say, or axolotls capable of regenerating a lost limb. There may be Greenland sharks alive today that were born before Christopher Columbus; the species is not even thought to reach sexual maturity until around a hundred and fifty years of age. Why? The answer likely has to do with a very slow metabolism and the cold waters that they inhabit. But for now, Nielsen said, it’s yet another mystery. “I’m just the messenger on this,” he told me. “I have no idea.”//

I did not see that coming.