400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)
bbc.com
bbc.com
Nice job- the shark had done just fine for ~400 years.
It has some staggering numbers regarding the amount of by-catch caught every day
Business runs on money - vote with your wallet as that is your power, use it, don't loose it.
When you tell people to "vote with your wallet", you are implicitly admitting that people with bigger wallets have more votes. Literally millions of times more, in many cases.
Don't vote with your wallet. involve yourself in local government, because legislation is the only way to solve problems like this.
Seeing the world as it is, is a precondition to changing it. You don't have to like it, but you do have to understand it.
In this case I both disagree and agree.
Disagree: Yes, rich people have a lot more money. But they don't eat more food than anyone else. Their threat to not buy certain fish is worth about as much as mine.
Agree: These kind of boycotts rarely accomplish much. The fishing system needs to be reformed away from free for all hunting, and legislation must do that. Iceland and New Zealand has decent systems in place now.
The issue is that rich people are both buying and supplying the fish that anyone else eventually eats.
You can do a bunch of research to figure out the best and most ethically sourced fish providers, but that takes a bunch of time and effort. It's not something you can reasonably rely on consumers to do. That's because most consumers either don't care or they care more about the absolute price than the source.
This comes up all the time with child labor and sweatshops. These big corporations have a giant supply network that makes it really hard to figure out where something comes from. Yes, maybe the shirt was sewn ethically but the cotton for the shirt was not. How would you know?
It's the same problem with fish. Unless there is a capital incentive (through regulation) to force a company to ethically source goods, they'll sooner turn a blind eye than fix the problem. That's because they know it's nearly impossible for an end consumer be informed about their ethics lapses.
So, while a rich person uninvolved with fisheries has little say in how their fish are sourced, rich people are most certainly in charge of which sources are ultimately used if they have fish in their supply chains. Those are the rich people with way more power than an individual consumer.
Otherwise completely agree.
We are not going to heal the planet by everyone consuming less or driving less or any of the million things that they encourage you to do to save it. Science is going to be the only solution as the pandemic has proven that people really are not going to make choices that inconvenience them, we need to provide alternatives that are just as enticing but are also financially attractive. In addition, even if we convinced everyone to cut their consumption of everything by 25%, so what; in a few years there will be more people rendering that 25% savings moot. Science is the only way.
As an individual - indeed that is probably so, but you do get to feel less helpless and gets down too a balance of moral dilemma and feeling helpless.
Don't eat seafood. The more that don't, the less fishing humanity will do.
Advice that tor several millions of people in this planet, will translate directly to "live less, die younger" or "starve your family to death, is good for your karma" (and your suicide will be highly appreciated for my own family).
Lets get serious, please. Stopping to eat seafood overnight would mean having a mass genocide in the planet in less than a year. Moreover, all cultures having many very long-lived people eat lots of seafood products. Is among the best human food known in the planet. This advice is totally out of any sensible discussion about our future.
Changing the subject, I have previously explained here how difficult and error prone is to study age in sharks, and my opinion has not changed a millimeter. I still would suggest to take this 400-yo values with a ton of arctic salt.
For some fish, we would figure out their age by looking at some tiny bone pieces under a microscope and counting rings, similar to tree rings.
I have no idea how I ended up in that job, I have no interest in fish or fishing or the ocean.
https://old.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/5shm1r/why_i_hate_the...
It's hard to imagine a piece of the world that we haven't had an impact on.
I was actually curious if anyone could help answer the following:
(a) how one would define inhabitant (including bacteria?) (b) what the net %age change actually would be given a suitable choice of (a)
Humans have displaced over 90% of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass (land animals with a backbone).
http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr...
Most of the human + livestock biomass is utterly dependent on Haber-Bosch process derived nitrogen fertiliser, produced via nonrenewable natural gas (methane, a fossil fuel).
The goalposts seem to have shifted from the person I replied to.
If you look at the linked chart, humans have increased net terrestrial biomass, yes, but virtually all of it now exists as just eight species: cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, horses, goats, cas, and dogs. Variants of the original chart highlight this.
https://www.survival.org.au/images/world-terrestrial-vertebr...
That is:
- Naturally-occurring vertebrate bodymass surviving on sustainable current-process nitrogen fixation has fallen precipitously, by ~99%.
- Net genetic diversity within and among those populations has similarly fallen, possibly below sustainable values for many species. Numerous species have gone extinct, many previously small, some prolific (passenger pigeon).
- A terrestrial vertebrate population of thousands of mammals and tens of thousands of overall species ... is now utterly dominated by about nine species. (The eight livestock/pet classes above, and humans.) A few other human symbiotes (rats, mice, deer) have also likely increased. All are dependent on nonsustainable nitrogen fixation among other nonrenewable or nonsustainable practices and inputs.
- Dense and interlinked populations are breeding grounds for novel trans-species disease, among other hygenic consequences. These affect both humans and livestock. The principle can be extended to plant onocrops as well, from tobacco to trees (in the non /r/trees sense, generally).
I wonder if we will be remembered by future biologists as cyanobacteria are remembered by our biologists today.
Fascinating that the fate of these sharks depended on a completely unrelated technological advance.
Yeah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_oil#Applications, up until 1972 in USA, apparently.
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.
If the probability is constant, you can model the lifespan as an exponential decay - there is no real upper limit, but the population of older individuals is very small.
For most animals the probability increases as they age, and becomes very high towards the end of their life, but this is not the case for all animals.
"(probability) becomes very high towards the end of their life."
This is, ultimately, what we want to know. At what age do they start to die of old age? Oldest living vertebrate is interesting, but I think it's mostly interesting because of what it says about the species?
Is it possible that a large vertebrate doesn't have an old age point, where probability of death is very high?
Trees ~20-40' high (~6-12m) are ~10,000 years old.
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.
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.
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.
N.B.: I'm a layman on this topic as well.
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.
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.
My heart rate when sleeping is 65bpm, and I can't focus on anuthing if my heart rate is below 90bpm during the day.
Some of the most productive people I know eat nothing but donuts and coffee, and don't exercise at all. They're smart, driven, and highly successful.
Meanwhile, I know a lot of people who put exercise and food as a priority, and don't seem nearly as sharp or as successful. Maybe this all washes out, with age.
Point is - do whatever works for you. Don't let some blog, or some person on the internet, tell you how to perform optimally!
Don't ask me how I know :-)
https://www.labroots.com/trending/cell-and-molecular-biology...
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.
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.
Wouldn't that be more an example of the Baader Meinhof effect?
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.
There are many excellent seafood but this is dog-food grade at best, not decent food for humans unless you haven't anything else. Cooking with urine would be healthier providing the same flavor without the extra-poisons. Pretty disgusting stuff.
After 400 years some kind of rare intelligence must surely develop.