Consider the Greenland Shark (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Consider the Greenland Shark (2020)

lrb.co.uk

88 pointsmooreds40 comments

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.

> We don't even appreciate how long it takes a forest to recover

Don't forget about forests that are thousands of years old too, very contemporary serious long-term damage

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.

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.

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

Yes I agree. All the moreso because the word fish is very ancient and was used to mean any aquatic animal long before Linnaeus came along and decided to "well ackshully" the word.

This is a reach, but do you know where to find the essay I read about someone explaining to King David that a whale isn't a fish and the King laughs at him because his modern mammal explanations are useless and impractical compared to the ones he uses?

I've been trying to re-find it for ages.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

Thank you, a refreshingly interesting read

Thank you!

The whale=fish thing is also an old joke about catholics. Back when one could not eat meat on fridays, all sorts of water-living mamals were declared to be "fish" for purposes of eating. So a new world protestant author in the 1800s is pointing a critical finger at oldworld religion and science.

We have lost knowledge of such nuance, like rewatching MASH or Trek and missing the religious and racial messages that made them so controversial then but banal today.

> Back when one could not eat meat on fridays, all sorts of water-living mamals were declared to be "fish" for purposes of eating.

Like what, seals? Otters?

Something tells me that otters were never passed off as "fish".

Capybaras in Brazil were Friday fish.

Afraid not.

In 1760, The Natural and Civil History of the French Dominions in North and South America did absolutely claim that there was some papal decree that otter tail was fish, and beaver was fish, and so on.

But... There's no actual Papal decree, bull, or otherwise in canon law that anyone can find. It's just a good story, not a true one.

Which doesnt matter. What maters is whether melville thought it to be true when he wrote the line. The joke/reference would have been understood by readers at the time regardless of whether it was factually true.

2010. Archibishop of New Orleans. Alligator is "fish". Whether or not the pope has an opinion, such things are not fiction.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/03/27/175058833/fo...

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.

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.

Doubt a shark could survive in freshwater. They’re very tuned to salinity

Bull sharks can, but they're the famous exception to this. Sometimes they swim up a river and nip somebody.

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_

Totally wild factoid: Bull sharks have been caught in tributaries of the Mississippi River in Illinois. (Back before they built all the dams)

Yeah, bull sharks are the most common and wide-ranging of the sharks that are adapted to survive in a wide range of salinity levels.

That's the kind of rare and highly luck based curiosity they ought to give you a plaque for. "From this shore in 1973 local angler..." Slap it on the same sign post as the flood high water markers they put up.

Bull sharks are often found in rivers tens of kilometres from the ocean in Queensland.

That's too bad. I thought he was on to something.

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.

Oh, the article is by Katherine Rundell. She has written some very nice children's books.

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.

There's a business lesson in the longest lived creatures being the ones that move slow, abide small insults, and make themselves generally unappetizing.

But are they rich?

What is being rich, if you die young?

I think the title is a reference to David Foster Wallace's awesome article, Consider the Lobster.

https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf

So that is where Silicon Valley got the "Consider the X" running gag from.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KuVEbBmu1EM

Which is homage to Consider the Oyster I believe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_the_Oyster

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.

Maybe "Consider the ant" from The Bible?

Which I only know about from the John Wyndham story[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consider_Her_Ways

A buddy of mine made a video of diving to find Greenland Sharks. It's apparently not terribly easy to find them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kS89k6DjnM

I heard he is still there at 20 meters banging a pair of rocks together.

Consider the elephant when?

Hello Ordinary Sausage

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