Greenland sharks live 400 years
Yes, you read that right: 400 years.
If you call that “living.”
We actually don’t know all that much about shark behavior. But here’s my first introduction to it, courtesy of Herman Melville in a Moby Dick passage that made a deep impression on me as a teenager:
But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase [of the whale], that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod’s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.
Nevertheless, upon Stubb setting the anchor-watch after his supper was concluded; and when, accordingly Queequeg and a forecastle seaman came on deck, no small excitement was created among the sharks; for immediately suspending the cutting stages over the side, and lowering three lanterns, so that they cast long gleams of light over the turbid sea, these two mariners, darting their long whaling-spades, kept up an incessant murdering of the sharks, by striking the keen steel deep into their skulls, seemingly their only vital part. But in the foamy confusion of their mixed and struggling hosts, the marksmen could not always hit their mark; and this brought about new revelations of the incredible ferocity of the foe. They viciously snapped, not only at each other’s disembowelments, but like flexible bows, bent round, and bit their own; till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound. Nor was this all. It was unsafe to meddle with the corpses and ghosts of these creatures. A sort of generic or Pantheistic vitality seemed to lurk in their very joints and bones, after what might be called the individual life had departed. Killed and hoisted on deck for the sake of his skin, one of these sharks almost took poor Queequeg’s hand off, when he tried to shut down the dead lid of his murderous jaw.
“Queequeg no care what god made him shark,” said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; “wedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.”
From the lyrics of “It Ain’t Necessarily So”
Methus’lah lived nine hundred years,
But who calls dat livin’
When no gal will give in
To no man what’s nine hundred years ?
JohnGalt47:
That was exactly and precisely the reference I was thinking of when I wrote the post, but I decided not to spell it out. You caught it! Bravo!
“Swimming no more than two miles per hour, the hulking beasts move slowly and grow just as slowly, just 0.5 to 1 centimeters per year. Yet they can grow to be more than six or even seven meters in length!” The description of a perfect bureaucrat, always grows, never dies, and does nothing except eat.
Melville got coffins crossed up with life preservers.
Freud would have something to say about that.
Thanks for the heads up about Greenland sharks.
The sharks around the Pequod were much more likely to be Oceanic Whitetips. They are aggressive beasties, and probably the all time people eaters, thanks to their attendance at sinkings during WWII. They certainly dined well on the survivors of USS INDIANAPOLIS.
Ref the Indy.
It seems a mathematical certainty that the sharks killed more Americans then than died in combat in the Spanish-American war. (Lots, including a couple of great-uncles, died of disease.)
Then there was The Slot, and The Bismarck Sea….
The whales themselves are no slouches when it comes to longevity.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1554522/Whale-had-antique-harpoon-in-its-neck.html
According to authorities that whale that was killed on that native whale hunt back in 2007 was shot by commercial whalers using an explosive harpoon around 1890. It’s hard to believe it was anything less than a mature animal when it was shot the first time for a couple of reasons. First, if it had been a calf it would have been with its mother. Which means that the whalers would have gone for the larger animal. It could have been a juvenile, because whales are weaned after the first year, then become independent and as a male this whale would have left the pod. They’re born about 10 to 15 long but on the cow’s fat-rich milk they can reach 33 feet long by that time. But whalers wouldn’t have spared a juvenile out of the goodness of their hearts, it’s just that the larger the whale the more profitable it would have been. Adults can reach 40 to 60 feet long and they yielded much more oil and baleen. A big Bowhead whale could yield as much as 100 barrels of oil. Since an explosive harpoon head is a single use item I suspect they wouldn’t have wasted it on a sub-adult.
Also he survived the wound, which suggests he was a pretty good size already. He was probably at least 8 years old as Bowheads become sexually mature between the ages of 4-8 but males would have no chance of competing with the larger adult males and actually mating at 4 or 5. It’s a big ocean and receptive females are difficult to find in it. So males begin aggressively “escorting” female whales as they come across them. They will keep other males away from her, and whale calves generally are pretty scarred up by the time they reach their first birthday as the males will shove them aside to investigate the female. And the females gain protection as the calf, and consequently her herself, is vulnerable to sharks and killer whales. Males typically are not vulnerable to predators except human beings unless they become sick or grow old.
No one really knows what constitutes old for a whale.
Actually, it’s rare to find a dead whale. If a whale survives the predators long enough to die of disease or old age it won’t be long until the scavengers strip all the blubber and most of the meat off he carcass. When that happens what’s left of the whale sinks to the ocean floor. With just enough meat on its bones to interest the bottom dwellers.
So can whales live longer than 200 years? I wouldn’t bet against the idea that some species of whales can. I don’t think the sample size is large enough to rule it out.
Yeah, the sharks dined well on the survivors of many ship sinking. Many of the sailors who went into the drink at the Battle off Samar on 25 October 1944, one of the engagements that collectively comprised Battle of Leyte Gulf didn’t live to be rescued. It’s mind boggling how the Navy could have left so many sailors in the water for over 40 hours as, unlike the Indy which went to her death unobserved, the ships of Taffy 3 were sunk within view of other ships and aircraft.
The USS Juneau was obliterated in the blink of an eye shortly before noon on 13 November 1942 by the Imperial Japanese Navy submarine 1-26 south of Guadalcanal in an area the American sailors nicknamed Torpedo Junction due to the ships lost to Japanese submarines. The skipper of the sub was actually shooting a spread of three torpedoes at the USS San Francisco, missed, and at least one torpedo proceeded on to hit the Juneau. The other sailors in the task force who saw the Juneau blow up couldn’t believe what they had just witnessed.
They had fought the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal shortly after midnight on the 13. Admiral Callaghan and his deputy commander Admiral Scott had both been killed, leaving Captain Gilbert Hoover of the light cruiser USS Helena the senior officer present to try to lead the cripples back to port. The USN had already lost the light anti-aircraft cruiser Atlanta (CLAAs didn’t really deserve to be designated as cruisers as they were totally unsuitable for a surface actions; they were just oversized, glorified destroyers designed as carrier escorts and optimized for air defense), every other cruiser was damaged to one degree or another. The Juneau had been struck by one torpedo during the night, was down 12 feet at the bow, and limping along on one screw barely able to make 18 knots as the torpedo had destroyed one of her fire rooms causing a lot of casualties. Of the remaining cruisers only the Helena escaped heavy damage, and four of eight destroyers had been sunk. Three of the four surviving destroyers were all moderately to heavily damaged. Only the Fletcher was lightly damaged and it was the only destroyer with a functioning sonar. Only the Fletcher and one other damaged destroyer had any depth charges.
The sailors were all pretty much at the end of their physical and emotional rope as they had spent the entire night fighting the Japanese and then fighting to save their ships. When the Juneau was torpedoed it blew up in a massive explosion, and when the smoke cleared in 20 or so seconds it was just gone. They didn’t believe a ship could disappear from the surface of the ocean so quickly. The ship was there one moment 800 yards on the beam of the San Francisco, then it wasn’t. Debris as large as the Juneau’s five inch gun turrets nearly hit other ships, and ships a mile away were nearly capsized when the shock wave from the explosion hit them broadside. It was more traumatic for the sailors on the other ships than the battle they had just been through. They couldn’t really see much during a night action because most of the sailors general quarter stations were not on deck in the first place, it was very dark, and the light largely came from their own blinding muzzle flashes. All they could see was what was etched on their retinas. The Japanese who had practiced night fighting would only fire in salvo, all guns in unison, and they had an alarm to warn their lookouts and bridge crews to shut their eyes so they wouldn’t lose their night vision. The Americans would fire at will, leading to rapid and heavy but ineffective fire and making it impossible to preserve their night vision.
But the Juneau was destroyed in broad daylight. Before that event some of sailors would half-jokingly talk about being torpedoed because generally the damage required a trip back to the US west coast or even yards on the east coast. Nobody joked about Japanese torpedoes after November 1942. The odds of an individual surviving a sinking were better than an individual ship getting sunk, but not even the sailors who witnessed ships getting sunk understood just how badly the the Japanese had them outclassed with their torpedoes until after the war. But they knew they were outclassed and didn’t relish the idea with taking a swim with all those sharks.
Nobody thought there could be any survivors. They didn’t believe anyone could survive the explosion or if they did they must have been killed in the rain of debris. Besides, they only had one destroyer with them with a functioning sonar and that wasn’t going to get the job done. It just couldn’t screen all the cripples, many of which were in such bad shape it was questionable if the barely floating wrecks could make it to port even if the Japanese didn’t put any more torpedoes into them or bombs on target. Hoover therefore made the difficult decision not to go back and search for survivors. He did signal a B-17 on a reconnaissance mission to search for survivors and passed along the lat/long where the Juneau went down. The aircrew spotted some of the approximately 115 sailors out of a crew of 63 officers and 785 who did survive the explosion and dropped a life raft to them, and many of those survivors had indeed been badly burned and/or had suffered seriously injuries due to falling debris. But due to poor communications Admiral Halsey didn’t get the message for days. The result was that no survivors were rescued for eight days. By then there were only ten survivors left. Injuries, exposure, thirst and sharks had taken the rest. But mostly the sharks.
Admiral Halsey, the theater commander was furious with Hoover and in what was one of the major injustices Halsey inflicted on his subordinates he relieved Hoover and ordered him back to Pearl Harbor. Nimitz and his chief of staff Adm. Spruance spotted the fact that Hoover’s remaining ships were in no condition to go back and search for survivors as they had no idea how many submarines were in the area, and couldn’t effectively hunt a submarine anyway. The tried to fix the damage Halsey did to Hoover’s career, but when a theater commander relieves a ship’s captain for cause it’s fatal to one’s career. Ironically later in the war many people were clamoring for Nimitz to relieve Halsey for some of his boneheaded mistakes, but Nimitz was far more lenient with Halsey than Halsey had ever been with his subordinates. One could make the case that leaving Halsey in command of his fleet was one of the few command failures on Nimitz’s part.
The sinking of the Juneau was actually more famous than that of the Indianapolis before Jaws came out in the mid ’70s. Three of the five Sullivan brothers had gone down with the ship and the other two survived for days until they had succumbed to wounds and sharks.