- Wildscreen Arkive – Greenland shark
- WebMD – Secretin
- Gulf of Maine analysis Institute – Greenland shark
- Animal Diversity Internet – Greenland shark
- Canadian Shark Analysis Laboratory – Greenland Shark
- Florida Museum of Natural History – Greenland shark
Greenland shark, (Somniosus microcephalus), person in the sleeper shark family Somniosidae (order Squaliformes, that also includes the dogfish family members, Squalidae) this is the longest-living vertebrate known. The types is mainly based in the cold-water environments for the Arctic Ocean and North Atlantic, from Baffin Bay eastward to your Barents Sea, but its range additionally stretches southward towards the North Sea and also the waters right beside the Eastern Seaboard for the usa. Bulky, by having a curved snout, tiny fins in accordance with body size, and grey to brown coloration, Greenland sharks are similar to spiny dogfish (Squalus acanthias)
except they lack a back at the second dorsal fin and usually the main one in the very first dorsal fin.
Normal history
The Greenland shark is amongst the biggest cartilaginous fishes. It may achieve a size of 7 metres (23 legs) and a fat of 1,025 kg (2,260 pounds) whenever completely grown, but the majority are between 2 and 4 metres (6.5 and 13 legs). Minimal is well known, but, regarding how the types reproduces. Females are believed to attain maturity that is sexual they surpass the 4-metre (13-foot) mark in total, which does take approximately 150 years to realize. They’ve been ovoviviparous (this is certainly, eggs are retained in the human anatomy until they hatch) and create on average 10 offspring at any given time. The kind, quantity, and timeframe of parental care the young receive are unknown, but boffins speculate that, like other shark species, Greenland sharks are separate from delivery. No other vertebrate known has a life span provided that this species; radiocarbon relationship of isotopes in the shark’s eye-lens suggests that are nuclei the earliest Greenland sharks might be a lot more than 500 yrs old.
Greenland sharks are hardly ever experienced by people. They’ve been considered to choose colder, much much much much much deeper surroundings but could be discovered ranging from the ocean area and depths of 2,200 meters (about 7,200 foot). Greenland sharks are slow-moving, typically swimming at prices of not as much as 3 kilometer (about 1.9 kilometers) each hour. They truly are carnivorous, and their diet is usually composed of various kinds of fishes, including smaller sharks, eels, flounders, and sculpins. Crustaceans, seabirds, and carrion—as well as terrestrial animals (such as for instance horses and reindeer) that probably dropped through the ice—have been present in belly analyses regarding the species. Greenland sharks aren’t considered dangerous to people, in component since they are now living in areas where individuals usually do not typically swim; truly the only known report of a feasible assault by a Greenland shark for a person dates to 1859.
Preservation status
Greenland sharks are believed to be always a species that are near-threatened the Overseas Union for Conservation of www.datingrating.net/escort/evansville/ Nature.
The types had been valued for the liver oil; about 114 litres (30 gallons) of liver oil can be acquired from a sizable specimen (see additionally fish oil). (even though flesh associated with the Greenland shark might be consumed, it really is toxic unless correctly washed and dried out or over and over over and over over and over repeatedly boiled just before consumption.) Greenland sharks had been fished commercially through the century that is 19th 1960. Norway persecuted Greenland sharks through the 1970s, simply because they had been regarded as a nuisance that threatened other fisheries. When you look at the very early 1900s because numerous as 30,000 Greenland sharks had been caught a year. In our day the yearly take is far smaller; small-scale subsistence fisheries in the Arctic harvest less than 100 people yearly, and roughly 1,200 are caught inadvertently in fishing trawls.
