Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderScience fact

The Greenland shark is the longest-living vertebrate known. Radiocarbon dating of one large individual put its age at about 392 years, though the method's own uncertainty range spans roughly 270 to over 500 years.

Nielsen et al., Science, 2016

Science

The story behind the card

A Danish-led team reported the result in the journal Science in 2016, after studying 28 Greenland sharks collected in Greenland waters. They radiocarbon-dated the core of each shark's eye lens, which forms before birth and never changes afterwards; radiocarbon dating measures how much of a slowly decaying form of carbon remains. The largest shark, about 5 metres long, came out at 392 years, with a range of roughly 272 to 512 years, so the study cannot say for sure whether it was alive in 1564, when Shakespeare was born. Greenland sharks live in the cold, deep waters of the North Atlantic and Arctic, grow about a centimetre a year or less and may not breed until around 150.

Türkçe oku
Grönland köpekbalığı, bilinen en uzun ömürlü omurgalıdır. Büyük bir köpekbalığının yaşı radyokarbon yöntemiyle yaklaşık 392 yıl olarak hesaplandı; ancak yöntemin payı geniştir ve gerçek yaş kabaca 270 ile 500 yılı aşkın bir aralıkta olabilir.
Nielsen ve ark., Science, 2016

Danimarkalı araştırmacıların öncülük ettiği bir ekip, Grönland sularında toplanan 28 köpekbalığını inceledikten sonra sonucu 2016'da Science dergisinde yayımladı. Ekip her köpekbalığının göz merceğinin çekirdeğini radyokarbon yöntemiyle tarihlendirdi. Bu çekirdek doğumdan önce oluşur ve sonra hiç değişmez; radyokarbon yöntemi de karbonun zamanla yavaşça bozunan bir türünden ne kadar kaldığını ölçer. Yaklaşık 5 metre boyundaki en büyük köpekbalığının yaşı 392 yıl çıktı, ama olası aralık kabaca 272 ile 512 yıldı. Bu yüzden çalışma, onun Shakespeare'in doğduğu 1564'te yaşayıp yaşamadığını kesin olarak söyleyemiyor. Grönland köpekbalıkları Kuzey Atlantik'in ve Arktik'in soğuk, derin sularında yaşar, yılda en fazla bir santimetre kadar büyür ve belki ancak 150 yaşlarında üreyebilir.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Greenland shark
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

StillnessLiterature

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Einstein said this to the American journalist George Sylvester Viereck, whose interview 'What Life Means to Einstein' appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on 26 October 1929. By then he was world famous: measurements made during the 1919 solar eclipse had confirmed his general theory of relativity, and he had won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. The line follows his remark that he was 'enough of an artist' to draw freely on his imagination. A similar passage appeared in his book Cosmic Religion in 1931.

Albert Einstein, The Saturday Evening Post interview (1929)Read card
WonderScience

Some Great Basin bristlecone pines in the western United States are more than 4,800 years old, older than Egypt's Great Pyramid of Giza.

The oldest known living one, nicknamed Methuselah, grows in the White Mountains of eastern California; counting its growth rings shows it is more than 4,850 years old, and its exact location is kept secret to protect it. The Great Pyramid was built around 2560 BCE, a few centuries after Methuselah sprouted. Bristlecones grow extremely slowly on thin, dry dolomite soil, a rock similar to limestone, where few other plants survive, which spares them competition and fire. Their dense, resin-filled wood resists insects, fungi and rot, and dead trees can stand for thousands of years. In 1964 a researcher in Nevada cut down one tree, later called Prometheus, and counted at least 4,862 rings, making it the oldest tree then known.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderScience

Many fig trees can be pollinated only by tiny fig wasps, which crawl inside the closed fig to reach the hundreds of flowers hidden within.

A fig is not a single fruit but a closed cluster of flowers, lined inside with tiny blossoms. A female fig wasp, only one or two millimetres long, pushes in through a narrow opening at the tip, often losing her wings, then pollinates the flowers, lays her eggs and dies inside. Her young hatch and mate within the fig, and the new females leave carrying pollen to another tree. Most fig species rely on their own wasp species, a partnership thought to be tens of millions of years old. In western Turkey, around Aydın, growers still hang branches of wild male figs in their orchards so the wasps can pollinate the Smyrna-type figs grown for drying; this is called caprification. Many common garden figs ripen with no wasp at all.

USDA Forest Service / Royal SocietyRead card
StillnessScience

Seagrass meadows cover only about 0.1% of the seafloor, yet they account for roughly a tenth of the carbon buried in ocean sediments. Seagrasses are flowering plants that grow underwater along coasts.

Unlike seaweeds, which are algae, seagrasses have roots, leaves and flowers, and they grow in shallow coastal water on every continent except Antarctica. Their leaves slow the current so fine particles settle, and their roots bind the seabed. Dead leaves and roots are buried in mud with little oxygen, where they rot very slowly, so their carbon can stay locked away for centuries. Carbon stored by coastal plants in this way is called blue carbon. In the Mediterranean, including the Turkish coast, Posidonia oceanica meadows build thick mats of roots and sediment over thousands of years. Since the late nineteenth century, more than a fifth of the world's known seagrass area has been lost to dredging, pollution and coastal building.

NOAARead card
StillnessScience

Kelp forests grow in cool coastal seas from giant brown algae, not plants, and shelter a great variety of fish, invertebrates, seals and sea otters.

Kelp are large brown algae. Instead of roots they have a grip-like base called a holdfast, and gas-filled bulbs hold their fronds up towards the light. Giant kelp can grow up to about 60 centimetres a day and reach more than 30 metres, forming a canopy at the surface like the treetops of a forest. Kelp forests grow along cool coasts from California and Chile to South Africa, Australia and Norway. In the North Pacific, sea otters help protect them by eating sea urchins, which graze on kelp. Where otters were hunted out for their fur, urchins multiplied and stripped forests down to bare rock, leaving what are called urchin barrens.

NOAA Ocean ServiceRead card
Next card in the archiveTurritopsis dohrnii, a jellyfish at most about 4.5 millimetres across, can turn back into a polyp, the early stage it grew from, when it is stressed, injured, sick or old. It then grows into new adults, restarting its life cycle.Read next →