Slowly swimming through the freezing waters of the North Atlantic around Canada and northern Europe, Greenland sharks are peculiar cigar or sausage shaped animals that live their lives largely in the dark, not just because of their environment, but also from copepods, small crustaceans that attach to their eyes and make them blind, not that it matters too much to the sharks, given they can still get around well through both their smell and hearing.

This slow and methodical lifestyle, where they most scavenge in the cold environments they inhabit, has led them to have a very slow growth rate, along with gestation periods. Growing at a rate of about 0.51 cm a year, and in some cases having a pregnancy of about 10 pups lasting a good 18 years, it was evident for a good while that these animals were quite longlived, though the extent was for a long while hard to pin down. That was until we looked at the effects that nukes had on their environment... I hope you enjoy this year's Shark Week!

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Sources:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenla...

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