Greenland Shark Dreams

How a 400-year old fish cures my insomnia

(photo: National Geographic)

About a decade ago, a fishing trawler in the Arctic Ocean snagged a Greenland shark in its nets. By the time it was dragged aboard, the creature had died. It was an unglamorous end to a life that later radiocarbon analysis of the shark’s eyeball concluded had been over 400 years. This blunt, scarred, slow behemoth had been swimming in the dark, under the icepack, since the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, and the passenger pigeon were still alive, since the Age of Sail, since Shakespeare was still writing, and before America had a name. It simply swam, and ate rotting whale carcasses, and occasionally mated. And then it died as mere bycatch in a net.

Sharks cannot stop swimming. They need water constantly flowing across their gills to breathe. They never sleep. That Greenland shark was awake, swimming in the dark and the cold for 400 years, growing only a centimeter per year, only reaching maturity after a century and a half. It was oblivious to the concerns of the world of sunlight and trees, and governments, of the wars we make, the love we forge and lose, the trust we gain and betray, the money we make, the things we wear, all the things we find so important.