The lives of most sharks remain cloaked in mystery, and the Greenland shark is no exception—but what we’ve learned recently is extraordinary.
Over the past few decades, scientists have discovered that these ancient Arctic animals can live upwards of 400 years and are often blind due to a parasite that attaches itself to their corneas. While they mainly feed on fish and squid, they have been known to scavenge the carcasses of mammals such as horses, reindeer, and even polar bears.
The latest surprise came when scientists spotted a Greenland shark in the western Caribbean, thousands of miles from its known range, in spring 2022. Although scientists have learned to expect the unexpected when it comes to these sharks, the sighting still came as a shock.
“It was both surprising and exciting,” says Devanshi Kasana, a doctoral candidate at Florida International University who, along with a crew of Belizean fishermen, caught the shark by accident during a tiger-shark tagging expedition. Their finding was announced in July in the journal Marine Biology.
