Confirmation bias is a creepy thing sometimes. I was literally asking my Google Home last night what the longest living vertebrate was and it told me the Greenland shark. Had a whole conversation about it over dinner, arguing about how accurate we think these age-establishing methods are. Though the more interesting part of our conversation (I would say) was wondering how ages work out in practice. For example why do…
This has so great effect that it's easy to observe even in a simple computer simulations. If you don't adapt and the environment is changing, then you go extinct.
Think about this sharks and how much their environment has changed since they were born. As a spices they will have a very hard time adapting to the changes we induce in the environment. While small animals that have lifespan in weeks, months or few years will be adapting a lot faster. E.g. in one generation of this shark a mouse will go trough up to 900 generations with up to 12 offspring in each generation.
This shark probably will go extinct and mice will thrive.
Interesting consequence of this effect is that our lifespan is most likely not dictated by any fundamental limitations of biological machinery to maintain us healthy indefinitely.
A lot more likely is that we are evolutionary designed to get old and die.