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400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

bbc.com

71–80 of 113 posts

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#71
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not powerless - ethical buying, if everybody did that then things would change as companies run on money, so vote with your wallet. Effort to research and may find in some area's it's down to picking the best of a bad choice, but little by little mindsets are changing and you do have the power. Business runs on money - vote with your wallet as that is your power, use it, don't loose it.

That’s a nice thought and I’ve tried that before but the “if everybody did that” is the key. I can bend over backwards to only buy local organic food just to have the farm driven out of business by a Walmart Super Center and watch as a new mega container ship, new mega mall, new mega church gets built. I don’t think I spend nearly enough money on retail stuff that would actually tip the scales or even make anyone not…

> I spend nearly enough money on retail stuff that would actually tip the scales or even make anyone notice that I stopped shopping at the “unethical” stores.

As an individual - indeed that is probably so, but you do get to feel less helpless and gets down too a balance of moral dilemma and feeling helpless.

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#72
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related: there’s a new documentary on Netflix called Seaspiracy It has some staggering numbers regarding the amount of by-catch caught every day

I saw the preview for this last night and on the one hand I want to watch it because I feel that it’s important to know this stuff, but on the other hand I really just want to bury my head in the sand. Over the past year I’ve realized just how much we are killing the planet and how powerless I am so do anything at all about it and it’s depressing me every time I think about it and not in a figurative sense.

>how powerless I am so do anything at all about it

Don't eat seafood. The more that don't, the less fishing humanity will do.

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#74

So... One individual out of 28 is known to be 400 years old. There is a subadult population bulge. Any way of estimating natural life spans from this? Could be some very, very old sharks out there. I wonder how big the 400yr old one is, relative to max known size.

You’d need to know the probability of death as a function of chronological age.

If the probability is constant, you can model the lifespan as an exponential decay - there is no real upper limit, but the population of older individuals is very small.

For most animals the probability increases as they age, and becomes very high towards the end of their life, but this is not the case for all animals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw the preview for this last night and on the one hand I want to watch it because I feel that it’s important to know this stuff, but on the other hand I really just want to bury my head in the sand. Over the past year I’ve realized just how much we are killing the planet and how powerless I am so do anything at all about it and it’s depressing me every time I think about it and not in a figurative sense.

>how powerless I am so do anything at all about it Don't eat seafood. The more that don't, the less fishing humanity will do.

Your not going to ever convince enough people to stop eating seafoood. Goverment needs to regulate better and ban imports that can’t prove they don’t have excessive by catch

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#76
post #21
post #3

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…

By far the most important reason dictating lifespan is evolvability - the ability to adapt genetically [0]. 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…

To counter this a little, there is a jelly fish Turritopsis Dohrnii which is biological immortal. Those jelly fish and sponges (which can get very old too) are very, very old/successful species.

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#77
post #6
post #3

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…

> confirmation bias .. Wouldn't that be more an example of the Baader Meinhof effect?

Plot twist, OP was referring to personified Google Home having a confirmation bias due to meme-science article proliferation?

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#78
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a nice thought and I’ve tried that before but the “if everybody did that” is the key. I can bend over backwards to only buy local organic food just to have the farm driven out of business by a Walmart Super Center and watch as a new mega container ship, new mega mall, new mega church gets built. I don’t think I spend nearly enough money on retail stuff that would actually tip the scales or even make anyone not…

> I spend nearly enough money on retail stuff that would actually tip the scales or even make anyone notice that I stopped shopping at the “unethical” stores. As an individual - indeed that is probably so, but you do get to feel less helpless and gets down too a balance of moral dilemma and feeling helpless.

I don’t want to just feel good about my actions though. I want to effect actual change. Trying to find an avenue for that, I guess.

Re: 400-year-old Greenland shark ‘longest-living vertebrate’ (2016)

#80
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming this is true, I recommend everyone start running! If I am regularly running, my resting heart rate at night drops into the upper 30s. During the day sitting down, 45-50. If I haven't been running (for a week or longer) it picks back up in to the mid 40s at night, and around 60 for normal sitting.

Welp... guess I'll die young. My heart rate when sleeping is 65bpm, and I can't focus on anuthing if my heart rate is below 90bpm during the day.

For what it's worth - I'm a firm believer that what is always healthy for your body, is not always healthy for your mind.

Some of the most productive people I know eat nothing but donuts and coffee, and don't exercise at all. They're smart, driven, and highly successful.

Meanwhile, I know a lot of people who put exercise and food as a priority, and don't seem nearly as sharp or as successful. Maybe this all washes out, with age.

Point is - do whatever works for you. Don't let some blog, or some person on the internet, tell you how to perform optimally!

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