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

bbc.com

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

#81

Post by dredmorbius »

frutiger wrote: post #60
eggsmediumrare wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than made it warmer and more acidic, added a bunch of plastic garbage and removed a significant percentage of its inhabitants, yeah I guess not much.

> removed a significant percentage of its inhabitants I was actually curious if anyone could help answer the following: (a) how one would define inhabitant (including bacteria?) (b) what the net %age change actually would be given a suitable choice of (a)

Most studies tend to look at biomass, either on a single-species or multi-species basis.

Humans have displaced over 90% of all terrestrial vertebrate biomass (land animals with a backbone).

http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Terrestr...

Most of the human + livestock biomass is utterly dependent on Haber-Bosch process derived nitrogen fertiliser, produced via nonrenewable natural gas (methane, a fossil fuel).

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

#82

Post by dredmorbius »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #46

When I went to Alska, it was fascinating to learn that all these small trees where actually hundreds of years old. The cold makes them grow very slowly.

White Mountains and the bristlecone pines similarly.

Trees ~20-40' high (~6-12m) are ~10,000 years old.

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

#83

Post by wonderwonder »

IgorPartola wrote: post #70
Zenst wrote: 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 honestly think the only way we are going to solve this is with Genetic engineering and manufacturing on a global scale. We need to create self sustaining food sources that provide enough of our needs to allow natural resources especially the ocean time to heal and replenish itself. Things like the AquAdvantage salmon, lab grown meat on a massive scale and a massive marketing campaign to quash the anti-gmo mindset that is making the world hesitate to go all in.

We are not going to heal the planet by everyone consuming less or driving less or any of the million things that they encourage you to do to save it. Science is going to be the only solution as the pandemic has proven that people really are not going to make choices that inconvenience them, we need to provide alternatives that are just as enticing but are also financially attractive. In addition, even if we convinced everyone to cut their consumption of everything by 25%, so what; in a few years there will be more people rendering that 25% savings moot. Science is the only way.

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

#84

Post by wonderwonder »

grawprog wrote: post #11
fastball wrote: 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…

Heartrate has been found to play a big part. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9316546/ Animals with slower heart rates tend to be longer lived. An interesting sidenote are bats, which have heart rates about the same as similarly sized small mammals like mice, but due to their nightly torpor state where their heart rate is significantly lowered, they tend to live 20-25 years opposed to the 3-4 mice usually live.

I have read a few studies saying that periodic fasting / starvation can play a role as well.

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

#85

Post by obmelvin »

IgorPartola wrote: post #78
Zenst wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I understand where you are coming from and am not trying to suggest that these smaller actions are enough, you should keep looking for more, but still the smaller choices you make do add up.

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

#86

Post by pbhjpbhj »

nabla9 wrote: post #33
rahimiali wrote: post #32

"The sharks' livers were once used for machine oil, and they were killed in great numbers before a synthetic alternative was found and the demand fell" Fascinating that the fate of these sharks depended on a completely unrelated technological advance.

Whales were killed huge numbers for whale oil during the industrial revolution. The oil was oil lamps and to make soap. (over 10-20 million gallons per year during the peak)

I thought whale oil was also used in something car related, transmissions/differentials?

Yeah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_oil#Applications, up until 1972 in USA, apparently.

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

#87

Post by practicalpants »

aloer wrote: post #42
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #2

> The team looked at 28 sharks, most of which had died after being caught in fishing nets as by-catch. Nice job- the shark had done just fine for ~400 years.

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 already know it doesn't bring up China's global fishing flotillas, who overfished China so roam the world stripping other coastlines, even protected areas like the Galapagos. One of the top reason for overfishing today. Or does it talk about this?

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

#88

Post by kaba0 »

opportune wrote: post #57
aloer wrote: 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 was just reading the wikipedia article for ocean sunfish the other day, and apparently they can be up to 90% of the total catch for what are ostensibly swordfish-catching operations in the Mediterranean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_sunfish#Human_interactio... .

I just remembered this rant:

https://old.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/5shm1r/why_i_hate_the...

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

#89

Post by simonebrunozzi »

kaba0 wrote: post #88
opportune wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just reading the wikipedia article for ocean sunfish the other day, and apparently they can be up to 90% of the total catch for what are ostensibly swordfish-catching operations in the Mediterranean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_sunfish#Human_interactio... .

I just remembered this rant: https://old.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/5shm1r/why_i_hate_the...

Thanks for posting the link to the "old" Reddit, by the way. It should be default on HN in my view.
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