One Constant in the Stormy Seas: The Greenland Shark
(Little Green Notebook)
My brother delighted in tormenting me. He’d hide under my bed and grab my leg when I was about to fall asleep; he’d sneak outside and jump up at my window; he pretended to see ghosts just over my shoulder.
Then, on June 20, 1975, he added a new item to his repertoire. Just two syllables uttered a half step apart sent me into fits and twists of fear, especially if I was swimming.
Dun DUN.
Oh, the horror!
I was not alone. A whole generation pulled our feet out of the ocean and ran to the safety of the sand at the sound of those two notes. We still do, united over a fictional shark’s maniacal aggression.
This week, on the fiftieth anniversary of Jaws, I’m hearing those notes in my head over and over as I read about sharks.
While the infamous shark in Jaws was a great white, it’s another that’s swimming around in my brain today, the Greenland shark. I am wondering how it is that I’ve gone this whole sixty-one year life of mine without paying more attention to this Methuselah-esque leviathan. Because now that we’ve met, I’m a little in love. Take that, Jaws!
Greenland sharks are enormous, even larger than the great white sharks who get so much attention. As opposed to the speedy white sharks, however, Greenland sharks lumber along in the deepest depths of their frigid sea homes at less than one mile per hour. Greenland sharks are characterized as “sleeper sharks,” their metabolism is so slow. With poor vision, they’re unbothered by the ribbon-like parasitic critters permanently attached to their eyelids whose function is unknown. It’s difficult to study a twenty-four-foot shark lurking 7, 200 feet below the sea in waters that hover around freezing temperatures.
Jaws could never have been written about a Greenland shark; they don’t attack people. Though one urban legend claims a human leg was found inside the body of a Greenland shark, it’s unsupported. Items which have been found in the bellies of these beasts include parts of horses, polar bears, and moose. These animals were likely dead before they were consumed. As nonaggressive, opportunistic eaters, Greenlands scavenge as well as hunt slow or slumbering prey.
All that’s good and well but now let’s be astonished. As the longest-lived vertebrate, Greenland sharks have a lifespan of about four hundred years, give or take a hundred.
Imagine a baby Greenland shark born back when Alabama flourished under the Mississippians, before Hernando de Soto showed up and destroyed Chief Tuskaloosa’s village. A hundred years later, about the time the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Creeks arose, this shark came into its sexual maturity. It swam the Arctic seas, giving birth to a litter of pups every few decades, never complaining about her eight-to-eighteen-year pregnancy. Our shark tasted the tea tossed in the American Revolution, the desperate tears shed on the Trail of Tears, the moonshine wasted during the Great Depression, and the floodwaters that raged after the recent Hurricane Helene.
That shark’s lifespan covers twelve to fifteen human generations, a distance that feels too long ago to comprehend. I have a great-great grandmother who kept a diary during the Civil War as a teenager. Even while reading her personal accounts of the Yankee occupation of her town, she feels a world away, and we’re just four generations apart.
Just think, all along, there’s a shark who was alive when my great-great grandmother was alive, who will still be alive when my own grandchildren are great-great-grandparents and I’m long gone. The existence of this anonymous Greenland shark connects me to this wide, wild world, to our chaotic past and our uncertain future, in a way that satisfies my distracted and busy brain. This shark is a balm against anxiety.
Now imagine a Greenland shark pup born today, one of ten in its litter, growing up and living out its quiet, slow life. Try to imagine the world it will inhabit. Impossible. The most mundane details of our lives today were as inconceivable to the Mississippians as those of the people living five hundred years in the future are to us now. A shark born today might well be there, however, a constant in a sea of change.
We cannot foresee what effects our human demands will have on the Arctic seas five hundred years from now. We cannot envision how our progeny will live. We cannot presume to know how transportation will work, what social structures will hold humanity together, what forces will topple the systems we have in place today. What we do know is that all great civilizations rise and fall.
How mysterious and wonderous is the Greenland shark, unchanged for the last four hundred million years, a silent witness to the triumphs and disasters of all mankind.
As we celebrate the 1975 summer blockbuster that connected a generation in a way we seldom connect these days, I raise a glass to the sleeper sharks who lay low beneath our tumultuous waves.
