The Greenland Shark is probably one of the
most bizarre creatures on the planet.
It is actually a deep-water shark and it is
prehistoric.
It has an extra gill slit than the modern
day shark so it comes form another era.
It lives at thousands of feet, on the bottom,
so very few people know about it.
The scientists tell you that it is probably
one of the largest populations of sharks on
the planet because there is no real commercial
fishery on it and they live so deep so nobody
really comes in contact with them.
The Greenland shark is known to live up to
200 years old, so imagine if they could talk!
What knowledge they would have.
The other bizarre thing is there is these
parasitic worms that actually somehow find
the shark in the water column, grab onto the
tail and then, like mount Everest, they hike
up and down these scales all the way to the
eyeball of the shark and then they latch onto
it and they spend their entire lives on the
eye and they feed of the tissue of the eye.
This renders the shark blind however the shark
does not need to really see in order to feed
cause it lives in dark deep waters anyhow
and it has an incredible sense of smell and
that's how it can find its prey and probably
also has the ability to pick up on vibrations.
The Greenland shark in my opinion wasn't that
dangerous.
He was very docile, kind of swam around slowly.
Scientist and the Inuit have found, in their
stomach, seals so there is this idea that
they somehow can hunt a seal.
Their mouths are more like a nurse shark.
The teeth are made for crunching bottom creatures
so they probably don't go after big prey but
if they can get their mouth around a seal
they actually have an extended jaw that comes
out and it locks on and then they do this
flipping action.
They will roll like an alligator rolls and
they roll left, they roll right, they roll
left, until they grab a piece out of the animal.
So for a human we did not feel endangered
because it was not biting us, it was just
kind of swimming by.
It is just a fabulous piece of the puzzle
and the arctic ecosystem and exciting that
we can swim with it, find one and document
it.
