Posted on 01/17/2007 10:09:28 PM PST by FLOutdoorsman
NATURE I A UBC scientist who first spotted the huge shark in its natural environment is now trying to solve its mysteries
Scotland has its Loch Ness monster and B.C. its Ogopogo. But for the people of Quebec -- both native and non-native -- there was always a shark.
A big shark. A dangerous shark. A shark that lurked under the ice in the darkest waters imaginable. Stories of it were rare and intermittent, but constant, too. People always claimed to have known someone who had caught one once.
But it took a scientist from B.C. to finally track it down.
Except at the time, Chris Harvey-Clark, a zoologist/veterinarian who now runs the University of B.C.'s Animal Care Centre, was working out of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.
It was 2003, and Harvey-Clark and his close friend, Jeffrey Gallant, a Quebec schoolteacher with a passion for sharks almost as visceral as his, finally saw it. The Greenland shark -- at up to 1,100 kilograms, the biggest shark in the North Atlantic and, after the Great White, the second largest on the planet -- and there it was, right under their noses.
Actually, they had to dive to see it -- in a comparatively shallow bay along the St. Lawrence River near where it ceases to be a river and becomes a gulf instead. It was May, comparatively warm -- at least by Arctic shark standards -- and clear enough.
And it was there -- at last, says Harvey-Clark. "It was the first time anyone had seen one of these animals in natural circumstances."
It was a Holy Grail experience, he recalls -- the culmination of an abiding fascination with big dangerous fish that began a generation earlier when as an Ottawa teenager he saw a newspaper photo of an ice fisherman who appeared to have caught a shark. Because it was from that moment on, to use the obvious piscine metaphor, that he was hooked.
A lot has changed since 2003. Harvey-Clark has left Dalhousie and moved across a continent to UBC to take up new professional duties. What hasn't changed is his fascination for the shark.
Each year he finds both the time and the money -- all his research has been funded out of his own pocket -- to go diving with Gallant again and again to keep studying a shark about which almost nothing was known before they cared enough to learn about it.
And what they've learned is that Greenland sharks may be good hunters as well as scavengers. They've learned, too, that almost all of them are blind, thanks to infections from sea-dwelling parasites. (Not that it matters when they live most of their lives at the bottom of the sea where there's no light anyway.)
And they've learned that year after year, they keep coming back to that bay near Baie-Comeau where they . . . well, that's still a bit of a mystery.
Because the thing about Greenland sharks, says Harvey-Clark, is that they shouldn't be there at all. Why would a fish that spends most of its time in near-freezing unfathomably deep water under swaths of Arctic ice, make its way to shallow water that is sometimes as warm as 12 degrees Celsius?
If only he knew.
"It's an enigma," he says. "Why are these animals here at this time?"
So he, Gallant and a team of dedicated volunteers they've engaged to patrol the waters of Baie-Comeau when they can't be there, have made it their mission to find out.
In the meantime, here are some things they do know about the Greenland shark:
- It can live more than 200 years, making it the longest-living vertebrate on the planet.
- It can be more than seven metres long and weigh more than 1,100 kilograms.
- It's an opportunistic predator that will eat almost anything that comes in its path -- dead or alive -- using the 102 very sharp teeth in its mouth.
- Its flesh is toxic and eating it can even lead to death.
Of course, there is much more to learn, but Harvey-Clark has set out to be the man who learns it. He is like the 21st-century version of the 19th-century explorer who saw his first elephant.
Because science doesn't really work this way any more. Now it's all about quarks and genomes and an unpredictable climate.
Or as Harvey-Clark puts it: "It's rare that a couple of guys with diving gear and a couple of cameras can make a major discovery like this."
Kinda Crypto ping.
sweet!
Need a photo and links to more info!
Saw a writeup on this shark in National Geographic a year or three ago. Pics too.
Wow.
Well, that's a new twist on "jumping the shark"...
Wrong. Haven't they heard of whale sharks in Canada?
I thought that at first, but the way the coma is used, the implication is that the Great White is the Second Largest one.
Mr.Burgess is truly a nitwit. Makes it sound like the captain murdered a 1500 lb. homeless guy at the soup kitchen.
Well, the prepositional phrase “after the Great White” is delimited by commas before and after. Without it, we have “The Greenland shark -- at up to 1,100 kilograms, the biggest shark in the North Atlantic and the second largest on the planet”, which seems to be in line with the recorded length / weight of caught sharks.
However, having “after the Great White” in there clearly is saying that the Great White is the largest on the planet. It's not (that's the whale shark). It's not even the second-largest (that's the Greenland shark).
I think the author just goofed; he should have written “after the Whale Shark” as the prepositional phrase inside the commas.
Thanks for posting such an interesting article.
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Note: this topic is dated 1/17/2007. |
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Bad link.
all his research has been funded out of his own pocket
The whale shark can become much larger than the great white.
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