Despite their size, and the fact that they are among the most fascinating animals on the planet, Greenland sharks are still largely a mystery. We are studying how they live so long, for example, but the most curious thing is what we still miss the foundations: to say one, we have no idea where they are born.
Now a study published on Ecology and Evolution At least partially raises the veil of mystery that covers the nursery of the sharks of Greenland – whose name, however, could be inaccurate.
very rare. Everything we know about the sharks of Greenland (not much) we learned it by observing adult specimens, or by studying the corpses of those dead because they are directly caught (their meat is the basis of an Icelandic specialty) or were trapped in the fishing networks. However, we miss the information on their youth stadiums: in 150 years of studies and observations, we saw only one pregnant female and only two babies; Also adding the teenage sharks you reach a total of 10 meetings in total.
This is because the sharks of Greenland live in the deep waters of the northern Atlantic, an immense and hostile habitat to us humans. The Natural History Museum of Denmark team has thus gone in search of all the meetings, volunteers or not, whether they were in some way registered, recovering from the archives also material never published or even private and not scientifically validated testimonies.
The shark in a haystack. The result of this research, the ocean equivalent of looking for a needle in a straw, focuses with a certain decision towards a very specific area: the Skagerrak, one of the two natural channels that separate Denmark from the rest of Scandinavia (the other is Kattegat). Other observations position some babies around the middle ridge of Atlantic, south of Iceland, but the Skagerrak is the main candidate for Nursery for the sharks of Greenland: the waters off Denmark are very deep, and therefore less disturbed by fishing, a speech that can also be made for the middle ridge of the Atlantic.
To be protected. In short, even if we have not yet laid our eyes (or the lens of some underwater camera) on the Nursery of the Sharks of Greenland, the probability that is off the coast of Denmark is very high: at this point the irony of the name of the animal will not escape you, which apparently is not “of Greenland” …
But apart from these details, the discovery is fundamental: Greenland sharks are considered vulnerable, and knowing where they give birth to their puppies is an important first step to protect them and the area of their nursery.