There’s a term for where I’ve been for the past few months. I’ve been down the rabbit hole with the marine-animal research, wandering blissfully through the warren, finding all sorts of fascinating side tunnels. I am now a diehard fan of cetacean documentaries, and I’ve been scoping out whale watches. There’s a very nice one that sails (literally; it’s a sailing yacht) from San Diego.
Meanwhile I follow a whole bunch of research feeds. Orca research, dolphin research, shark research. Marine biologists and oceanographers. Videos and podcasts and documentaries. Researchgasms wherever I turn.
One of my sources for the article on Greenland sharks is a Canadian documentary that follows a series of expeditions from around 1996 to 2003. Dr. Chris Harvey Clark of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia teamed up with professional diver Jeffrey Gallant to answer a question that had obsessed Clark since he was twelve years old, when he read a newspaper article that depicted an ice fisherman with his unexpected catch: a pair of Greenland sharks.
The fisherman’s hole in the ice wasn’t anywhere near Greenland. It was 3000 kilometers (1800 miles) away on a tributary of the St. Lawrence River. Says Clark, “Looking for Greenland sharks in Canada has been like looking for Bigfoot. It’s a bit like cryptozoology in that we started with nothing. There was really no literature on these animals.” What there was was local legend in a remote part of Quebec, “in the heart of French Canada” as the narrator tells us.
In 1995 when Clark and Gallant first met at a conference, and in the early years of the twenty-first century when they began their search, little was known about this rare and elusive species of shark. They focused on a deep fjord at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, where fresh water and salt water mix in powerful tides. It’s tremendously rich in nutrients, and full of a wide variety of aquatic life.
Both arctic and antarctic waters are teeming with creatures of all sizes. You might think that such water would be too cold to support life, but these regions are some of the richest in the world. Giants congregate there: Walruses and elephant seals. Cetaceans including the humpback and the sperm whale. And Greenland sharks.
Clark and Gallant began what they called a grassroots expedition. Gallant traveled around the area and talked to people. They wanted to know why and where this particular species of shark had shown up in the fjord.
Legends of huge sharks went all the way back to the sixteenth century. One interviewee said, “It has almost become a mythical creature, a mascot of sorts for the people. The Greenland shark may be our own Loch Ness monster.”
This isn’t a cryptid. It’s a real, scientifically attested, actual animal. But Clark and Gallant were determined to find it in this particular region. As far as anyone knew at the time, it was only known to exist in the waters around Greenland.
Their expedition, and the documentary based on it, is a great example of the challenges of field research in marine biology. You have to go where the subject of your study goes. Deep-sea species live in an environment that’s actively inimical to human life.
It’s tough enough to mount an expedition in the tropics or in the temperate zone, but the arctic is a whole other level of difficulty. Prime fishing season there is in the winter. According to the documentary, ice fishermen have pulled up dozens of sharks out of that specific fjord since the mid-twentieth century.
We get to see one such episode, a homemade video from 1995. It took five men to pull a shark out of their fishing hole, and they had to widen it to make room for the fish. It’s clearly a Greenland shark: that big pointy nose is unmistakable, and the fish is noticeably larger than the men pulling it in. They were not fishing for any such thing, but there it was.
In 1996, five sharks were caught in a huge ice-fishing camp on the fjord. That’s a lot of sharks for a species that’s supposedly extremely rare. But as Clark says, it’s not like animals on land. Things underwater are invisible. People don’t know they’re there.
Clark and Gallant knew there were sharks in those waters, but they weren’t planning to fish for them. They wanted to observe the animal in its native environment. That meant diving, in the winter, under the ice.
Their experiment began with a hole in the two-foot-thick ice, a large supply of bait, and a metal cage. They hoped not to need the cage, but had it in reserve, just in case.
The weather was terrible, Clark says. Cold enough to shatter plastic. Total darkness under the ice, and only one exit. They had no idea what to expect, or what they would find. The shark itself was virtually unknown to science at that time; it had never been studied in the wild.
I wondered why they didn’t send a remote camera under the ice, at least to scope out the area. Didn’t have one? Wanted a truly hands-on experience?
Whatever their reasoning, the first season yielded nothing. They did learn quite a bit about the ecosystem of the area, but they didn’t find any sharks. The next year they went back, but again, nothing. “Frozen, frustrated, and out of money, it was back to the drawing board.”
Their fruitless search continued for over five years. But they were determined to dive with the Greenland shark in the Saguenay Peninsula. They wanted to believe. They were as dedicated as any cryptid hunters.
Then, in 2003, Gallant had an email from someone in the area who had observed “a large fish.” Divers on social media were seeing “a very big fish” near the town of Baie Comeau. Gallant and Clark packed up and headed north yet again—but this time during warmer weather.
Local divers confirmed the presence of a huge fish, but conditions were the diametrical opposite of the ones Clark and Gallant had been diving in before. It was June, and the water was relatively shallow. But spring that year had come late; the water was still unseasonably cold. An unusually large run of bait fish had congregated in a secluded bay. That would explain why a Greenland shark might be there.
And it was.
Literally as soon as Gallant got in the water, he saw it. “This massive thing [came] out of nowhere, coming straight for us.”
It was huge. Mottled skin, heavy body, swimming calmly along—the first pictures ever taken of a Greenland shark swimming freely in the wild. “It was a scientific coup and a personal victory.”
Clark wasn’t there for it. He was still en route. But the next day, like Gallant, he saw a shark as soon as he hit the water. It was the most amazing feeling in the world. “It’s like finally you’ve seen Bigfoot. You’ve found the secret graveyard of the elephants. You’ve found the thing you’ve looked for for years.”
It was more than just a thrilling experience. The scientific rewards were immense. Just for starters: Clark’s shark was not blind. Its eyes were clear. It wasn’t afflicted with the parasite.
They did not know how it would react to being followed around by humans with cameras. They were diving without a cage, without a clear sense of the animal’s temperament, whether it was dangerous, if it would turn on them.
Clark had found a two-and-half-meter male. Gallant the day before had encountered a female. The male swims faster than Gallant’s female, and it’s keeping a literal sharp eye on the humans.
Up to that point, scientific consensus had been that these are not visual predators. The parasite they were all presumed to be infected with had forced them to rely on their sense of smell. But these sharks weren’t acting like blind scavengers at all. They were quick and agile; Clark clocked the male at 1.4 meters per second, which is faster than a human can swim.
Just when Clark and Gallant were almost out of air, a second shark joined the first. After years of nothing at all, they were seeing multiples: this time, a three-meter female. When they had recharged their tanks and gone back again, Gallant ventured to touch her—and she let him know, in shark, Don’t. She lowered her pectoral fins and bent her nose downward.
Gallant speculates that she read him as a fellow shark. Greenland sharks, like other sharks, will eat each other, and there’s no other predator in those waters that can take them on.
Clark notes that she does not like it when one of them is directly behind her. Her tail is frayed, most likely from nipping by other sharks. It might be how a male approaches a female.
He also notices that the male is missing one of his two sexual organs, the claspers that allow him to hold on to a female during breeding. This indicates that shark courtship could be just a little bit wild.
There are still numerous questions to be answered. Is this is predator or a scavenger? What does it mean when a Greenland shark comes up behind you? Is she seeing you as a threat, or as dinner? Does she live here year-round, or is she migratory? How old can she get? What is her life cycle?
Some of these questions have been answered in whole or in part since, but these first observations were groundbreaking. If there’s a word that describes the whole experience, it’s “unexpected.” Unexpected catch for ice fishermen, unexpected location and environment for the sharks the seekers finally find, and unexpected discoveries. What I didn’t expect was beauty. These are gorgeous fish. Huge and healthy and very much aware of the humans swimming alongside them. And they’ll still be swimming, barring accident or injury, long after all of us are gone.
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