A lot of people are taking time in this strange year to make changes to eat better, get more exercise and otherwise take better care of themselves, so they can stick around a while longer.
It may be worth taking some tips from the Greenland shark, aka the sleeper shark.
Scientists now estimate these creatures can live for up to four hundred years.
That’s a record for vertebrates.
For comparison, the previous recordholder was a whale species that could live up to 211 years, which is still not bad!
We don’t know yet why these sharks can last as long as they do, but there’s a theory that because they live in extremely cold waters, they have some kind of anti-aging qualities.
One thing we do know is that they play it cool.
While they can grow to be up to 24 feet long and weigh more than a ton, they grow very, very slowly, often less than an inch a year.
They move less than a mile an hour, though they can speed up when hunting.
And, amazingly, they don’t become fully mature until they’re around 150, so their biological clocks aren’t exactly racing.
Scientists are studying all of this and more, to see what it is that gives them such longevity and whether any of it might help humans live longer and stay healthier.
Maybe they should also work on some kind of translation device, so we could ask one of the really old sharks what it’s like to be older than Isaac Newton and Catherine the Great.
And the wide, wide sea got more accessible, thanks to British artist Sue Austin and her underwater wheelchair.
It’s propelled through the water by a set of propellers and aerofoils, making it a pretty fancy way to get around down there!
A Greenland Shark Living Today Could Have Been Alive in 1620 (HowStuffWorks)
A Specially Adapted Underwater Wheelchair Brings Artist Sue Austin Beneath the Earth’s Surface (Colossal)
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Photo by Hemming1952 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikicommons
