Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

https://phys.org/news/2026-01-eye-greenland-sharks-vision-centuries.html

240•pseudolus•4d ago

Comments

chatmasta•16h ago

Sharks are so cool, man. They’ve just been chilling on the planet for 400 million years, swimming the oceans while epochs passed them by in their periphery. Their entire biology is pretty much unchanged. They’ve been sharks the whole time.

zaken•16h ago

Sharks are older than trees

colechristensen•15h ago

And the north star, Polaris, is a fraction the age of sharks at only 50-70 Mya (it's a trinary star system but the other two stars are much dimmer and not visible to the eye)

echelon•13h ago

I love this fact.

Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.

baxtr•11h ago

I think there is a theory that we’re not seeing any aliens simply because life on Earth started so early.

ssl-3•11h ago

Or there are many planets with life, with each harboring their own equivalent to our sharks.

(And none of those shark-equivalents have developed a space program.)

baxtr•11h ago

That would be unfortunate.

I’d love to see some space sharks!

ssl-3•10h ago

We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them.

We're pretty good at accomplishing things like that.

One day, there's some space sharks swimming in a sea of liquid helium and doing deep dives to get to the smaller creatures that devour the seabed of diamonds.

The next day, we're figuring out how to use space shark squeezings in our fusion reactors.

Unless, of course, the space sharks figure out how to kill us first. They will probably try if that's useful to then.

It's the circle of life.

JumpCrisscross•1h ago

> We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them

There is a credible argument that what the literature terms genocidal tendencies—where conflict isn’t resolved when it ends, but when the enemy is destroyed—is a precondition for conquering a world. So if we met space sharks, barring enlightenment, they’d probably seek to destroy us, too.

computerex•9h ago

There is life, then intelligent life like humans. Plus you have physical constraints like the speed of light.

alex1138•2h ago

I would love a "chatty" universe like Mass Effect but the problem is we'd probably be fighting Reapers

readthenotes1•2h ago

Light is slower in water. I think that explains why we are still waiting

BurningFrog•1h ago

I think this is clearer:

Since we're not seeing any aliens, life on Earth must have started very early.

simmerup•55m ago

It’s more inaccurate as it’s stating an assumption as fact

Ericson2314•4h ago

Yes I love it too, wish more people appreciated it

yread•2h ago

That's not that early, no? There was probably enough C, H, N, O, P, S, Na atoms for life to start 10B years ago. You probably couldnt rely on iron being everywhere though but that's not such a hard requirement.

gusgus01•11h ago

Another Fun Fact: the Appalachian mountains formed before sharks existed, the rings of Saturn existed, and before bones existed.

sethammons•11h ago

I think you misstated your fun fact

abc123abc123•10h ago

...but younger than the mountains. There you go!

readthenotes1•2h ago

ICYMI: https://youtu.be/IUmnTfsY3hI?si=WuUcwv_LLYh8gX4u

Good call, abc123

nine_k•14h ago

They've found a local optimum, and stay in it. There's no easy way out anyway.

echelon•13h ago

> There's no easy way out anyway.

Evolution always finds new nooks and crannies of state space to explore.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndbw7SQMCcQ

odyssey7•12h ago

Yes, but maybe not from one specific lineage. E.g., extinction really is the end of the line for some species.

maxbond•12h ago

Not always, species go extinct all the time. Evolution can get stuck in local optima. Consider the whiptail lizard, which has lost the ability to reproduce sexually. Will they be able to adapt to future changes of the environment? Maybe, but the chips are stacked against them.

yetihehe•10h ago

No one said that those nooks are not deadly. But evolution will explore them just in case.

computerex•9h ago

Evolution doesn’t explore anything, mutations are random, selection pressure causes beneficial traits to become more common overtime.

yetihehe•8h ago

Yes, but those mutations are part of why evolution works. Through random mutations, every possible way of doing something is explored. If something is beneficial, organisms thrive. If it's not beneficial, organisms die. The same is for whole species. If a species was using some niche to their advantage and the niche disappeared, the species will die. But that niche (nook) was explored.

esafak•6h ago

That's what exploration looks like; mutation plus selection. I think you know this but consider exploration willful, perhaps?

RaftPeople•2h ago

> mutations are random

Kind of. Mutation rate of our dna is "managed" by the dna/chromosomes/genes to reduce the rate in critical areas.

kruuuder•1h ago

Wow what an interesting animal, haven't heard about it before.

> the chips are stacked against them.

Wikipedia says: "This reproductive method enables the asexual desert grassland whiptail lizard to have a genetic diversity previously thought to have been unique to sexually reproductive species."

Doesn't look to bad?

pelagicAustral•9h ago

Sounds like working for government.

barrenko•9h ago

> queue the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club song

Fnoord•11h ago

When they lose a tooth, they just grow a new one. How conveniently cool!

starkeeper•16h ago

This is so messed up harvesting the eye from a creature that lives hundreds of years. I guess they put the shark down. RIP one eye.

dlahoda•15h ago

is future possible cure for humans worth one shark eye?

how many fish, water mammals and may be humans shark killed for hundred years? did shark thought about their eyes?*

*except in sence that eyeballs are very delicios

seszett•13h ago

Greenland sharks don't kill humans, they're not more "responsible" for what white sharks do than you as a mammal are responsible for tigers killing their prey.

ulrikrasmussen•15h ago

I would agree, but then I read the Wikipedia page which says that around 10 of these animals are caught every day as bycatch, so I assume the shark that was studied came from one of these.

This shark takes 150 years to reach sexual maturity and gestates for 8-18 years. It's pretty fucked up that bycatch at this rate is just accepted because it surely is going to lead the species to extinction. Humans are pretty fucking arrogant.

If these sharks were not caught at this rate then I would agree that they shouldn't be studied in ways that require killing them, but since they are, I think it is better to at least get some knowledge out of it and possibly raise awareness of the problem.

Edit: read the article, and it actually says it was caught by the scientists and not as bycatch. Still, this catch is negligible compared to the 3500 that are caught, killed and thrown out again (I assume) each year

andrewflnr•15h ago

> The Greenland sharks used in her co-study were caught between 2020 and 2024 using scientific long lines off the coast of the University of Copenhagen's Arctic Station on Disko Island, Greenland.

But I guess a few sharks for scientific sampling are probably still negligible compared to bycatch.

the-grump•15h ago

People don't want to face the music but the way we're fishing is completely unsustainable.

The way we live on land is unsustainable too, of course.

tonyhart7•14h ago

so we need to extract resources from space asap, now that the planet cant sustain entire human race

duskdozer•12h ago

now this guy's just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.

maxbond•12h ago

Adding more resources doesn't solve the problem that they aren't being managed sustainably. We can't exhaust all the resources in space, but we could definitely exhaust all of the resources accessible to us in space. Like how we can't exhaust all of the oil or all of the gold on this planet, but we could exhaust all of the resource which can be mined economically.

This was once explained to me with a metaphor of a bacteria colony in a jar. The colony doubles every 24 hours. So they quickly exhaust the space in the jar. No problem, you give them another jar. 24 hours later, their population doubles, and they have filled both jars.

tonyhart7•8h ago

Yes, it does

maxbond•2h ago

Would you care to elaborate?

JumpCrisscross•1h ago

Resource intensity of GDP has been falling for decades, most quickly in developed economies. Space-based resource extraction isn’t going to be radically cheaper (if it ever is cheaper) than terrestrial sources with known propulsion, so that balance is unlikely to shift. Herego, replacing terrestrial extraction with moderately-cheaper space-based extraction would reduce harm to our ecosystem without changing our economies to turbo-consume materials and thereby accelerate terrestrial extraction.

maxbond•1h ago

I agree it may reduce harm (depending on how the actual costs shake out), but the calculus remains that if you have access to finite resources but your needs are expanding exponentially, and you are not recycling them in some way, you will run out of resources no matter how many you have.

I'm not opposed to exploiting resources in space, I think we should pursue the goal of being an "interplanetary species", but I think it's important to understand that it isn't a silver bullet or a free lunch. We still have to change our economy to be more sustainable.

Not to mention that it is not clear that exploiting space resources or becoming interplanetary is possible. I presume that it is. But we shouldn't bank our future on something unproven. We don't know if we're a decade away from mining our first asteroid or a century. We should assume that our future is here on Earth with the resources currently available to us, until proven otherwise.

JumpCrisscross•55m ago

> if you have access to finite resources but your needs are expanding exponentially

Our material needs in many categories are not expanding exponentially. On a per-capita basis, in advanced economies, it's been flat in several categories.

If anything, the constraints of spacefarig seem almost perfectly designed to nudge a culture and economy towards conservation and recycling. Building lunar and Martian colonies requires sustainability in the near term in a way that does not have clean parallel on Earth.

> we shouldn't bank our future on something unproven

Nobody is banking on space-based resource extraction.

> We should assume that our future is here on Earth with the resources currently available to us, until proven otherwise

Bit of a paradox to this. On one hand, obviously, yes. But on the other hand, given two civisations, one which assumes space-based resource and one which doens't, which do you think is going to get there first?

prmoustache•5h ago

No, we need to reduce dramatically our own population.

zo1•5h ago

That sort of thinking needs to first and almost-entirely be directed at China, India and Africa, then we can talk about sustainability and what the West can do.

prmoustache•4h ago

The west is wasting much more resources and contributing to global warming more than these 3 continents/countries combined.

srean•11h ago

There's a massive reduction in the whale song of the blue whales. Almost halved. They are presumably starving.

That something ginormous can be so elegant, beautiful and sleek is hard to conceive till one meets a blue whale. Let's let them thrive on the blue planet.

derektank•10h ago

The Blue Whale population has actually increased since the 70s. When they were critically endangered, their population numbered roughly 1,000-2,000 but population estimates for today put the number at roughly tenfold that. The 1966 worldwide moratorium on whaling has been incredibly successful and we’ve also seen recoveries in Humpback and Grey Whales.

srean•9h ago

Compared to numbers at peak whaling you are correct. I was commenting on a more recent phenomena.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/ocean-hea...

http://archive.today/2025.09.03-030523/https://www.nationalg...

hshdhdhj4444•10h ago

We keep talking about “sustainability” but sustainability is a secondary issue here.

The primary issue is that we are taking individuals and basically torturing and/or killing them, rarely for good reasons.

It won’t even be decades before our descendants look back at horror for how we treat them, not unlike how we can’t even imagine how our ancestors thought it was ok to have human slaves.

The major difference will be that the horrors of human chattel slavery (even the name clearly links it to how we treat non human animals) have largely only been recorded via text. The horrors of our actions will be available in text, images, videos for all to see in perpetuity by just looking at an Instagram archive.

dataflow•14h ago

Tangent, but you might want to watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tuS1LLOcsI

alex1138•14h ago

Douglas Adams had Last Chance To See and then the series got a reboot by Stephen Fry

gimmeThaBeet•13h ago

jeez 8-18 years, is that a record or is it one of those things they don't know enough about them to narrow down? that's another thing to think about when my ignorant self is eating my sushi. i used to assume that farmed salmon was marginally better than wild, but given how much wild fish gets fed to farmed fish, not sure that is even a plus on top of the ecological effects of fish farming.

bikeshaving•16h ago

It’s sinful to fish and kill these ancient creatures up from the deep for minor scientific progress.

derektank•10h ago

They’re predatory scavengers that wouldn’t hesitate to eat you if it had the opportunity. I would much rather conduct biomedical research on sharks than mice or rats.

jaccola•9h ago

Ah yes potentially getting us one step closer to immortality, hardly worth killing an animal!

I mostly eat vegan because I do have a strong dislike of factory farming and the way animals are treated there. But killing animals is a fact of life and I think scientific progress is a very valid reason to do so.

To put it in perspective, a lot of shark young will kill each other in the womb such that only the strongest is birthed. These animals eat other animals alive, etc.. etc.. My point being it is not like the option is between a rosy utopia or human-inflicted suffering.

arter45•3h ago

I'm not against scientific research per se or living a bit more but... is immortality (or living for, say, 200 years or more) really something we should strive for?

Many aspects of human society assume, one way or another, that our life expectancy is fairly limited. From politics (even absolute monarchs or dictators eventually die), to economics (think about retirement, for example), demographics (if everyone is immortal and everyone keeps having children, what happens?), even psychology ("everything passes").

Are we willing to throw these implications away? What would be the purpose?

JumpCrisscross•1h ago

> Many aspects of human society assume, one way or another, that our life expectancy is fairly limited

Assumptions can change. Each of our technological shifts was more upending than longer healthspans would be—most of the West is already a gerontocracy.

> What would be the purpose?

To not die horribly.

arter45•1h ago

> Assumptions can change. Each of our technological shifts was more upending than longer healthspans would be—most of the West is already a gerontocracy.

Sure but is gerontocracy a good thing, then? I’m not against older people, but shifting the whole demographic towards them is not looking good for retirement, social constructs, and more. Immortality would bring this even further, especially when meant literally.

> > What would be the purpose? To not die horribly.

Well ok, but even if you can’t die horribly (ignoring murders,…) you can still suffer horribly, physically or otherwise, for a variety of reasons. Starving, rape, physical and psychological abuse, painful diseases even if non lethal,… still exist regardless of immortality. It’s not like immortal people are necessarily happy or good.

JumpCrisscross•48m ago

> shifting the whole demographic towards them is not looking good for retirement, social constructs, and more

I'm genuinely not seeing the problem. Longer lives means more productive lives. (A massive fraction of healthcare costs are related to obesity and aging. A minority of medicine is in trauma.)

> Immortality would bring this even further, especially when meant literally

We don't have a path to entropy-defying immortality. Not aging doesn't mean literal immortality.

> you can still suffer horribly, physically or otherwise, for a variety of reasons

The fact that you're levying this argument should seal the case. It's an argument that can be made against anything good.

arter45•35m ago

Yes, of course it can be made against anything good, but what I mean is… is death truly the worst thing? Isn’t it better to focus on other ways to reduce suffering? Unexpected death is of course tragic, but everything eventually stops. I understand looking into ways to treat diseases, reduce other unpleasant events and possibly reduce pain (physical or otherwise), but immortality to me looks like something you (a generic you) just for the sake of it. Also because, when you think about it, you only die once, but you experience suffering in a variety of ways. In addition, death is a way to “enforce” change. Sometimes it’s bad, other times it’s good.

> Longer lives means more productive lives.

When you work until you’re, say, 80, what happens? You have less time to enjoy some rest, you still do your work (which means, if everything else stays equal, that there is less room for people taking your job and gaining experience because you are as productive as always).

jonplackett•12h ago

So wait did they just catch a 200 year old shark and cut its eye ball out to have a look?

imcritic•2h ago

Yeah, the article both mentions it and leaves any details out! Did they kill the shark or did they only collect its eyeball??

internet_points•11h ago

Highly recommend the book "Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean" by Morten Strøksnes if you're interested in old sharks, small boats or deep oceans https://bookshop.org/p/books/shark-drunk-the-art-of-catching...

MagicMoonlight•11h ago

I’m starting to realise we don’t really want a cure to aging.

Imagine a world where people like Stalin never die. People like bill gates never have to pretend to be a nice person…

If there’s no chance of death, there will never be any progress in society. People in power would just establish a tighter and tighter grip. All the boomers would be immune to death and disease, but the treatment would be banned for the young because they haven’t done enough to earn it.

maipen•10h ago

Dictators die all the time and most often not of old age. As we get older our flexibility to adapt to change also starts to diminish. You will eventually be outperformed. We can’t account for what we don’t know.

quesera•5h ago

Perhaps, but the power conferred by the miracle of compound interest does not require performance.

EugeneOZ•10h ago

People like Einstein would find a solution.

derektank•10h ago

If your thesis was correct, we would presumably not treat children for cancer. Since that’s evidently not the case, I’m not sure how you’re coming to this conclusion

ricardo81•10h ago

Reminds me of the film 'In Time' where the rich can be immortal.

It does seem that nature has it 'programmed in' that we are to die due to telomere shortening and for natural selection to take place. Our modern and constantly changing society likely means that any kind of evolutionary adaptation doesn't have long enough to prove itself.

Interestingly how people would handle immortality could change that.

BLKNSLVR•7h ago

...and Altered Carbon (primarily the book but also the TV series), which does things a lot better than "In Time".

mlrtime•7h ago

90% will say this until they are faced with death and then they just want 1 more minute.

FpUser•7h ago

>"I’m starting to realise we don’t really want a cure to aging."

YOU realize that WE do not need. How convenient of you to tell me what I need. I think this is how Stalin's of the world start.

WhyNotHugo•6h ago

You'll enjoy "Altered Carbon", which focuses (partially) on this topic: if we get rid of death, then the worst of the aristocracy never dies.

asah•1h ago

+1000 - altered carbon season 1 is amazing. IMHO commit to watching it 3x to get everything going on - after the first watching, everyone's like "that was amazing but I'm not sure what I just watched." It's just so rich - if The Matrix is 136 mins vs 570 mins with that much more depth.

1970-01-01•3h ago

You need both sides of the coin. Yes your Emperor is forever young but so are the heroes among us. Eisenhower turns 135, Hitler 136.

keiferski•10h ago

Unfortunately it also seems like these sharks are plagued by parasites in their eyes:

The shark is often infested by the copepod Ommatokoita elongata, a crustacean that attaches itself to the shark's eyes.[17] The copepod may display bioluminescence, thus attracting prey for the shark in a mutualistic relationship, but this hypothesis has not been verified.[18] These parasites can cause multiple forms of damage to the sharks' eyes, such as ulceration, mineralization, and edema of the cornea, leading to almost complete blindness.[11] This does not seem to reduce the life expectancy or predatory ability of Greenland sharks, due to their strong reliance on smell and hearing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_shark

ricardo81•10h ago

Are they parasites though? It may be symbiotic, especially if the relationship between the species has spanned over many years. e.g. their presence may promote the production of rhodopsin.

OTOH it may be natures way of allowing natural selection to take place in the sharks since their lifespan is so long. The wiki article seems to imply that's not the case though.

oncallthrow•8h ago

> These parasites can cause multiple forms of damage to the sharks' eyes, such as ulceration, mineralization, and edema of the cornea, leading to almost complete blindness.

xeetzer•8h ago

Would it be fucked up? Yes. But, that doesn't contradict a possible symbiotic relationship.

ricardo81•7h ago

It's one of those 'invisible hand' things where killing off older sharks may be advantageous in the long run. One of many possibilities.

One idea behind that is that any environment has a carrying capacity, limitations on food etc. It may be the parasites favour older sharks etc etc.

sowbug•6h ago

Parasitism is in the eye of the beholder.

gcanyon•3h ago

Begrudging upvote for you my friend.

cubefox•1h ago

https://smbc-comics.com/comic/2003-02-07

bicx•6h ago

This is what the article begins by addressing and questioning.

androiddrew•8h ago

Soon to be America sharks.

simoes•8h ago

Anyone else surprised to see a Greenland headline without Trump involved?

mlrtime•7h ago

Godwins law v2

qq540738209•7h ago

This shark is really an amazing creature.

csr86•6h ago

I have permanent damage on my retina of other eye. I hope one day humans could regenerate their retinas as sharks and zebrafish can do. Seems strange, that fish living in deep dark oceans can fix their eyes, while most mammals who rely on vision a lot more cannot.

aziaziazi•6h ago

The article talk about DNA repairs, helping the eye to maintain its function in the long run. It's not a repair after injurie. I also hope for progress in human eye medecine.

hearsathought•3h ago

Thought we'd have replaceable eyes, teeth, hair, etc by now. When your vision goes, instead of getting new contacts or glasses, just replace your eyes with a new pair. You have cavities, just replace your tooth with another. The promise of genetic sequencing and research just hasn't panned out.

yread•2h ago

Give it time reprogramming stem cells without the source code or even disassemblers is hard

1970-01-01•3h ago

If it happens to humans, we all could look forward to relaxing the high power laser laws (pun intended).

old_bayes•3h ago

So how did they get the Greenland shark eyeballs to dissect for the research paper?

imcritic•2h ago

I hate this stupid style of writing. So did they find out anything new besides the fact that a shark supposedly still sees the light? Did this particular shark get a parasite on its eyes or not? Not a single word about DNA repair mechanisms except for in the baity title. Awful.

TL;DR: we think sharks eyes can still see light even if the sharks a centuries old, please fund us for further research!

arbuge•2h ago

I had no idea they could live for 400 years... I actually now realize that I never thought about the lifespan of a shark before, but I would have guessed (prior to this education) around 25 years or so.

cubefox•1h ago

This article contains basically no information about the topic mentioned in the headline, just vaguely related chitchat.

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Greenland sharks maintain vision for centuries through DNA repair mechanism

Comments

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ChatGPT Health is a marketplace, guess who is the product?

Bichon: A lightweight, high-performance Rust email archiver with WebUI

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UpCodes (YC S17) is hiring PMs, SWEs to automate construction compliance

Bindless Oriented Graphics Programming

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UK government exempting itself from cyber law inspires little confidence

“Erdos problem #728 was solved more or less autonomously by AI”

Httpz – Zero-Allocation HTTP/1.1 Parser for OxCaml

NASA announces unprecedented return of sick ISS astronaut and crew

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Sinclair C5

Allow me to introduce, the Citroen C15

How we made v0 an effective coding agent

GPU memory snapshots: sub-second startup (2025)

Changes to Android Open Source Project

Reverse Engineering the Epson FilmScan 200 for Classic Mac

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