Greenland shark: Anomalous fish. Lives for 500 years, and her body does not degrade with age at all

Today, the Greenland shark is considered the longest-living vertebrate on the planet. Radiocarbon dating of the lens of the shark's eye showed that their age could exceed 500 years! This is several times longer than the life expectancy of other record holders, such as giant tortoises, bowhead whales and humans. Of course, the latter are of keen interest in the anomalous fish. And while some simply study it, like some kind of biological curiosity, others ask: “Can a person do the same?”

We used to think that the abnormally long lifespan of Greenland sharks was a side effect of their adaptation to specific environmental conditions. For most of the year, sharks live in deep-sea regions of northern waters, where resources and energy are catastrophically scarce. To survive here, they have to eat anything: shellfish, worms, carrion, any fish. And the largest sharks even attack seals sleeping on the ice, compensating for their slowness with surprise.

However, everything turned out to be not so simple. Research in recent years shows that shark metabolism is not just slow, it is abnormal. In the vast majority of animals, metabolic processes in their bodies gradually slow down with age. Explosive growth and development in childhood are replaced first by stable maturity, and then by fading old age. But for Greenland sharks everything is different: the metabolism of newborn babies and elders, who are 2 times older than Pushkin, is almost identical. Their enzymes, protein production rates, and thousands of other processes occur at the same speed and efficiency regardless of age.

Part of the small difference in metabolic rate is due to the fact that baby Greenland sharks are selective sluggers. In eggs and the womb (Greenland sharks do not lay eggs, but carry them inside themselves), sharks spend from 8 to 18 years, and after leaving their mother they grow at a rate of only 1-2 centimeters per year, slower than trees! Even though they live in a kind of nursery - in the relatively safe and food-rich shallow waters of Europe and the East Coast of North America. It is logical to expect that if the base metabolic rate is so low, it will be very difficult to fall below.

However, there is something more here. Greenland sharks have mechanisms for genome repair and restoration and cell regeneration that are unique to no one else, complementing the standard self-repair mechanisms of the body. And they are so perfect that even the retina of their eyes - one of the most fragile tissues of the body - feels great after a couple of centuries of working in close contact with parasites.

The eyes of almost all adult Greenland sharks are infested with luminous copepods, which are anchored in the cornea using special hooks. In humans, such contact with arthropods would surely lead to rapid degradation of vision. This is why we have long believed that decades of

 such close contact is guaranteed to lead to blindness.

And here are the figurines. This winter, an international team of scientists was able to study parasite-infected sharks aged 130-150 years and found that their vision was as sharp as in their youth. Age-related changes in the retina are not even recorded in them!

The only pity is that this knowledge is absolutely inapplicable to humans. The physiology and lifestyle of Greenland sharks are so different from ours that their methods of extending their life and the health of their organs simply will not work for us, even theoretically. But they are extremely useful for a general understanding of the principles of operation of regeneration mechanisms at the cellular level.

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