The narrators of wildlife documentaries will sometimes suggest that odd-looking animals are “the stuff of science fiction”. They have a few too many eyes. They spout poisonous ink. That sort of thing.
Ho and, indeed, hum. News that a Greenland shark has washed up on the coast of Co Sligo confronts us with an altogether more unsettling strangeness. The unfortunate beast was estimated at being about 150 years old. Sounds venerable. But this is merely the age at which males of the species achieve sexual maturity (something Irish men manage in half the time).
These grey, torpedo-shaped animals can expect to live more than 300 years. A few well-preserved individuals – those that avoid cigs and trans fats – are believed to have made it past 500. This hardly seems possible. It is similar to discovering there is a creature out there that can teleport to other planets.
The Greenland shark is not close to being the longest-lived organism on Earth. Black corals survive more than 4,000 years. The glass sponge clocks more than 10,000.
So when the oldest living of those hexactinellids was a baby, Early Neolithic humans in the Americas were just discovering agriculture. We had not yet invented the potter’s wheel. Our ancestors on this island were living in the crude round huts you can see modelled at the Mountsandel Mesolithic site, in Coleraine.
And I feel old for remembering The Beatles splitting up?
But sponges and coral don’t really cut it. They scarcely register as organisms at all. The Greenland shark, as the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth, is more in our biological neighbourhood. Creatures with backbones (and eyes and mouths) are part of the family. That’s the sort of chap you could go for a pint with.
Our late whippersnapper will, sadly, never make it to the pub. Last weekend the cartilaginous visitor was discovered beached not far from Sligo town. It was then taken to the regional veterinary laboratory, prior to tissue samples being preserved as part of the National Museum of Ireland’s collection. A representative of that body described the discovery as exceptionally rare in Irish waters.
We humans think of ourselves as comparatively long-lived beings. “Comparatively” is the operative word there. We live near dogs, cats, gerbils, sparrows and squirrels. If we eat meat, we eat cows, chickens, lambs and pigs.
The greatest chance most of us have of meeting anything with a greater average lifespan than a human is a visit to a Galápagos tortoise at a zoo. You maybe once met a parrot that was pushing 60, but that is a rare enough occurrence.
This is just one way in which we foolishly imagine ourselves divinely engineered superbeings. Our pets quail before our near immortality. Why not put a bolt through the head of that poor cow? It’s not as if she will live to welcome in another decade, anyway. (I no longer eat meat. I am speaking for an invented monster. Do not write in.)
Using the average human lifespan as a measure – a great deal shorter in earlier centuries – our concept of “long ago” makes some sense. The second World War, remembered clearly only by those over 90, now seems to have passed into a distant epoch. Yet the poor shark that drifted into Sligo Bay was swimming beneath the North Atlantic convoys in his late 60s.
When he was born, Germany was in the process of unification. George Eliot was finishing Middlemarch. Leo Tolstoy was sending Anna Karenina off to the publisher.
Sexual maturity for a human male strikes at about 13 or 14. The events surrounding the shark’s birth – the invention of the incandescent light bulb, for further instance – compare, for us, with the Scottish independence referendum and the ice-bucket challenge.
And that poor fellow died tragically young. When the longest-lived members of his species first entered the chilly northern waters, Martin Luther had just nailed his theses to the door in Wittenberg. Copernicus was proposing the heliocentric model. The Spanish Armada was readying itself. The very oldest of the Greenland sharks are, we believe, near contemporaries of William Shakespeare.
All very peculiar. All very entertaining. But what use is this information to us? It presses home that antiquity may not be so ancient as we believe. The notion that our societies have, over aeons, bedded down and established immovable moral certainties is an illusion we hug to for fear of acknowledging the nearness of social chaos.
To the oldest Greenland shark – not to mention the black coral or the glass sponge – all technology more sophisticated than the wine press was invented within living memory. What came so freshly can vanish in the fluttering of an eye. It would do us no harm to ponder the recency of more or less everything.