The 400-Year-Old Shark
Scientists have just mapped the DNA of the Greenland shark, a giant fish that lives in the freezing cold waters of the North Atlantic. These sharks are the longest-living vertebrates on Earth—some can live for 400 years! That means there are sharks swimming today that were born before the lightbulb was invented. Researchers discovered that these sharks have a massive genome with special genes that repair their DNA, helping them stay healthy for centuries.
Wee Ones
Greenland sharks grow very slowly, about 1 centimetre every year. If a tiny baby shark is 5 centimetres long and it grows 1 more centimetre, how many centimetres long is it now? Count on from 5!
Little Kids
If 3 scientists find 12 shark teeth on the ocean floor, how many teeth does each scientist get if they share them equally?
Big Kids
If a Greenland shark lives for 400 years, and a human lives for 80 years, how many human lifetimes fit inside one shark's life?
The Sky's the Limit
The Greenland shark has a giant genome with 6.5 billion DNA base pairs. The human genome has about 3.2 billion base pairs. To the nearest whole number, how many times larger is the shark's genome than the human genome? If a scientist studies 1 percent of the shark's genome, how many millions of base pairs are they looking at?