This 400-Year-Old Shark May Hold the Secret to Preserving Human Vision
Researchers found no retinal degeneration in Greenland sharks, and rhodopsin stayed active in blue light, challenging assumptions that the species is functionally blind.
4 Articles
4 Articles
This 400-Year-Old Shark May Hold the Secret to Preserving Human Vision
A UC Irvine study identifies a DNA mechanism that helps these sharks maintain their vision over centuries. On a computer screen in her UC Irvine office, Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk watches a Greenland shark drift through the dark Arctic water. Its body moves slowly through the murk, but what catches her attention is not the shark’s size [...]
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have debunked the belief that Greenland sharks are functionally blind. The study, led by Professor Dorota Skowronska-Krawczyk, reveals that these sharks, which can live up to 400 years, possess a DNA repair mechanism that helps preserve their vision throughout their long lives. The research indicates that, despite the adverse conditions in which they live, such as the presence of parasites in …
Greenland sharks can live more than 400 years, which means some of the ones cruising the North Atlantic today were already swimming when Isaac Newton was writing the Principia, and almost all of them spend those centuries functionally blind from a parasite anchored to their eyes.
Somewhere between 200 and 2,600 metres beneath the surface of the North Atlantic, a shark the length of a small car is moving at roughly the pace of a person walking through knee-deep snow. It is grey, blunt-nosed, and probably older than the United States. Two milky tendrils may trail from its eyeballs — a parasitic copepod called Ommatokoita elongata, latched onto the cornea and slowly clouding the surface. The animal can lose much of its visi…
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