[Non ceph] Monstrous sleeper shark

Sordes;85754 said:
Although I also suppose that sleeper sharks mainly scavenge on dead or dying Mesonychoteuthis, I would not completely rule out that they are able to catch and kill such a beast. They look very sluggish, but they can also be very fast on short distances, and the lack of eyesight is surely compensited with other senses.

Is it not pitch black 'down there' anyway?
 
The copepod parasites are in most cases bioluminescent, luring prey to the shark itself; their other senses (notably the ability to sense the faintest muscular activity and changes in waterpressure) are so keen that they hardly need vision, anyway. The deep sea is rife with bioluminescence, which is the reason why there are so many visual hunters in the pitch black abyss.
 
Animals like the Greenland sharks aren´t also only in deep water, they come even sometimes very close to the surface. Two days ago I´ve seen a very interesting documentation which showed a greenland shark swimming under the surface of the ice. As this sharks are regularly caught with hook and line or nets, they are surely not always in the real abbys.
 
And, the copepods don't actually cover the entire cornea, as illustrated in this picture of Ommatokoita elongata, the parasite in question.
 
ob;85784 said:
And, the copepods don't actually cover the entire cornea, as illustrated in this picture of Ommatokoita elongata, the parasite in question.

Thanks ob, I was just about to eat, but now I don't feel hungry anymore.

What do the copepods get out of the relationship?

myopsida - thanks for the calculator, I'm a big fan of the routemaster bus as size comparison. I've added that to my favourites.
 
Here is a very interesting article about greenland sharks: Eishaie: Die heimlichen Herrscher der Arktis
As it is in german, most of you will probably not understand it. I´ll try to put the content in a nutshell: Greenland sharks are no sluggish deep sea scavengers. Recent studies showed that their diet consists to a big part of seals, and it is very unprobable that they were all already dead when they were eaten by the sharks. They have also often salmons in their stomaches, which are also very fast fish. Furthermore studies with transmitter-marked sharks showed that they swim not only in deep water, but also very often in minimal depths, often directly under the ice, most probably to hunt for seals. If they are really such active and efficient predators, it could really be that they actually hunt living giant and colossal squid.
 
What is also facinating is their incredibly slow growth rate, potentially the larger specimens are well over a hundred years old ("hundreds of years theoretically" according to the article, putting stress on the adjective). Bowheads spring to mind.
 
Yes, this is exactly what I also thought some time ago. Even their smallest relatvies can life for about a century, but how long needs a sleeper shark to grow to 7m?
 

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