• Question: how long do sharks live up to

    Asked by to Thon, Catherine, James, Natalie, Shaylon on 19 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Natalie Pilakouta

      Natalie Pilakouta answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      There are many different shark species, so it depends greatly on the specific species. Most of them live 20-30 years. The great white shark lives 70+ years, but I think the longest-lived sharks are whale sharks and spiny dogfish which live more than 100 years!

    • Photo: Anthony Caravaggi

      Anthony Caravaggi answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Natalie’s right, as far as I know. But there is another type of shark which might live even longer. The Greenland shark is a huge shark (second biggest after the great white) which lives in the Arctic. It is generally slow-moving, though it can move quickly in bursts if it needs to. It is also slow-growing, but at present Greenland sharks can’t be aged. But some scientists think that if Greenland sharks grow at the same rate all their lives, then an adult shark around 7 metres long could be over 200 years old.

    • Photo: James Bell

      James Bell answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      Generally it will be bigger sharks that live longer – as Natalie points out, one of the longest living sharks is the Whale Shark (which is also the biggest fish). That’s probably true of sharks that spend most of their time near the sea surface.

      For deep-sea sharks it’s probably very different. There’s some evidence (though no one is quite sure) that sharks like the Greenland Shark (that can grow to up to 7m long!) might be able to live for more than 200 years. This is because the pace of life is much slower in the deep-sea so animals don’t age as quickly. Another species of deep-sea shark is thought to live for up to 80yrs. These sharks generally live way down, probably spending most of their time between 1000 and 3000m deep (so you’re never likely to meet one)

      http://www.arkive.org/bluntnose-six-gill-shark/hexanchus-griseus/image-G17861.html

    • Photo: Catherine Offord

      Catherine Offord answered on 19 Jun 2014:

      On a slightly different note – as far as old *species* of sharks go, this extremely unattractive looking ‘goblin shark’ () lives about 100m underwater and has looked rather like this for every generation since about 125 million years ago. That means the first few sharks in this species met the dinosaurs and came into existence around the same time flowers started appearing on our planet.

      They are 3 or 4 metres long and VERY rare these days – although a fisherman in Florida caught one only a few weeks ago! He was understandably quite surprised.

Comments