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Imagine, for a moment, an ocean without sharks. At first it might seem like good news. No more circling fins. No more fear in the water. The very thing so many people dread, simply gone. For a while little appears to change. Then, slowly, the cracks begin to show. Fish populations swing wildly out of balance. Coral reefs start to sicken. The catches that feed whole coastal communities begin to fail. An ocean that once ran like clockwork comes, piece by piece, apart. This is n

Somewhere in the cold black water beneath the Arctic ice, a shark is moving slowly through the dark. It is in no hurry. It has never been in a hurry. This animal may have been alive when Isaac Newton was writing about gravity. It may have been born before the first factory chimney ever rose over Europe. It is a Greenland shark. It could be approaching four hundred years old. Sharks have a way of bending our sense of time. Partly because individuals like this one can outlive a

A diver kneels on the sandy floor of a Caribbean reef. Around her, a dozen sharks turn slow circles in the blue. Then one breaks from the group. It glides straight towards her, slows, settles almost gently into her arms, lies still while she works a rusted fishing hook free from its skin. When she finishes, it slips back into the water. She has done this many times. The same sharks return to her, season after season. To watch it is to feel utterly certain that the animal know