All Posts

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

In late 2003 a young female great white shark slipped away from the coast of South Africa and swam east into open water. A small tag fixed near her dorsal fin quietly recorded the journey. Three months later she surfaced off Western Australia, more than eleven thousand kilometres away. Then she turned around and came home. Scientists named her Nicole. Her crossing, there and back inside nine months, overturned almost everything researchers believed about how far a single shar