A lot of deep sea creatures have very slow metabolisms. It is one of the many reasons sea dredging and mining should be held with such disdain: these are ecosystems which may take thousands of years to recover.

We don't even appreciate how long it takes a forest to recover, much less one with glass sponges that are thousands of years old.

When H Melville stuffed the middle of Moby Dick with a "cetology" -- BEFORE The Origin of Species, famously saying "a whale is a fish" -- he didn't forget the Greenland Shark. I think all the time about how many of those sharks swimming around in 1851 are still swimming around today.

There's a business lesson in the longest lived creatures being the ones that move slow, abide small insults, and make themselves generally unappetizing.

Oh, the article is by Katherine Rundell. She has written some very nice children's books.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46511555

I think the title is a reference to David Foster Wallace's awesome article, Consider the Lobster.

https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf

Jeremy Wade, host of the TV show "River Monsters", has an episode where he investigates the Loch Ness Monster and concludes it's likely a Greenland Shark that swam up an underground river from the North Atlantic to the lake. He likens the shark's horse-like face and the distribution of the low fins on the shark's back to descriptions of the monster. A solitary long-living fish could explain the occasional sightings, and the scientists' findings that there is not enough food in the lake for a breeding population of large carnivores.

Consider the elephant when?