Author: Megan Molteni / Source: WIRED
Is there any more daunting animal to study than the great white shark? Just you try attaching a radio transmitter or drawing a tube of blood from a two-ton, razor-toothed, meat-seeking missile. But scientific understanding of these iconic apex predators has been limited by technical challenges as much as human bias for studying species that reside on closer branches of the taxonomic tree.
Sharks evolved from the rest of the animal kingdom 400 million years ago—before the first adventurous amphibians left the oceans for dry land. What could the great white possibly teach 21st century humans?A lot actually, according to the scientists who have spent years painfully decoding its DNA. Today, they reported their efforts mapping the first great white shark genome in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The major scientific milestone is a boon for conservation biologists seeking to better understand population dynamics of the great white and other shark species, nearly all of which are in steep decline. And the massive genome—great whites, it turns out, have 41 pairs of chromosomes compared to our 23—also holds clues to how these ancient animals have for so long ruled Earth’s oceans. These clues could one day help our own evolutionarily infantile species live longer, less disease-ridden lives. (Provided of course we don’t burn the planet down first.)
“Getting money for shark genomics is really difficult,” says Michael Stanhope, an evolutionary biologist at Cornell University, who co-led the genome-mapping project with his friend Mahmood Shivji, a conservation biologist at Nova Southeastern University’s Guy Harvey Research Institute. Despite the falling cost of DNA sequencing, it was still a massive undertaking, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, most of which was funded by the Save Our Seas Shark Research Center. “Historically, there’s been a lot more interest in sequencing other vertebrates, like livestock and primates,” says Stanhope. “But sharks have some fascinating biology going on that really warranted…
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