Animalia > Chordata > Elasmobranchii > Squaliformes > Somniosidae > Somniosus > Somniosus microcephalus

Somniosus microcephalus (gray shark; gurry shark; sleeper shark; Oakettle; Ground shark; Greenland shark)

Synonyms:
Language: Afrikaans; Danish; Dutch; Faroese; Finnish; French; German; Greenlandic; Icelandic; Inuktitut; Italian; Mandarin Chinese; Norwegian; Polish; Portuguese; Romanian; Russian; Spanish; Swedish; Turkish

Wikipedia Abstract

The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus), also known as the gurry shark, or grey shark, or by the Inuit name eqalussuaq, is a large shark of the family Somniosidae ("sleeper sharks"), closely related to the Pacific and southern sleeper sharks. The distribution of this species is mostly restricted to the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean and Arctic Ocean.
View Wikipedia Record: Somniosus microcephalus

Endangered Species

Status: Vulnerable
View IUCN Record: Somniosus microcephalus

Attributes

Maximum Longevity [2]  392 years
Water Biome [1]  Pelagic, Coastal
Diet [1]  Carnivore
Female Maturity [2]  156 years

Protected Areas

Name IUCN Category Area acres Location Species Website Climate Land Use
Macquarie Island Nature Reserve Ia 233540 Tasmania, Australia  
Saguenay - St. Lawrence Marine Park National Marine Conservation Area II 310822 Canada
Sirmilik National Park II 5475284 Canada

Prey / Diet

Prey / Diet Overlap

Predators

Physeter macrocephalus (Sperm Whale)[4]
Somniosus microcephalus (gray shark)[4]

Providers

Parasite of 
Ommatokoita elongata[4]

Consumers

External References

NatureServe Explorer

Citations

Attributes / relations provided by
♦ 1Myers, P., R. Espinosa, C. S. Parr, T. Jones, G. S. Hammond, and T. A. Dewey. 2006. The Animal Diversity Web (online). Accessed February 01, 2010 at animaldiversity.org
♦ 2de Magalhaes, J. P., and Costa, J. (2009) A database of vertebrate longevity records and their relation to other life-history traits. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 22(8):1770-1774
♦ 3McMeans, Bailey C., et al. "The role of Greenland sharks (Somniosus microcephalus) in an Arctic ecosystem: assessed via stable isotopes and fatty acids." Marine Biology 160.5 (2013): 1223+. Academic OneFile. Web. 14 July 2014.
♦ 4Jorrit H. Poelen, James D. Simons and Chris J. Mungall. (2014). Global Biotic Interactions: An open infrastructure to share and analyze species-interaction datasets. Ecological Informatics.
♦ 5CephBase - Cephalopod (Octopus, Squid, Cuttlefish and Nautilus) Database
♦ 6Phocoena phocoena, David E. Gaskin, Peter W. Arnold, and Barbara A. Blair, MAMMALIAN SPECIES No. 42, pp. 1-8 (1974)
♦ 7Pollerspöck, J. & Straube, N. (2015), Bibliography database of living/fossil sharks, rays and chimaeras (Chondrichthyes: Elasmobranchii, Holocephali) -Host-Parasites List/Parasite-Hosts List-, World Wide Web electronic publication, Version 04/2015;
♦ 8Gibson, D. I., Bray, R. A., & Harris, E. A. (Compilers) (2005). Host-Parasite Database of the Natural History Museum, London
Abstract provided by DBpedia licensed under a Creative Commons License
Species taxanomy provided by GBIF Secretariat (2022). GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. Checklist dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/39omei accessed via GBIF.org on 2023-06-13; License: CC BY 4.0