We
should always eat slowly, chew our food well and then, hopefully, we won’t
overeat, or so the story goes. But in recent times the Slow Food movement has
been gaining ground – slowly.
It
would seem that the two activities should go well together slowly cooked, tasty
food should be eaten slowly so that it can be savored fully. Nature however,
(red in tooth and claw, of course) doesn’t normally work slowly when it comes
to lunch.
When
you get cold, you slow down and that seems to be particularly true of the
Greenland Shark which Watanabe et al
have clocked swimming around at ¾ mph (1,2). This would seem to leave this
species of shark with a bit of a problem as it likes to lunch on seals.
With
seals swimming around at 2¼ mph, things don’t look promising for the sharks, as
even flat out, they are only able to reach 1½ mph. But nature has her ways and
the seal have a weakness for naps.
Sleeping
underwater would seem to be an extreme sport, but with sharks swimming around
propelled by tails that take 7 seconds to sweep from one side to the other, it
is even more dangerous. So these slow swimming sharks glide gently up to a
snoozing seal to become a slow eater.
It’s
not just a quick snap of the jaws that occurs. The BBC report indicates that a
deal of sucking goes on to bring the seal in (2), rather like that tail end of
pasta that is trying to escape as you dig into your pasta and meat balls.
I
guess we can conclude that to be a slow eater, you have to be a sucker too.
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022098112001657
- http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18531924
