On the trail of the fabled greenland shark

On the trail of the fabled greenland shark

Nicholas Read, Vancouver SunPublished: Saturday, January 13, 2007

Scotland has its Loch Ness monster and B.C. its Ogopogo. But for the people of Quebec -- both native and non-native -- there was always a shark.

A big shark. A dangerous shark. A shark that lurked under the ice in the darkest waters imaginable. Stories of it were rare and intermittent, but constant, too. People always claimed to have known someone who had caught one once.

But it took a scientist from B.C. to finally track it down.

Except at the time, Chris Harvey-Clark, a zoologist/veterinarian who now runs the University of B.C.'s Animal Care Centre, was working out of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

It was 2003, and Harvey-Clark and his close friend, Jeffrey Gallant, a Quebec schoolteacher with a passion for sharks almost as visceral as his, finally saw it. The Greenland shark -- at up to 1,100 kilograms, the biggest shark in the North Atlantic and, after the Great White, the second largest on the planet -- and there it was, right under their noses.

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