Meet The Animal That Lives For 11,000 Years

This post originally appeared on National Geographic. “What’s the top ranking of the longest living animal?” Mohamed Larbi Bahou asked Weird Animal Question of the Week. Some days it feels like it might be me. Kidding aside, humans these days live pretty long lives: The average global life expectancy of someone born in 2015 is 71.4 years. That’s not bad compared with some adult female mayflies, which live for under five minutes ― just long enough to mate and lay eggs. Talk about speed dating. We did some digging and found some animals who are really getting the use out of their senior discount cards. The Old Clam and the Sea  The sea harbors many a Methuselah. Take sponges, for example. “People often forget sponges are animals” ― and some of them very long-lived animals at that, Marah J. Hardt, author of Sex in the Sea: Our Intimate Connection With Sex-Changing Fish, Romantic Lobsters, Kinky Squid, and Other Salty Erotica of the Deep, says via email. Estimates of sponge longevity vary quite a bit, but are often in the thousands of years. One study in the journal Aging Research Reviews notes a deep-sea sponge from the species Monorhaphis chuni lived to be 11,000 years old. Ming, a quahog clam, died at the age of 507 when researchers tried to dredge the bivalve up from Icelandic waters. The quahog’s life-span is usually about 225 years. (Also see “405-Year-Old Clam Called Longest-Lived Animal.”) Some...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news