I think clonal colonies like Pando are some of the the oldest LARGE organisms. But can one say they are organisms?
Probably a few rotifers and tardigrades are the oldest organisms since they can lie dormant for many years and then be reanimated with water. Perhaps millions of years!!!
> "Humongous Fungus", an individual of the fungal species Armillaria solidipes in the Malheur National Forest, is thought to be between 2,000 and 8,500 years old.[33][34] It is thought to be the world's largest organism by area, at 2,384 acres (965 hectares).
So it may be the oldest organism, but it also has the crown for largest.
The main Bristlecone Pine grove in California is a lovely place. It sits near 10,000 feet, and yet is pretty easy to drive to. It's about five or six hours east of the SF bay area, depending on whether Tioga pass is open or not. (This year, the pass will be opening quite late.)
I strongly encourage a visit if at all possible. It is truly like another world up there, and the silence is magnificent.
I would second visiting. It is a great experience and quite unlike visiting other ancient forests. Unlike say a giant sequoia grove or a virgin rain forest, the trees size are more at the human scale. They look very old and it hits your psyche below the conscious level. Some trees having only a small strip of living bark attached to a few branches and needles with the rest of the dead trunk exposed. The wood is very hard and over thousands of years is eroded by the wind/sand-dust like a rock formation in a desert. The high elevation puts your mind slightly off balance if you come directly from the Owen valley at 3000 ft. These trees like to grow on limestone and there is almost no other plants around and no dirt. On a clear day (and most are) you experience just a jumble of bare white rock with an amazingly deep blue sky, a cool breeze, and these ancient trees clinging to life.
The photo in the article is not from the preserved groves in the White Mountains near Bishop. There it is more high rolling hills than dramatic mountain views. I prefer that setting as one is not distracted from the trees.
While I was there I asked how the trees got so old (3000 - 5000 years), if it was a special kind of tree or what. The ranger told us that trees don't die of age, if they have roots, bark, and leaves, they can keep on going. It was the environment of that area that allowed the trees to grow live so long. It's relatively high elevation, so there are few bugs and other predators. The biggest threat they faced was from erosion, and wind taking the bark off over time. Absolutely awesome place.
I've always thought that was incredibly cool. These trees live so long that a primary cause of death is the mountain literally eroding away from beneath them.
is it just me or is this article written like someone who did a few google searches for old organisms and then writes down their speculations in the form of what some would call an article?
"However, the oldest, precisely measured organism living on Earth today remains, for now, a Great Basin Bristlecone pine tree. Pando the quaking aspen and Antarctic glass sponges could be much older but their ages are assumed from indirect measurements and educated guesswork. "
It seems that one could argue that the first single-celled organism has never died. Single-celled organisms reproduce by dividing, and there's no distinction between parent and offspring, right? So if any offspring survives, then the original organism arguably has not died.
There's a good argument to be made that organisms which reproduce with haploid gametes (animals and plants) truly generate "new" individuals when the sperm and egg fuse to create the first cell with a nucleus containing a truly unique genotype. However, organisms that reproduce by fission, where one complete living cell divides into two identical complete living cells (minor single-site mutations aside) have a much stronger case to claim that they are both still "the same" organism, as old as the original. So, no, you aren't the oldest organism on the planet, but many bacteria could be considered to be a billion or two years old.
It always amuses me how rapidly discussions about life (define life, what constitutes a different species or organism) end up at ancient philosophical discussions. In this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus is just a breath away! (In this case: would those cells be a billion or two years old? Have all of their atoms been replaced at this point? Does it matter?)
If the clones of individuals can accrue minor errors until they've diverged enough to become a breeding pair and still be considered the same organism. Why would the result of them melding their DNA together make them a new organism?
That is analogous to the "I've had this brush for years, and it's had a new handle 3 times and a new brush head 5 times." type idea. Safe to say that no, it is not the same organism.
Saw a documentary that mentioned this recently. Interestingly, these sharks are born with great eyesight, but nearly all of them that have been studied have these parasites (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ommatokoita) embedded in their eyes that literally eat their corneas.
"Animals of this and similar species of Antarctic sponges grow extremely slowly in the low temperatures. Estimates based on growth rates suggest a very long lifespan in this and similar animals. One two meter high specimen in the Ross Sea was estimated to be 23,000 years old, though because of sea level fluctuations in the Ross Sea it is unlikely that such an animal could have lived for more than 15,000 years. Even if 15,000 years is an overestimate, which may well be the case, this specimen appears to be the longest-lived animal on earth."
Can long-living organisms, or hard-coded behavior across generations of short-lived organisms, be used to transfer data or preserve knowledge across incredible stretches of time?
For example, the rings within trees that live for thousands of years.
Or, the elaborate art made by creatures like the Japanese Puffer Fish. [0]
But if you're just storing random data, like text, it probably offers little to no fitness benefit to the organism. So it could all be lost with a random deletion and no one but you would care.
> if you're just storing random data, like text, it probably offers little to no fitness benefit to the organism.
Wow, this makes me even more interested in the idea of using mating rituals as a mechanism for very-long-term knowledge storage!
Things like birdsongs, dances, and the aforementioned courtship art... If an individual can only reproduce if it correctly retransmits the "data", then the data will survive as long as the species does..no?
Why not over a million years? That would still only be 0.1% of bits flipped, and it should be possible to design a code with enough redundancy or error correction to take care of that. Is there some compounding effect I'm not thinking of? Or simply that it's hard to keep a species alive for a million years?
"Mammals, for instance, have an average species "lifespan" from origination to extinction of about 1 million years, although some species persist for as long as 10 million years."
Evolution: Library: The Current Mass Extinction - PBS
www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/2/l_032_04.html
So yeah, it would be a shame if space aliens visited and encoded a message to us in saber toothed tigers or trilobites.
Also I have no religious hangups, I'm a direct descendant of the ancestor of amoebas or whatever exactly, and if the message were encoded into whatever makes an amoeba an amoeba, well, its definitely gone now.
I think it would be hard to "infect" a species with stored data. They'd have to burn more protein to replicate that extra DNA material, which would provide a competitive advantage to any individual not carrying the data, so its not going to last long. Even thinking outside the box with a virus, wouldn't smaller ones have better odds of survival?
Yes, I believe the oldest trees on Earth are around 5000 years old. Some Fungi systems could be extremely old...but they sort of clone each other so it's not exactly the same organism living...but that said most of your cells except neurons seem to die and get replaced, so continuous living is open to some interpretation. You could say the creator of the Venus Willendorf is the oldest "living in our memory" human being...the sculpture is thought to be 35,000 years old and continues to influence artists today like Jeff Koons.
http://arthistoryresources.net/willendorf/willendorfdiscover...
It seems they point to a group of bacteria living under Siberian Permafrost for the past half million years. As the video also points out; not in suspended animation, they're rather alive and repairing themselves.
Another Skeptic's Guide listener on HN! I've posted various comments linking to SGU segments or Steven Novella posts, but I have yet to see anyone else do so.
I actually stumbled on it 4 years ago while having a discussion on HN. I was looking for explanations on the biological approach to mental illness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5829068
HN's search function is good! I just looked for "scott_s Steven Novella", changed it to look at comments (default is stories, which, unsurprisingly, there are no hits), then sorted by date. It's usually easy to find a comment you or someone else made by just searching for the username, then some keywords.
Absolutely fantastic book. I was surprised to learn there were a few examples closer to me that I had expected. Of course, their precise locations are usually obscured.
There was a tree. Someone was trying to check it's age and his bit got stuck. He cut the tree down to retrieve his bit, finding the tree to be the oldest living (something). I don't have a link. Probably on Atlas Obscura.
We're arguably the least cavalier about taking life of any life on earth.
In the wild, life is so cheap and valueless that when we witness unspeakable acts of horrific wild violence, we have to condition it: wild is wild, nature is nature, human expectations and morality don't apply.
On the contrary, I imagine a lot of the nuts are planted by squirrels! In either case, many plants have an implicit bargain with animals: eat my fruit, but you must carry my seeds out beyond where I can reach and deposit them there.
Which happens when they pass through the gut, essentially.
It is just as cavalier and anthropocentric to impose a deliberate ecological aesthetic based on the idea of preservation. Cyanobacteria oxygenated the world and caused mass extinction of most Earth species. Life moved on.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
It seems to have the title of "largest" locked down, but it's a viable contender for "oldest" as well. It's at least worth a mention anyway.