• Question: What is the oldest living thing on earth??

    Asked by anon-187836 to Stewart, Miriam, Marton, Laura, Kathryn, David on 12 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Stewart Martin-Haugh

      Stewart Martin-Haugh answered on 12 Nov 2018:

      No one seems to know for sure: Wikipedia mentions 80,000 year old tree colonies, with connected roots. This kind of stretches the definition: each of the trees is connected and has the same genes and as trees die, others grow. But then, humans replace all their cells every 7 years, but we don’t think about this when we count our age!

      While looking into this I found that there is a tree in Sri Lanka planted in 288 BC, making it 2306 years old!
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaya_Sri_Maha_Bodhi

    • Photo: Miriam Hogg

      Miriam Hogg answered on 13 Nov 2018:

      Stewart has this one down. Tree colonies are thought to be the oldest living thing. These colonies are technically all one tree, it either grows a new tree from the roots of the original tree (which often spread out miles and miles), or it makes a clone sapling and uses a branch to drop it to the ground. (like how spider planets and strawberries reproduce by using ‘runner’ branches with clones of themselves attached)

      Even though the tree is growing clone versions of itself and some might be destroyed the tree as a whole has been around for 80,000 ish years.

      In terms of animals I think some types of octopus and lobster are technically immortal (but do get eaten and die of illness so most of those alive right now probably aren’t very old, a few hundred years or so at most). Tortoises can live a few hundred years or more.

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