BrainStuff Classics: What Is The Oldest Living Thing?

To be fair, the answer to this question depends on what you consider 'living' and 'thing' to mean. Learn a few possible answers in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren bog Obam here with a classic episode from the
vault our erstwhile host Christian Sager is exploring a tangly question,
what is Earth's oldest living thing? Hey, brain Stuff. It's

(00:23):
Christian Sager here. So as far as aging goes, humans
have it pretty good. I mean, we're no giant tortoises,
but we're generally capable of living for decades, some of
us for more than a century. Here at brain Stuff,
it got us thinking, what is the world's oldest living thing? Well,
that's a tricky question, and the answer depends on how

(00:44):
we define living and thing. First, let's tackle what we
mean by thing. If we say a thing could also
be a clonal colony, then the competition heats up quickly.
There are numerous plant and fungal clone colonies that have
been around for tens of thousands of years years, and
they're still barreling along. There's King Clone, the creosote bush

(01:04):
in the Mojave, almost twelve thousand years old. And we
can't forget Pando, the gigantic male quaking aspen clonal colony
in Utah. He is about eighty thousand years old. Incidentally,
he's also the heaviest living thing, weighing in around six
million kilograms. But what if we stick to single organisms.
If so, then the tiny end a liths are strong contenders.

(01:27):
These extreme aphile methuselahs like to kick back and take
it easy. For millions of years, they've lived a mile
and a half below the ocean floor, with metabolism slower
than molasses, only reproducing once every few centuries or millennia.
I mean that makes pandas look like rabbits. There's a big,
let's call it loophole in the definition of living dormancy.

(01:52):
What if something was frozen in time, trapped in stasis,
and then revived like Captain America or the Alien and
the Thing. In two thousand and eleven, then professor Brian
Schubert published a paper on just that he discovered bacteria
in what he called a kind of hibernation state inside
tiny bubbles of thirty four thousand year old salt crystals.

(02:13):
Other scientists have claimed to find older organisms, such as
the two hundred and fifty million year old bacteria in
southeast New Mexico, but Schubert's work was independently reproduced. So
if we allow an organism to take a time out
and spend thousands of years in stasis, there are loads
of competitors for the title of oldest living thing, many

(02:34):
of which may still lurk undiscovered in the isolated hinter
lands of Earth. You know, deep oceans, remote mountains, endless
Arctic wastes. Now I'm thinking of HP Lovecraft. Well, moving on,
There's one other important thing. Some organisms might be immortal. Now,
don't get jealous. We're not talking about some super sexy
vampire type immortality. No, we're talking about jellyfish, specifically, how

(03:00):
hydra and the tour autopsis story. The tour autopsis is
only four point five millimeters large, but capable of something
that may be unique in the animal world. After reaching
sexual maturity, it can revert to its polyp stage, it
can reverse and reset its aging cycle, rendering it biologically immortal,

(03:20):
and the hydra doesn't seem to age at all. That
means that potentially the oldest living organism could one day
be a jellyfish. But for now, even counting states of dormancy,
the oldest living, continually active things on Earth appear to
be the extreme file organisms collectively called endoliths. But of

(03:40):
course there may be something older, buried in time, dormant,
waiting for intrepid humans to wake it from its deathless slumber.
Today's episode was written by Joe McCormick and produced by
Tyler Lang. To hear morphrom Joe, check out his weird
science podcast Stuff to Blow your Mind wherever you tune

(04:02):
into podcasts this very perhaps, and of course, for lots
more on this and other well preserved topics, visit our
home planet, how Stuff Works dot com