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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren bog Obam here with a classic episode from the

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Speaker 1: vault our erstwhile host Christian Sager is exploring a tangly question,

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Speaker 1: what is Earth's oldest living thing? Hey, brain Stuff. It's

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Speaker 1: Christian Sager here. So as far as aging goes, humans

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Speaker 1: have it pretty good. I mean, we're no giant tortoises,

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Speaker 1: but we're generally capable of living for decades, some of

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Speaker 1: us for more than a century. Here at brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: it got us thinking, what is the world's oldest living thing? Well,

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Speaker 1: that's a tricky question, and the answer depends on how

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Speaker 1: we define living and thing. First, let's tackle what we

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Speaker 1: mean by thing. If we say a thing could also

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Speaker 1: be a clonal colony, then the competition heats up quickly.

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Speaker 1: There are numerous plant and fungal clone colonies that have

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Speaker 1: been around for tens of thousands of years years, and

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Speaker 1: they're still barreling along. There's King Clone, the creosote bush

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Speaker 1: in the Mojave, almost twelve thousand years old. And we

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Speaker 1: can't forget Pando, the gigantic male quaking aspen clonal colony

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Speaker 1: in Utah. He is about eighty thousand years old. Incidentally,

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Speaker 1: he's also the heaviest living thing, weighing in around six

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Speaker 1: million kilograms. But what if we stick to single organisms.

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Speaker 1: If so, then the tiny end a liths are strong contenders.

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Speaker 1: These extreme aphile methuselahs like to kick back and take

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Speaker 1: it easy. For millions of years, they've lived a mile

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Speaker 1: and a half below the ocean floor, with metabolism slower

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Speaker 1: than molasses, only reproducing once every few centuries or millennia.

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Speaker 1: I mean that makes pandas look like rabbits. There's a big,

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Speaker 1: let's call it loophole in the definition of living dormancy.

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Speaker 1: What if something was frozen in time, trapped in stasis,

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Speaker 1: and then revived like Captain America or the Alien and

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Speaker 1: the Thing. In two thousand and eleven, then professor Brian

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Speaker 1: Schubert published a paper on just that he discovered bacteria

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Speaker 1: in what he called a kind of hibernation state inside

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Speaker 1: tiny bubbles of thirty four thousand year old salt crystals.

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Speaker 1: Other scientists have claimed to find older organisms, such as

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Speaker 1: the two hundred and fifty million year old bacteria in

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Speaker 1: southeast New Mexico, but Schubert's work was independently reproduced. So

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Speaker 1: if we allow an organism to take a time out

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Speaker 1: and spend thousands of years in stasis, there are loads

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Speaker 1: of competitors for the title of oldest living thing, many

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Speaker 1: of which may still lurk undiscovered in the isolated hinter

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Speaker 1: lands of Earth. You know, deep oceans, remote mountains, endless

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Speaker 1: Arctic wastes. Now I'm thinking of HP Lovecraft. Well, moving on,

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Speaker 1: There's one other important thing. Some organisms might be immortal. Now,

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Speaker 1: don't get jealous. We're not talking about some super sexy

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Speaker 1: vampire type immortality. No, we're talking about jellyfish, specifically, how

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Speaker 1: hydra and the tour autopsis story. The tour autopsis is

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Speaker 1: only four point five millimeters large, but capable of something

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Speaker 1: that may be unique in the animal world. After reaching

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Speaker 1: sexual maturity, it can revert to its polyp stage, it

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Speaker 1: can reverse and reset its aging cycle, rendering it biologically immortal,

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Speaker 1: and the hydra doesn't seem to age at all. That

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Speaker 1: means that potentially the oldest living organism could one day

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Speaker 1: be a jellyfish. But for now, even counting states of dormancy,

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Speaker 1: the oldest living, continually active things on Earth appear to

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Speaker 1: be the extreme file organisms collectively called endoliths. But of

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Speaker 1: course there may be something older, buried in time, dormant,

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Speaker 1: waiting for intrepid humans to wake it from its deathless slumber.

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Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Joe McCormick and produced by

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Speaker 1: Tyler Lang. To hear morphrom Joe, check out his weird

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Speaker 1: science podcast Stuff to Blow your Mind wherever you tune

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Speaker 1: into podcasts this very perhaps, and of course, for lots

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Speaker 1: more on this and other well preserved topics, visit our

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Speaker 1: home planet, how Stuff Works dot com