Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren bog Obam here with a classic episode from the
Speaker 1: vault our erstwhile host Christian Sager is exploring a tangly question,
Speaker 1: what is Earth's oldest living thing? Hey, brain Stuff. It's
Speaker 1: Christian Sager here. So as far as aging goes, humans
Speaker 1: have it pretty good. I mean, we're no giant tortoises,
Speaker 1: but we're generally capable of living for decades, some of
Speaker 1: us for more than a century. Here at brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: it got us thinking, what is the world's oldest living thing? Well,
Speaker 1: that's a tricky question, and the answer depends on how
Speaker 1: we define living and thing. First, let's tackle what we
Speaker 1: mean by thing. If we say a thing could also
Speaker 1: be a clonal colony, then the competition heats up quickly.
Speaker 1: There are numerous plant and fungal clone colonies that have
Speaker 1: been around for tens of thousands of years years, and
Speaker 1: they're still barreling along. There's King Clone, the creosote bush
Speaker 1: in the Mojave, almost twelve thousand years old. And we
Speaker 1: can't forget Pando, the gigantic male quaking aspen clonal colony
Speaker 1: in Utah. He is about eighty thousand years old. Incidentally,
Speaker 1: he's also the heaviest living thing, weighing in around six
Speaker 1: million kilograms. But what if we stick to single organisms.
Speaker 1: If so, then the tiny end a liths are strong contenders.
Speaker 1: These extreme aphile methuselahs like to kick back and take
Speaker 1: it easy. For millions of years, they've lived a mile
Speaker 1: and a half below the ocean floor, with metabolism slower
Speaker 1: than molasses, only reproducing once every few centuries or millennia.
Speaker 1: I mean that makes pandas look like rabbits. There's a big,
Speaker 1: let's call it loophole in the definition of living dormancy.
Speaker 1: What if something was frozen in time, trapped in stasis,
Speaker 1: and then revived like Captain America or the Alien and
Speaker 1: the Thing. In two thousand and eleven, then professor Brian
Speaker 1: Schubert published a paper on just that he discovered bacteria
Speaker 1: in what he called a kind of hibernation state inside
Speaker 1: tiny bubbles of thirty four thousand year old salt crystals.
Speaker 1: Other scientists have claimed to find older organisms, such as
Speaker 1: the two hundred and fifty million year old bacteria in
Speaker 1: southeast New Mexico, but Schubert's work was independently reproduced. So
Speaker 1: if we allow an organism to take a time out
Speaker 1: and spend thousands of years in stasis, there are loads
Speaker 1: of competitors for the title of oldest living thing, many
Speaker 1: of which may still lurk undiscovered in the isolated hinter
Speaker 1: lands of Earth. You know, deep oceans, remote mountains, endless
Speaker 1: Arctic wastes. Now I'm thinking of HP Lovecraft. Well, moving on,
Speaker 1: There's one other important thing. Some organisms might be immortal. Now,
Speaker 1: don't get jealous. We're not talking about some super sexy
Speaker 1: vampire type immortality. No, we're talking about jellyfish, specifically, how
Speaker 1: hydra and the tour autopsis story. The tour autopsis is
Speaker 1: only four point five millimeters large, but capable of something
Speaker 1: that may be unique in the animal world. After reaching
Speaker 1: sexual maturity, it can revert to its polyp stage, it
Speaker 1: can reverse and reset its aging cycle, rendering it biologically immortal,
Speaker 1: and the hydra doesn't seem to age at all. That
Speaker 1: means that potentially the oldest living organism could one day
Speaker 1: be a jellyfish. But for now, even counting states of dormancy,
Speaker 1: the oldest living, continually active things on Earth appear to
Speaker 1: be the extreme file organisms collectively called endoliths. But of
Speaker 1: course there may be something older, buried in time, dormant,
Speaker 1: waiting for intrepid humans to wake it from its deathless slumber.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by Joe McCormick and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Lang. To hear morphrom Joe, check out his weird
Speaker 1: science podcast Stuff to Blow your Mind wherever you tune
Speaker 1: into podcasts this very perhaps, and of course, for lots
Speaker 1: more on this and other well preserved topics, visit our
Speaker 1: home planet, how Stuff Works dot com