What is the oldest living organism on the planet? | Hacker News Reader

What is the oldest living organism on the planet?

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156 pointsmiraj67 comments

I've been under the impression for many years that the oldest living organism on the planet was the giant underground fungus in Oregon.

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.

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!!!

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis...,

> "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.

> The biggest threat they faced was from erosion

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?

tl;dr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

"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. "

As always, if your curiousity is piqued by one of these articles, you really might as well do exactly what the journalist did and go to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-living_organis...

(My favourite thing from the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomatia_tasmanica)

To me, it's just an indicator of what an amazing time we live in, when almost any kind of information is just a few Google searches away (no sarcasm).

Also, I probably would never make these searches myself if this article wasn't written and appeared here.

That said, I admit Antarctic glass sponges deserve mention in the article.

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.

And when it becomes a multi-celled organism through various mutations?

If you could trace your lineage back to the first single-celled organism, would that make you the oldest lifeform on the planet?

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?

Well, the first of any living generation, sure.

We don't know that the first organism made it, perhaps it didn't. Or perhaps it divided many times before its line died out.

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.

At what point do you consider the bacterium dead? If it splits in two, you consider them both offspring and the parent is dead?

Somewhat related: last year a study showed that the oldest living vertebrates are Greenland sharks, which can attain ages of 400-500 years: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160811143218.h...

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.

The AnAge database may be of interest to those who like to think about this sort of thing.

http://genomics.senescence.info/species/query.php?search=Ani...

http://genomics.senescence.info/species/nonaging.php

Note the sponges, particularly this one:

http://genomics.senescence.info/species/entry.php?species=Sc...

"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."

Why be merely old when you can be immortal ? http://immortal-jellyfish.com/immortal-jelly-fish-life-cycle...

Age signifies the robusticity of a creature

I'd suppose you have to be both, for immortality to matter, since immortality alone doesn't confer invulnerability.

A related question which has always intrigued me:

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]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1PID91sEW8

DNA is probably your best bet for bottom up approach.

Its surprisingly difficult data to find and the rate probably varies a lot, but wikipedia claims:

"The human germline mutation rate is approximately 0.5×10−9 per basepair per year"

My RAID array does better, polaroid pictures somewhat worse, etc.

A bit error rate of 1e-9/yr is something that can be worked around over a lifespan but probably not over a million years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation_rate

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?

Ouch I did some research and found

"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?

> I think it would be hard to "infect" a species with stored data. ...

Yeah, but what about encoding a message/knowledge into the mating rituals of an species (or artificially-modified subspecies) from the start? [0]

> if the message were encoded into whatever makes an amoeba an amoeba, well, its definitely gone now.

Are we sure humans don't have any "useless" DNA? What about seemingly superfluous organs like the appendix?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14548854

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deletion_(genetics)

> 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?

I thought the oldest may be this 13000yo bush near Riverside California? http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/22/science/la-sci-oak23...

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...

There is an interesting video from It's Okay to be Smart on this topic;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgspUYDwnzQ

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.

The oldest living organism may well be the planet itself, though it may require a review of the term "living organism" :)

Although I haven't seen any post lately, I have been following this blog that describes some very old organisms around the world.

There is a description of Lomatia Tasmanica which is claimed to be 43000 years old. Obviously, growing clonally.

http://oltw.blogspot.de/

An American geographer killed the oldest confirmed bristlecone, Prometheus, which was even older than Methuselah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(tree)

Radiolab had a show on this story back in the day:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91722-be-careful-what-you-plan...

The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe also discussed the 80,000 year old clonal tree in a recent episode (I think the latest?). http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu

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.

You're not alone

I heard about it here, actually, in some podcast thread a year or two ago. It rapidly became my favorite podcast. 90 minutes every week!

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

Heh heh, how on Earth did you dig that comment up?

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.

a book about this very topic: http://www.rachelsussman.com/oltw/

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.

Fabulous... imagine if they were living and were able to talk about the eons they witnessed!

The transmittable dog cancer? It started about 11000 years ago. The cancer is an STD and the cells are all the same from the original dog.

Does 'reviveable' qualify as living? Some small organisms have been revived after over 100k years if I remember correctly.

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.

There's additional information on this incident in the link being discussed.

This link has some info on that: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-40224991

My vote would go to the cloning bacteria.

a programmer above the age of 37?

Gymnosperms – the marathon runners of the botanical world. Tré dope, mon dude.

How cavalier we are about taking life of other species.

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.

Really? What did you have for lunch today?

All the herbivores in Animal Kingdom would disagree with that statement.

No really. Go to /r/natureismetal and witness it for yourself.

Here is a goat eating baby chickens...http://imgur.com/kHJhMjW

Plants still count as life.

In many (most?) cases herbivores aren't taking the life of the plant.

Think of a squirrel, perhaps, and how it feeds on plants.

(Still don't agree with the GP)

Good point, but I think squirrels are a bad example. They're not only taking lives, they're killing the babies!

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.

Not sure I understand what you are trying to say. Herbivores, by definition, do eat living organisms (plants).

> We're arguably the least cavalier about taking life of any life on earth.

Fungi beat us in this respect. Most of them feed exclusively on dead matter.

But those that do? A fungal infection leading to death is a slow, horrible way to die.

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.

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