Well, they actually killed it in 2007, when they thought it was a merely stripling of 405 years, but a new analysis shows that it was actually 507 years old—the world’s oldest known animal.
It was a clam nicknamed “Ming” (species Arctica islandica), plucked from the sea floor, and, as The Daily Mirror reports (yes, I’ve confirmed it elsewhere), it was “born” in 1499. As the Mirror reports:
Ming saw off Queen Elizabeth I, the English Civil War, the entire Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and two World Wars.
But its life came to an abrupt end seven years ago when scientists from Bangor University dredged the seabed near Iceland as part of a study into climate change.
Not knowing the long life of the mollusc, researchers at Bangor University opened its shell for analysis, killing Ming in the process.
By counting the number of rings visible on the inside shell of the mollusc, they initially calculated that Ming was an incredible 405 years old.Scientists have now admitted they made a mistake- and now believe it to be 100 years older than first thought.
‘We got it wrong the first time and maybe we were a bit hasty publishing our findings back then,’ ocean scientist Paul Butler from Bangor University told ScienceNordic.
‘But we are absolutely certain that we’ve got the right age now.’
The problem with the original calculation was that some of Ming’s growth rings on the inside of the shell had become too compressed to be seen.
The researchers have now recalculated the age of Ming by looking at the growth rings on the outside of the shell.
Well, what they were supposed to do when they found it? Throw it back? They had to open its shell to determine its age, and by then it was too late to “save” it.
Naturally, the Daily Mirror emphasizes the demons in lab coats who snuffed out the venerable Ming:
“KILLED” is in caps. Those evil scientists!
It is sort of sad, but surely older clams of this species still lie on the sea floor.
And, for your delectation, here’s the only existing picture of Ming with the Mirror‘s caption:
Ming supposedly held secrets that can help us live longer:
By examining the oxygen isotopes in the growth rings, scientists can find out the sea temperature at the time when the shell came into being.
What’s even more fascinating, however, are the lessons that the Ming could teach scientists about ageing.
A few years ago, charity Help the Aged, gave the marine biologists from Bangor University £40,000 to investigate why this animal lives so long.
The charity hopes the university will be able to help unlock the secret to human longevity, or at least make old age a little more palatable.
The lesson it teaches me is that if you want to live a long time, you need to be a cold-water invertebrate with a slow metabolism.
This is the original
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031018212000302
Variability of marine climate on the North Icelandic Shelf in a 1357-year proxy archive based on growth increments in the bivalve Arctica islandica
Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology
Volume 373, 1 March 2013, Pages 141–151
Oh, the scientists weren’t evil, just merciless …
/@ | Barcelona
But it was an accident!
Poor Ming, he was a simple clam who enjoyed the ocean and filtering food from the bottom of the sea. Ming was best known for his contribution to the English language with metaphors like, “feeling clammy” and “clam up”.
Ming spent his last days outside his favourite sea home when he was swiftly and cruelly murdered by the hand of science.
RIP Ming the Clam.
+1
And “happy as a clam”.
And +2!
Yipes, that’s the phrase I usually use when someone asks how I am. I’ll find it more difficult from now on!
Looking forward to learning how Ming lived so long. Maybe long telomeres? Efficient mitochondria?
Anyway, so long, Ming.
Along these lines, an impatient scientist, Donald Currey, really did kill the oldest known tree at the time, a bristlecone pine that was 4000+ yrs old. The story I originally read many years ago was that he was doing a dendrochronology study and his coring drill broke. Rather than take the time to get a new one, he cut down the tree, which proved to be the oldest tree known. You can read about it on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29
Nowadays we know some clonal trees are older though no single part of them is as old as this tree was.
Good thing I did a screen refresh; I was just about to post that too.
And re. the clam, it looks about the same size as your run-of-the-mill clam headed to a chowder pot. Makes me wonder how old the typical clam at the seafood store is.
I’d hope it’s a bit fresher.
My favourite dead tree. It was already nearly a thousand years old when God sent the Great Flood to wipe out all life on the surface of the Earth….
… oh, wait.
Trees can swim?!
homo hubris
After reading this, I imagined what the accompanying photograph to this story might look like and immediately conjured a Gary Larsonesque cartoon wherein two scientists in lab coats are standing in the foreground, each holding half a shell with the caption “My data confirm that it’s definitely the oldest known animal ever: 507 years old!”
In the background is another scientist preparing to slide the lemon-juice-and-cocktail-sauce-prepared contents of his half shell down his throat and caught in a guilt-ridden sidelong glance towards the other two.
That’s funny.
I agree.
I feel quite badly for Ming, and wonder how many oldtimers end up in the pot of spaghetti and clams, one of my favourite dishes.
How come there is no other way to check for age other than opening it up and counting inside rings, especially if scientists were able to re-check the age using the outside rings on the shell? Not sure I understand that part of the article. Would something like x-ray/MRI (or whatever) work or would it hurt the clam? Might be too expensive/high tech to be practical though.
Mmmmm clam chowder. The proper kind without corn or weird puree. Those clams are small though so not the old timers.
Philosophically, though, why is it worse to kill an old clam than a young one?
(I do get the idea that it’s a needless end, after having lived through so very much else…)
“So very much”? This clam lay in the mud for 500 years straining plankton from seawater.
Ha!
Adds to my point, now that you mention it.
There are live colonies of deepsea zoanthids that settled when Rome was founded and black corals nearly 2k years older than that. Certainly this mollusk cannot be the world’s oldest animal. See Roark et al 2009 Extreme longevity in proteinaceous deep-sea corals. PNAS.
But the corals are colonies, right? Ming was a single organism.
Of tangential interest is the largest (and likely oldest) living organism on Earth: a fungus in Oregon
From Scientific American:
[The fungus] occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf…The discovery of this giant Armillaria ostoyae in 1998 heralded a new record holder for the title of the world’s largest known organism, believed by most to be the 110-foot- (33.5-meter-) long, 200-ton blue whale. Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well.
Not an animal of course and not as beautiful as a blue whale, bristle pine cone tree, or a clam but impressive nonetheless.
Reminds me of a classic Gary Larson cartoon. I cannot find it online, but it shows a man and a boy looking at the many rings of a huge tree that the man had cut down. The man is pointing at one of the rings. To paraphrase: “And this is where this magnificent tree miraculously survived a fire!”
The species of clam is a kind of Quahog. It is collected by dredging, and is an edible species.
Just poking around in Wikipedia, and learned the longevity of this clam is likely a case of negligible senescence.
Nice link, thanks.
Any word on how the chowder tasted?
Say goodbye to shellfish – with cold waters holding more dissolved CO2 these will be the last long lived shellfish –
Ocean acidification may increase 170 percent this century
http://phys.org/news/2013-11-expert-ocean-acidification-percent-century.html
Also on BBC website
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24904143
I too “want to live a long time”, and perhaps I would not mind “be a cold-water invertebrate with a slow metabolism”, but then commenting at WEIT …
… would …
… slow …
“The lesson it teaches me is that if you want to live a long time, you need to be a cold-water invertebrate with a slow metabolism.”
No, no, no. You’re learning the wrong lesson.
This should have taught you that science will stop at nothing to find even a single instance of climate change actually causing any kind of harm to anything. And it doesn’t even teach that because the harm wasn’t from climate change but from scientists!!1!11!
/denialism
I do not follow your argument – could you clarify what you mean?
He/She is poking fun at climate change denialists.
I hope the researchers at least had the decency to eat Ming and turn him into a human.
Deep sea octopuses also live longer (~2x?) than shallow-water octopuses, and they do have lower metabolisms. So, let all those who fear death take themselves to the deep ocean where they can chill for some extra decades of sweet, sweet, life.
And they’ll have yet another reason to fear global warming.
“The problem with the original calculation was that some of Ming’s growth rings on the inside of the shell had become too compressed to be seen.The researchers have now recalculated the age of Ming by looking at the growth rings on the outside of the shell.”
I’m confused. Why didn’t they just go right to counting the rings on the outside of the shell? They would have gotten the age right, and they would have spared this ancient mollusk’s life. Am I missing something?
According to the linked ScienceNordic article, opening these clams to date them is SOP because the inside of the shell is where the rings are (usually) clearest and easiest to count. (Rings on the outside are less distinct and less protected from environmental wear and tear.)
The researchers dredged up hundreds of clams. Logically, one of them had to be the oldest, but they didn’t know in advance which one that would turn out to be. They gave the name “Ming” posthumously to the oldest clam they found.
Since these clams are fished commercially, it’s quite likely that even more ancient mollusks regularly find their way into chowder pots with no one the wiser.
Gregory Kusnick has given good reasons below for counting rings on the inside of the shell. Mollusc shells are complex things, and their structure in detail can allow you to identify them to depressing detail even with quite fragmentary remains. I sometimes make a stab at it when drilling “clay with shell debris”, out of boredom.
But what I took away from the descriptions was that the intervals of highly compressed rings, comprising about a fifth of the animal’s life, were periods when it’s environment was so severe that growth almost stopped, and possibly even bad enough that the animal almost died. Several times.
This bullet-dodger of a pelycypod finally met a dredge net with his (her?) name on it. Very sad. So did another million or so on that fishing run.
Just one moment – aren’t there glass sponges who live some 10.000 years? And those are not colonies, but also single animals.
It would also probably be a good idea to keep out of sight. I guess the cold, dark high pressure ocean floor seemed like a great idea, and it worked for half a millennium. Just not out of sight enough these days. Do you suppose it was tasty?
“Well, what they were supposed to do when they found it? Throw it back? They had to open its shell to determine its age, and by then it was too late to “save” it.”
Couldn’t they have just counted the rings on the outside of the shell like they ultimately ended up doing? 🙂
And they said Ming was merciless. Cue Homer Simpson: “Doh! Crummy scientists!”
How did they know Ming’s name?
Good point since clams aren’t talkative (they “clam up”).
Tish!
“Ming saw off Queen Elizabeth I, the English Civil War, the entire Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and two World Wars.”
Wow, that’s quite a life for a clam.
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.
“The charity hopes the university will be able to help unlock the secret to human longevity, or at least make old age a little more palatable.”
If longevity entails sitting on the sea floor for centuries, eating mud – I have just one question: how does a clam end it all?
Chowder.
How big was it? Can’t find a decent size comparison.