Today’s Fun Biology Facts come from PuffHo, which gives a list (it’s been replicated elsewhere) of the world’s oldest individual organisms (or, in some cases, clones). These come from a book by artist Rachel Sussman to be published by the University of Chicago Press on April 14: The Oldest Living Things in the World. (the spruce in the fourth picture below graces the cover).
Sussman notes that it took her five years to travel the world and photograph these amazing organisms. The book’s foreword is by Carl Zimmer.
Here are five examples and one eucalyptus that isn’t pictured because it’s too rare.
I can understand the omission of the eucalyptus. When I visited the bristlecone pine forest in the White Mountains of California, which are said to include the oldest single individuals of any species, I inquired about the oldest pine—”Pine alpha”—and was told that it was a secret. Wikipedia gives its age:
A specimen of Pinus longaeva located in the White Mountains of California is 5,063 years old, from measurements by Tom Harlan.The identity of the specimen is being kept secret by Harlan. This is the oldest known tree in North America, and the oldest known individual tree in the world, although a clonal individual, nicknamed “Old Tjikko”, a Norway spruce in Sweden is 9,550 years old.
You really must make the drive up to the bristlecone forest if you’re anywhere near Death Valley or the Owens Valley in California. It’s fantastic. The trees are old and gnarled, fighting for life in a dry, cold environment. And of course Pine Alpha will remain a secret, because if people knew where it was, they’d take bark samples, carve their names into it, and god knows what else.
But I digress: here’s a sample of old organisms (plants and one bacterial colony) from Sussman’s book. The captions are from PuffHo, probably written by Sussman:
La Llareta: 2,000+ years old (Atacama Desert, Chile)
“”What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a very dense, flowering shrub that happens to be a relative of parsley, living in the extremely high elevations of the Atacama Desert.”
Stromatolites: 2,000-3,000 years old (Carbla Station, Western Australia)
“Straddling the biologic and the geologic, stromatolites are organisms that are tied to the oxygenation of the planet 3.5 billion years ago, and the beginnings of all life on Earth.”
These colonies are the oldest known fossil life on Earth—about 3.5 billion years old—and they are cyanobacteria, formerly known as blue-green algae, that form the stromatolite mats. It’s amazing that these mats still exist in a few places on earth as living organisms.
Welwitschia Mirabilis: 2,000 years old (Namib-Naukluft Desert, Namibia)
“The Welwitschia is primitive conifer living only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola where moisture from the sea meets the desert. Despite appearances, it only has two single leaves, which it never sheds. National plant of Namibia.”
This spruce (clearly “Old Tikko”), is almost twice the age of Pine Alpha, but it’s said to be clonal (see above):
Spruce Gran Picea: 9,550 years old (Fulufjället, Sweden)
“This 9,950-year-old tree is like a portrait of climate change. The mass of branches near the ground grew the same way for roughly 9,500 years, but the new, spindly trunk in the center is only 50 or so years old, caused by warming at the top of this mountain plateau in Western Sweden.”
Pafuri Baobab: Up to 2,000 years old (Kruger National Park, South Africa)
“”This baobab lives in the Kruger Game Preserve in South Africa and requires an armed escort to visit. Baobabs get pulpy at their centers and tend to hollow out as they grow older. These hollows can serve as natural shelters for animals, but have also been appropriated for some less scrupulous human uses: for instance, as a toilet, a prison, and a bar.”
Here’s one I’d like to see, but understand why it’s not pictured. I wonder if it’s clonal, for it’s older than Pine Alpha by a long shot.
Rare Eucalyptus (species redacted for protection): 13,000 years old (New South Wales, Australia)
“This critically endangered eucalyptus is around 13,000 years old, and one of fewer than five individuals of its kind left on the planet. The species name might hint too heavily at its location, so it has been redacted.”
I only wish she hadn’t tried to explicate her work in a rather pompous way. The biology stories and pictures are wondrous enough without this leaden prose:
My practice is contextualized by the multidisciplinary inquiries of Matthew Ritchie and the new conceptualism of Taryn Simon and Trevor Paglen, who likewise gain physical access to restricted subjects and illustrate complex concepts with photographs supported by text. The work spans disciplines, continents, and millennia: it’s part art and part science, has an innate environmentalism, and is underscored by an existential incursion into Deep Time. I begin at ‘year zero,’ and look back from there, exploring the living past in the fleeting present. This original index of millennia-old organisms has never before been created in the arts or sciences.
I approach my subjects as individuals of whom I’m making portraits in order to facilitate an anthropomorphic connection to a deep timescale otherwise too physiologically challenging for our brain to internalize. . . .