National Geographic reports that scientists didn’t actually kill the world’s oldest animal, a clam, just to find out how old it was.
You may have seen the story of Ming given as:
At first there was nothing to suggest that Ming was any different to the other clams collected.
But in 2007, an initial count of the rings in its shell suggested the bivalve was a record-breaking 405-410 years old.
And now the elderly clam has made the headlines again, because a new more detailed analysis suggests it had lived for more than half a millennium.
The headlines around the world alleged that they had to kill it to see how old it was. People found that disturbing. But that’s not how it happened. It was just a data point in a larger study.
Contrary to news reports, the researchers say they did not kill the elderly clam for the ironic-seeming purpose of finding out its age.
“This particular animal was one of about 200 that were collected live from the Icelandic shelf in 2006,” explains climate scientist Paul Butler from the same U.K. university, who, along with Scourse, dredged up the clam as part of a research project to investigate climate change over the past thousand years.
All 200 clams were killed when they were frozen on board to take them home. They didn’t find out how old Ming was until they were back in the lab and looked at its shell under a microscope.
Unfortunately, we learn more about an animal when we can study a specimen upon death. Now we know that quahog clams live incredibly long. So even though this one was very old, there are definitely older ones out there. How else would we have found this out? Besides, there are lots of these animals, we eat them in chowder. They are yummy and we now can bank this information away for further use.