Scientists Clone Oldest Living Organism

goran72 sends along the story of the world's oldest living organism, a shrub that grows in Tasmania and reproduces only by cloning. Tasmanian scientists have cloned Lomatia tasmanica as part of a battle to save it from a deadly fungus. From the RTBG's press release (which seems to load slowly in the US):"The Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens [RTBG] is working towards securing the future of a rare and ancient Tasmanian native plant... Lomatia tasmanica, commonly known as King's Lomatia, is critically endangered with less than 500 plants growing in the wild in a tiny pocket of Tasmania's isolated south west. The RTBG has been propagating the plant from cuttings since 1994... 'Fossil leaves of the plant found in the south west were dated at 43,600 years old and given that the species is a clone, it is possibly the oldest living plant in the world,' [Botanist Natalie Tapson] said."

Comments

Re:It's not the oldest living organism

[Trepidity]

This is arguing something different--- not that it's the earliest-to-emerge species with still-living individuals, but that this particular individual is the oldest one still alive. That depends on your definition of "organism" and "individual" and such. Clonal colonies are a bit of an edge case--- they reproduce by continuously producing what could be seen as new individuals, or could be seen as just new branches of the original individual (they often come up from the same root system). To take a similar example, is Pando a single organism with a lot of trunks, which has been alive for tens of thousands of years; or is it a colony of individual trees, each of which has been around a lot less long?

And you can find even more edge cases--- there are stable mats of seagrass that might be 100,000-year-old organisms, if you consider clonal colonies to be individual organisms.