Australian Scientists Discover 'Oldest Living Thing On Earth'

New submitter offsafely writes "Scientists in Australia have discovered the oldest living life-form to date: a small patch of Ancient Seagrass, dated through DNA sequencing at 200,000 years old." Says the linked article: "This is far older than the current known oldest species, a Tasmanian plant that is believed to be 43,000 years old." What I want to know is, How does it taste?

Comments

wow

[irussel]

And here i was thinking they were talking about Joan Rivers...

Re:wow

[Tsingi]

Here's a tree that's 80,000 years old. Kind of conflicts with the 43,000 year number in TFA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

BS Summary and Article title

[Anonymous Coward]

the seagrass has been able to reach such old age because it can reproduce asexually and generate clones of itself. Organisms that can only reproduce sexually are inevitably lost at each generation, he added.

So actual news story is that Australian scientists have decided that a clone of an organism is the same organism, although they are not the same organism.

On a less snarky note, the article says it's the oldest living species. Which is a completely different story.

Re:BS Summary and Article title

[flyingfsck]

I'm sure you wife will think that explains it all.

Re:BS Summary and Article title

[Samantha Wright]

No, it's like saying you're 80,000 years old because a Neanderthal with the amazing ability to grow back both halves when cut up like a sea star/starfish has left you behind.

But don't take the Telegraph article too seriously: they couldn't even get the species name correct. (There's an 'a' on the end that's missing.) Here's the journal article in PLoS ONE.

Re:BS Summary and Article title

[Anonymous Coward]

This argument holds no water. Your cells replace almost completely every few years, does that make you a different organism than before?

Re:BS Summary and Article title

[flyingsquid]

There's pretty much no way these colonies can be 200,000 years old. During the last ice age, 15,000 years ago, the sea level was about 400 feet lower. That means that during the Ice Age, these seagrass meadows would have been on dry land, and you'd have regular old grass, not seagrass. There were literally Neanderthals and wooly rhinoceros walking around on this terrain. I was curious how the authors could possibly have missed this; it turns out they didn't; the Australian news article just does a bad job of summarizing the research.

From the PLOS article:

The scenario of a km-range spread achieved exclusively through clonal growth requires that the clones reach a minimum age of about 12,500 years. Applying the same estimates to the genets shared between the two pairs of meadows, located 7 km apart between Formentera and Ibiza and 15 km apart around a cape in Formentera (Fig. 3), yields a minimum age estimate between 80,000 and 200,000 years, projecting the origin of the clones well into the late Pleistocene. Although there is no biologically compelling reason to exclude this possibility, we consider it to be an unlikely scenario because local sea level changes during the last ice age (from 80,000 to 10,000 years) would place these sampling locations on land (the sea was 100 metres below its present level).

Anyway, it just drives home the point- if you really want to understand the issue, go back to the source material, not the media summary that was done on a tight deadline. It raises a question though- if seagrass really grows that slowly, how do you get these vast colonies? One possibility is storms. Since seagrasses are in nearshore environments, that means that storms can tear them up; currents can then pick up and move the plants, perhaps for miles. Every once in a while, some of those uprooted plants might luckily get transplanted into a hospitable habitat down current, and you can get a single colony rapidly spreading out over a huge area. Effectively, the plant could seed itself without actually using seeds.

Re:BS Summary and Article title

[rastos1]

So it depends on whether you have OEM or full license?

Clone Wars (or Sensationalist Headline)

[rodrigoandrade]

Just to be clear, the actual plant isn't nearly that old. The original plant that started the cloning process was 200,000 years old.

Re:Clone Wars (or Sensationalist Headline)

[Samantha Wright]

Transcription errors are inevitable in small quantities, but in general plant clones are considered one organism. Since we humans don't (except in severe obesity) generally grow by spreading around, it's hard for us to understand sometimes exactly what's going on here, but what happened is that the plant just kept putting down more roots and foliage, gradually covering a large area of the ocean floor. Then, chunks died off. It's not like it's some kind of sporing or budding process; except due to accident, the parts of a huge plant like this are always connected. Wikipedia's being unresponsive right now, but the largest trees and fungi in the world work the same way—and since their roots are buried way down underneath so much soil, we're not sure if they're still connected or not.

200,000 Years Old?

[omganton]

This "scientific discovery" directly conflicts with my belief that the entire universe is only 6000 years old.

Re:200,000 Years Old?

[mr1911]

The only reasonable conclusion is that scientists are heretics and must all be killed.

Re:200,000 Years Old?

[Samantha Wright]

Mother nature called. She said that was very quaint and reminded humanity as a civilization that it would not be getting any dinner for the next five hundred years unless it smartened up, bathed, and cleaned its room, and stopped making excuses about imaginary friends that live in the sky.

Re:200,000 Years Old?

[cupantae]

If someone says something is >6,000 years old, you should take that to mean, "God gave it an apparent age of X-6000 years at creation".

Endangered?

[kungfugleek]

FTA:

But Prof Duarte said that while the seagrass is one of the world's most resilient organisms, it has begun to decline due to coastal development and global warming. "If climate change continues, the outlook for this species is very bad," he said.

But if it's 200k years old, hasn't it already survived some serious climate change?

Re:Endangered?

[mr1911]

But if it's 200k years old, hasn't it already survived some serious climate change?

That was different. We're talking about man made climate change, which is obviously much worse and must be stopped.

Re:Endangered?

[cusco]

Yes, but previous changes took centuries and millenia, not decades. Species, even asexual ones like this, can adapt to slow change fairly well. Rapid change is generally catastrophic.

Re:Endangered?

[tnk1]

There has been at least one, and possibly a few supervolcanic eruptions in 200,000 years. The sharp climate change rate due to those would have made current global warming trends look like statistical noise in comparison.

That's not to say that humans can't affect species in specific ways all their own, but that requires the "standard climate disaster" warning to be modified to make that clear or some skeptics will start to have a point about the lack of rigor in statements coming from some scientists.

Re:Endangered?

[Samantha Wright]

It says the following in the journal article:

Nevertheless, even though such phenotypic plasticity possibly evolved across millennia, it may well be challenged by the unprecedented rate of environmental change imposed by current global climate change [55], including temperature increase and ocean acidification, and recent anthropogenic pressure on coastal areas resulting in changes in water quality, eutrophication, and nutrient load, particularly in seagrass meadows [56].

Please spend the rest of the day in silent introspection.

Re:Endangered?

[ArcherB]

In a sense, correct. Human-induced climate change threatens to happen far faster than natural climate change, over a period of decades or centuries rather than tens of millenia. That type of sudden shift doesn't occur naturally short of a globally significent event like a supervolcano eruption.

So have there been any supervolcano eruptions in the past 200,000 years that should have killed this plant off?

I'm not trying to debate the merits of global warming here. I'm just agreeing with the ancestors of this post who say that trying to pull the global warming debate into every single things is BS.

Re:Endangered?

[DerekLyons]

There's been plenty of dramatic short term changes too, like the Little Ice Age. Climate change, over the history of the Earth, happens at all manner of timescales - it's not the smooth(ish) sinusoidal wave many mistakenly view it as. Study this graph, which shows just the last two millenia for multiple examples.

Wrong

[koan]

First lets get this out of the way "Obligatory Dick Clark comment"

These plants haven't been cloning perfectly for 200,000 years, there is drift and errors in cloning too.

Re:Wrong

[Samantha Wright]

Newsflash: clones are never perfect anyway. The thing is, they've been physically attached this entire time. A plant 'clonally reproducing' is nothing more than one organism putting up a bunch of completely redundant backups. It may or may not partially die off due to an accident, but the thing is that it's a single network that's been fragmented by the passage of time, not an organism deliberately reproducing. Since the distinction where one organism ends and the next begins is a made up human one, you probably shouldn't waste your time trying to figure it all out. You should know, however, that biologists consider this to be or have been one organism.

species != organism

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Saying "older than the oldest known species" is silly, since we can be pretty sure from both fossil and genomic evidence that modern humans have been around for about 200k years, and we're a pretty young species. "The current known oldest organism" would have been better.

OTOH ... think about this for a moment. This plant came into existence around the time the first true humans were born. For all of human history, both the few thousand years of which we have records and the much longer span of which we don't, it's just been sitting there under the sea in its little patch of ocean, doing its thing. That's pretty damn cool.

Re:Already slashdotted, it seems

[AC-x]

Works fine here, must just be your connection. I don't think Slashdot traffic will be taking The Telegraph's website down any time soon :)

Ssshh , don't mention that!

[Viol8]

Much as I tend to agree with the global warming consensus , that particular type of sentence does unfortunately have a habit of appearing in a lot of enviromental/biological pieces these days. It seems to be almost a standard issue cut and paste warning that [insert species here] will be affected by climate change unless we DoSomethingNow(tm). And in so doing devalues any serious debate.

Re:Ssshh , don't mention that!

[Samantha Wright]

It's actually addressed meaningfully in the journal article. I won't quote the section at you since that would be spam, I've already done it, and I'm just compulsively replying to people because people being wrong on the Internet is clearly the noblest cause ever, but there you go: it is, in fact, the rate of change in environmental conditions, not merely that it's occurring.

Re:Ssshh , don't mention that!

[Anonymous Coward]

A guy is driving down the highway at 100 MPH. He's told that a sudden stop at this speed will kill him. "Nonsense," he says. "My speed has been 0 MPH before, and I didn't die then."

Re:Ssshh , don't mention that!

[radtea]

it is, in fact, the rate of change in environmental conditions, not merely that it's occurring.

Which would be weird, given the rate of current change is rather modest compared to the Dansgaard–Oeschger events and other natural climate fluxuations over the past 200K years, particularly in the Mediterranean basin.

Don't get me wrong: I'm (mildly) skeptical about AGW (I'm a computational physicist and a great deal of climate modelling is done by climatologists who are decidedly not computational physicists) but this running about in panic in response to the issue du jour is just sad. Not everything is caused by or related to the global climate change, and it really does cheapen the debate and coarsen the public's response to events when Every Single Thing is immediately related to (and blamed on) climate change.

I'd think it far more likely that any trouble this species is in is due to the profound ecological changes in the Mediterranean in the past century due to pollution and over-harvesting of fish and whatnot, but where's the sexy big-issue "society is to blame" in that?

Re:Ssshh , don't mention that!

[Samantha Wright]

Well, there's this. Which, I think, shuts down the entire conversation on its own empirical basis even if we don't understand why, but it doesn't let me make my favourite point ever about anthropogenic threats to the ecosystem: the Mediterranean is a lot dirtier than it was during the last D–O event. It seems to me not that the hilariously tragic loss in biological diversity of the next century will not be on our shoulders merely because we turned up the thermostat, but because we pumped in noxious fumes at the same time. (Have you ever seen one of those fantastically unnerving stories about the Mafia dumping nuclear waste into the sea? Yeah, gee, I wonder where all that goes...)

Screw tasting it

[WillgasM]

Let's smoke it!

Has a flavor

[bughunter]

How does it taste?

Well, if nothing's eaten it in 200ky, then it must taste pretty crappy.

Re:Has a flavor

[F34nor]

http://ctext.org/zhuangzi/tree-on-the-mountain

Zhuangzi was walking on a mountain, when he saw a great tree with huge branches and luxuriant foliage. A wood-cutter was resting by its side, but he would not touch it, and, when asked the reason, said, that it was of no use for anything, Zhuangzi then said to his disciples, 'This tree, because its wood is good for nothing, will succeed in living out its natural term of years.' Having left the mountain, the Master lodged in the house of an old friend, who was glad to see him, and ordered his waiting-lad to kill a goose and boil it. The lad said, 'One of our geese can cackle, and the other cannot - which of them shall I kill?' The host said, 'Kill the one that cannot cackle.'

Next day, his disciples asked Zhuangzi, saying, 'Yesterday the tree on the mountain (you said) would live out its years because of the uselessness of its wood, and now our host's goose has died because of its want of power (to cackle) - which of these conditions, Master, would you prefer to be in?' Zhuangzi laughed and said, '(If I said that) I would prefer to be in a position between being fit to be useful and wanting that fitness, that would seem to be the right position, but it would not be so, for it would not put me beyond being involved in trouble; whereas one who takes his seat on the Dao and its Attributes, and there finds his ease and enjoyment, is not exposed to such a contingency. He is above the reach both of praise and of detraction; now he (mounts aloft) like a dragon, now he (keeps beneath) like a snake; he is transformed with the (changing) character of the time, and is not willing to addict himself to any one thing; now in a high position and now in a low, he is in harmony with all his surroundings; he enjoys himself at ease with the Author of all things; he treats things as things, and is not a thing to them: where is his liability to be involved in trouble? This was the method of Shen Nong and Huang-Di. As to those who occupy themselves with the qualities of things, and with the teaching and practice of the human relations, it is not so with them. Union brings on separation; success, overthrow; sharp corners, the use of the file; honour, critical remarks; active exertion, failure; wisdom, scheming; inferiority, being despised: where is the possibility of unchangeableness in any of these conditions? Remember this, my disciples. Let your abode be here - in the Dao and its Attributes.'

My translation?

"If you want to live to be 200,000 years old, don't be anyone's bitch."

Re:Great, it's been found...

[bughunter]

It *is* a lawn...

Re:How do you define age though?

[The Wild Norseman]

Or are we just talking 200K years since its DNA was last involved in sexual reproduction?

Oh, that reminds me! My wedding anniversary is coming up soon...

Re:How do you define age though?

[tnk1]

That's a good point, but you know, if some human's body managed to survive 200,000 years by regenerating all of its cells in a configuration that allow it to remain almost unchanged in appearance and function over that time period, you might well consider that human to be 200,000 years old, even though not one atom of the human is the same as that of their body when they were in their first century of life.

If we define an individual as a process instead of as a static object, you can come up with different results for what you consider to be an individual. After all, even if not every part of us is recycled constantly, I'd say that most humans are not the same components that they were at any time in the past. Even the cells that don't go through normal cell division and death are probably made up of entirely different molecules and atoms than they had when you were born.

Re:Already slashdotted, it seems

[Samantha Wright]

The real deal is publicly accessible (I think.) You might find it more engaging!

Re:You're saying Joan Rivers is still alive?

[gmhowell]

I watched the Superbowl halftime show. I've SEEN the oldest living thing on earth, and it was DANCING.

You've seen the oldest thing on Earth which is still hot. There's a difference.

Betty White was in the halftime show?