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...

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

[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.

200,000 Years Old?

[omganton]

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

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?

Has a flavor

[bughunter]

How does it taste?

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

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: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.