A patch of Mediterranean seagrass could be up to 200,000 years old making it the oldest living creature on Earth, according to Australian researchers. The super-ancient patch of Neptune grass, a species of seagrass, spans 2,000 miles from Spain to Greece. Researchers previously estimated that several plant colonies like seagrass could live for thousands of years. While no individual part of a colony is alive for more than a fraction of the plant's life, these colonies contain genetically identical clones that propagate and reproduce asexually for thousands of years.
This seagrass lives in the Mediterranean Sea, where it forms large meadows that can weigh up to 6,000 tons, according to The Daily Telegraph. A recent study, Implications of Extreme Life Span in Clonal Organisms: Millenary Clones in Meadows of the Threatened Seagrass Posidonia oceanica, published in the journal PLoS ONE, analyzed the seagrass meadows and found that it is likely to be at least 100,000 years old, and could be up to 200,000 years old. “They are continually producing new branches," Carlos Duarte, one of the study’s authors, told The Daily Telegraph. "They spread very slowly and cover a very large area giving them more area to mine resources. They can then store nutrients within their very large branches during bad conditions for growth."WikipediaThe Trembling Giant is a colony of one Quaking Aspen tree, a kind of poplar, located in Utah. What appears to be thousands of multiple trees are stems from a single male tree that reproduces by a process called suckering. “An individual stem can send out lateral roots that, under the right conditions, send up other erect stems; from all above-ground appearances the new stems look just like individual trees,” Michael Grant, a professor of environmental, population and organismic biology at the University of Colorado, told BioScience. “The process is repeated until a whole stand, of what appear to be individual trees, forms. This collection of multiple stems, called ramets, all form one, single, genetic individual, usually termed a clone.”
This colony occupies 106 acres of space (43 hectares), and each stem lives for approximately 130 years.WikipediaKings Lomatia is a Tasmanian shrub discovered in 1937. Kings Lomatia has three sets of chromosomes, which renders it unable to produce sexually. When a branch falls off, it will generate new roots and turn into a new plant. Though it doesn’t have collective roots like some of the other colonies, each plant is still genetically identical, and the plant has been cloning itself for anywhere between 43,600 and 135,000 years. There is only one colony in the wild.WikipediaFound in Pennsylvania, the Box Huckleberry, a relative of the blueberry, forms large colonies, spreading out at a rate of several inches a year. The largest colony was over 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) long and estimated to be 13,000 years old. Another colony, over 1,000 years old and spread out over 10 acres (4 hectares), was declared a national landmark in 1967, and is protected by the Hoverter and Sholl Box Huckleberry Natural Area. Wikipedia
