Episode 364: Animals Who Will Outlive Us All

Thanks to Oz from Las Vegas for suggesting this week's topic! Further reading: Bobi, the supposed 'world's oldest dog' at 31, is little more than a shaggy dog story Greenland sharks live for hundreds of years Scientists Identify Genetic Drivers of Extreme Longevity in Pacific Ocean Rockfishes Scientists Sequence Chromosome-Level Genome of Aldabra Giant Tortoise Giant deep-sea worms may live to be 1,000 years old or more A Greenland shark [photo by Eric Couture, found at this site]: The rougheye rockfish is cheerfully colored and also will outlive us all: An Aldabra tortoise all dressed up for a night on the town: Escarpia laminata can easily outlive every human. It doesn't even know what a human is. Show transcript: Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw. This week we have a great suggestion by Oz from Las Vegas. Oz wanted to learn about some animals that will outlive us all, and gave some suggestions of really long-lived animals that we’ll talk about. We had a similar episode several years ago about the longest lived animals,where for some reason we talked a lot about plants, episode 168, but this is a little different. But first, a quick correction! Last week we talked about the dodo and some of its relations, including the Nicobar pigeon. I said that the Nicobar pigeon lived in the South Pacific, but Pranav caught my mistake. The Nicobar pigeon lives in the Indian Ocean on the Nicobar Islands, which I should have figured out because of the name. Anyway, back in the olden days when I was on Twitter all the time, I came across a tweet that’s still my absolute favorite. Occasionally I catch myself thinking about it. It’s by someone named Everett Byram who posted it in January 2018. It goes: “DATE: so tell me something about yourself “ME: I am older than every dog” Not only is it funny, it also makes you thoughtful. People live a whole lot longer than dogs. The oldest living dog is a chihuahua named Spike, who is 23 years old right now. A dog who was supposed to be even older, 31 years old, died in October of 2023, but there’s some doubt about that particular dog’s actual age. Pictures of the dog taken in 1999 don’t actually look like the same dog who died in 2023. The oldest cat who ever lived, or at least whose age is known for sure, died in 2005 at the age of 38 years. The oldest cat known who’s still alive is Flossie, who was born on December 29th, 1995. If your birthday is before that, you’re older than every cat and every dog. The oldest human whose age we know for sure was Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years. We talked about her in episode 168. The oldest human alive today, as far as we know, is Maria Branyas, who lives in Spain and will turn 117 years old on her next birthday in March 2024. It’s not uncommon for ordinary people to live well into their 90s and even to age 100, although after you reach the century mark you’re very lucky and people will start asking you what your secret for a long life is. You might as well go ahead and make something up now to tell people, because it seems to mainly be genetics and luck that allow some people to live far...