Episode 364: Animals Who Will Outlive Us All
b"Thanks to Oz from Las Vegas for suggesting this week's topic!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nBobi, the supposed 'world's oldest dog' at 31, is little more than a shaggy dog story\\n\\nGreenland sharks live for hundreds of years\\n\\nScientists Identify Genetic Drivers of Extreme Longevity in Pacific Ocean Rockfishes\\nScientists Sequence Chromosome-Level Genome of Aldabra Giant Tortoise\\nGiant deep-sea worms may live to be 1,000 years old or more\\n\\nA Greenland shark [photo by Eric Couture, found at this site]:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe rougheye rockfish is cheerfully colored and also will outlive us all:\\n\\n\\n\\nAn Aldabra tortoise all dressed up for a night on the town:\\n\\n\\nEscarpia laminata can easily outlive every human. It doesn't even know what a human is.\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nThis 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\\u2019ll 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.\\nBut 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.\\nAnyway, back in the olden days when I was on Twitter all the time, I came across a tweet that\\u2019s still my absolute favorite. Occasionally I catch myself thinking about it. It\\u2019s by someone named Everett Byram who posted it in January 2018. It goes:\\n\\u201cDATE: so tell me something about yourself\\n\\u201cME: I am older than every dog\\u201d\\nNot 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\\u2019s some doubt about that particular dog\\u2019s actual age. Pictures of the dog taken in 1999 don\\u2019t actually look like the same dog who died in 2023.\\nThe 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\\u2019s still alive is Flossie, who was born on December 29th, 1995. If your birthday is before that, you\\u2019re older than every cat and every dog.\\nThe 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.\\nIt\\u2019s not uncommon for ordinary people to live well into their 90s and even to age 100, although after you reach the century mark you\\u2019re 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 beyond the lives of any dog or cat or most other humans. Staying physically active as you age also appears to be an important factor, so keep moving around.\\nBut there are some animals who routinely outlive humans, animals who could post online and say \\u201cI am older than every human\\u201d and the others of its species would laugh and say, \\u201cOh my gosh, it\\u2019s true! I\\u2019m older than every human too!\\u201d But they don\\u2019t have access to the internet because they are, for instance, a Greenland shark.\\nWe talked about the Greenland shark in episode 163. It lives in the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans where the water is barely warmer than the freezing point. It can grow up to 23 feet long, or 7 meters, with females being larger than males. Despite getting to such enormous sizes,"