Escarpia laminata, a type of tubeworm, living in perpetual darkness and lurking in the deep seas for about three centuries now has been hailed the Earth’s longest living creature.
The deep sea is home to a large number of long-living organisms, ranging from sharks and coral to octopuses and these tubeworms.
This is attributable largely, to the fact that as the temperature drops as depth increases, the animals’ metabolic rates follow suit and slow down. With many deep-sea critters, there is a gradient in relation to body size and depth, and how long they are likely to live.
But curiously for the tubeworms, they don’t follow this rule as some shallower species can still reach impressive ages.
It was for this very reason researchers, led by Alanna Durkin of Temple University, decided to focus on the strange bottom-dwelling animals in really deep water, and see if they could instead figure out just how old they do get.
The team’s work, published this month in The Science of Nature, determined that E. laminata might be the oldest species of tubeworm yet — some specimens had been alive for more than 250 years. One of their most interesting findings is that the death rate of E. laminata is extraordinarily
low: only 0.67 percent of each population dies yearly.“Given the uncertainty associated with estimating the ages of the longest individuals,” Durkin said in a press statement, “there may be large Escarpia laminata tubeworms alive in nature that live even longer.”
In the course of their study, the team collected and marked 356 tubeworms at different locations in the Gulf of Mexico and measured how much these grew over the course of one year. This method for modelling annual growth was first developed to calculate the age of Lamellibrachia luymesi. The average individual growth model was then extended to also include death rates and recruitment rates to construct a population-wide simulation. In the process, the age and growth rates of the individual tubeworms collected could be estimated.
While a 300-year-old tubeworm sounds impressive, what’s to consider are plants which obviously live much longer; giant sequoia trees, redwood trees, and some varieties of pine trees can live thousands of years. Compared to them, tubeworms (and us humans), live and die in the blink of an eye.
