Hightlight
- Earth is a place with varied and diversified flora and fauna
- The Oldest Organisms must be protected from extinction
- Hunting of endangered animals is to be banned all over the world.
The oldest living human is said to have lived around 122 years. This might be a great achievement if we look at the average age around which humans live. But for other living organisms, touching a hundred is merely surpassing their childhood. The oldest organism on earth is not an animal but someone along the lines of trees, molds, or bacteria. The list is relatively long if we were to find out the oldest living organism in every species of flora and fauna. Therefore let us look at six of the most fascinating oldest living organisms in the world.
Oldest Organisms on Earth
1. Box huckleberry
This rare plant, native to North America has had quite a dramatic life of its own. It is said to be around thirteen thousand years old and is related to blueberries and huckleberries. It belongs to the Gaylussacia brachycera species and its age is determined by its size. The plant was believed to be extinct during the ice age. However, in the 1920s, Harvey Ward found a 6500 feet long colony in Losh Run, Pennsylvania, USA. This brought the Box Huckleberry back into the limelight and is now surviving in part in the protected Losh Run area as one of the oldest organisms on Earth.
2. Ice Age Flower
In the cold regions of Russia exist the oldest revived plant on Earth. It is famously known as the Ice Age Flower. This 32,000-year-old plant came into being when Russian scientists revived this plant from 32,000-year-old seeds from the Ice Age Fruit found in a burrow underneath the Siberian permafrost. The modern counterpart of the Ice Age Flower still grows in Northeastern Siberia and is very similar to its old sibling.
3. King’s Holly ( King’s Lomatia)
The King’s Holly or King’s lomatia found in the Southwest National Park in Tasmania is the solitary existing example of Lomatia tasmanica in nature. There are less than 500 plants left in a mysterious area of the recreation center, which is believed to be clones of a single King’s Holly that is around 43,600 years of age. It is assessed that every individual plant in the state has a life expectancy of around 300 years; however, the King’s Holly keeps on cloning itself.
4. Pando
We have only heard of organisms being 50,000 years old in cartoons or animated series. However, there is a name on the world’s oldest living organism list that is as old as 80,000 years. This honor is reserved for the Pando or as it is famously known ‘the trembling giant. Pando is said to the single living organism that shares an enormous underground root system. It is also the heaviest living organism on earth weighing in at 6,000,000 kilograms (6,600 short tons).
5. Ancient Bacteria
Until now we were looking at the oldest organism on Earth who aged around thousands of years. However surprising it may be there are organisms that are millions of years old. The Ancient Bacteria is believed to be 25-35 million years old. This bacterium was also revived like the Ice Age flower in 1995 by Raul Cano and his team. The bacterium was revived through its spores from ancient bees that were encased in amber from the Dominican Republic.
6. Basin Bristlecone
the Great Basin Bristlecone Pine or Pinus longaeva is one of the oldest living trees on Earth and is found in the higher mountains of California, Nevada, and Utah. The tree even though is only 4,852 years old gets to be on the top of the list for being the oldest known living non-clonal organism on Earth. The known age of this tree is said to be 4,852 years however Tom Harlan, a researcher with the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research found a specimen of this tree that was 5,062 years old in 2010. The identity of the specimen was kept secret by Harlan and is still unknown. Their average age is said to be around 2000 years old.
Conclusion
With this, we have looked at some of the most peculiar and fascinating oldest organisms on Earth. They are all unique in their own way and still continue to grace the planet in their carefully protected habitats. Most of them are endangered and protected under government acts. The search for an even older organism will never end since the organisms of the Earth never fail to amaze us.
