Animal Longevity Did you ever wonder how long animals live? This is not a trick question. The Mayfly has a life span of 24 hours. That is not much time for it to fulfill its wish list. I guess it doesn’t matter because I have it on good authority it is very short. Did you know there are some lizards with a year life span, if they are lucky. The Labord Chameleon is one of these unlucky creatures. Imagine dying of old age at a year old. We are finding out bees are far smarter than we first thought. The are capable of transmitting directions to other bees when they find succulent flowers. It is most amazing they can do this, but even more amazing when we realize their life span is only about three to six months on average but varies with the season. It seems they are born smart. If a worker bee is active in the winter it might live for as many as eight months. Studies have said the Giant Tortoises are the longest living land creatures. It is said the oldest one lived to be 250 years old. These creatures are mostly gentile giants. Some insects just have no luck with longevity. One of them is the drone ant. This winged creature lives only three weeks. It is always a male and has a job, which is reproduction to keep the colony growing. There are certain creatures in the sea that either reach older ages than land creatures, or will never die a natural death. Yes, they die if attacked or have an accident, but if not, they grow to a certain age and then begin to reverse age and start the cycle over again. These creatures are certain types of Jellyfish. This does make me wonder if there could be an alien race out in space, or even more than one, which lives forever maybe even by different means. The oldest lobster to ever be caught was said to be 140 years old. This would be about two lifetimes for the average person. Dive magazine featured an article about a Greenland shark scientists discovered that was ancient. The creature tested at 400 years old. Can you imagine a creature still alive which was born in the 1620s? You might be wondering how the experts could tell the age? They used radiocarbon dating of the creatures eye proteins. I for one never knew you could use a test like this to determine the age of an animal. What about ancient animals, particularly dinosaurs? I ask this question because people are very interested in them. It is much harder to figure out the life span of a creature which lived millions or hundreds of millions of years ago. Trying to infer a dinosaur died of old age is very difficult from just using such old bones. Scientists have used the metabolism of a particular species as an indication of the life span of the animal. They have made an educated guess of the lifespan of an Apatosaurus which is about 300 years. The truth is, we really can’t say with 100 percent accuracy. The guess for the famous Velociraptor lifespan was about ten years. Sometimes we find birds with long lives but we also find some with short lives. Since we think of ourselves as masters of this world, shouldn’t we have the longest span? Many scientists think so and are feverishly working on ways to make that happen. Will it happen for a select few, or be available to everyone? It might be very pricey and only those rich folk may be able to afford the treatment. We will have to wait and see on that one. Turkey buzzards have a life span over 100 years and they are not the only birds with longevity. Parrots also live that long. There is a story about Winston Churchill’s parrot. It seems Churchill was cursing the nazis a lot and when he died, another person got the parrot and was startled when he heard the parrots language and its curses against the Nazis. When you look at the television show, Swamp People, if you do, you will see it is about alligator hunting. It turns out the creatures can live between 30 to 50 years on average. Some of those big brutes they kill can be into their seventies. Now I know why they said on the show they can get smarter as they age. It is said the same thing is true for crocodiles. Did you ever wonder how to tell one from the other? The snouts are not a good way to do it using the animals from all over the world. In the United States you can see crocs have broad snouts and alligators pointer ones, but this is not true for many other world species. Alligators have wider upper jaws and narrower lower ones. Alligators usually have darker skin than crocs. Alligators average between 800 to 1,000 pounds, but crocs average 1,000 to 2,000 pounds. Crocs live longer than alligators with an average life span between 70 to 100 years. We tend to think of elephants as being able to live very long lives. They have a life span equivalent to our own. It is said their average life span is 70 years old if they are left to live it out. Unfortunately, it is nothing like that, because they have tusks and hunters kill them because of this. Between African and Asian elephants there are roughly 500,000 left in the world. In the last century the height of the population of elephants just in Africa was in excess of four million. This is not even counting the Asian elephants. When we think of insects, we think of creatures with a short lifespan and that is understandable since insects seem fragile, short lived creatures, but this is not true for all of them. The Golden Buprestid can outlive some people. It has a lifespan of up to 51 years. Their life is not that exciting however, since most of it is lived as a larvae buried in wood. Some of the queens in the insect world live far longer than the rest of the colony. Ant queens are said to be able to live up to 28 years, while termite queens can live for 30 years. We are not the kings and queens of longevity on this planet by any means, but we might learn how to increase our longevity by studying the animal world and figuring out how they do it.
|
