Nearly IMMORTAL Animals

Have you ever wondered just which animals are the closest to achieving immortality but haven’t had the brains to just Google it yourself? Not to worry, we’ve got the answers for you. Some of these creatures live an incredibly long time, and we even have one that is said to be biologically immortal! Can you guess what it is? We’re back again, this time with Nearly IMMORTAL Animals!
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5. Tortoise
We’ve probably all met a tortoise in our lifetimes, am I right? These slow-moving, sweet-acting giants are land-dwelling reptiles and are, obviously, shielded from predators with their great big shells! They’re generally reclusive and are known to be the longest-living land animal in the world. Different tortoises live different lengths of time. The Galapagos tortoise usually lives a little over 150 years whereas the Aldabra giant tortoise is thought to be able to live to be over 200! One Aldabra in particular, Adwaita, was said to have lived for 255 years at the time he left our planet to go slink around in the heavens among all of his fellow passed turtle brethren. It’s crazy to think that there are even some tortoises swimming around out there that were already here the year that Charles Darwin was born back in 1809, and will continue to be here for years and years to come. These guys live a long, long time and it seems as though you can tell when you meet one. I mean, they’re all wrinkled and crusty A-F, and they move like the folks you’d see in a nursing home.
4. Arctica Islandica
These clammy clam clams are also known as the ocean quahog and are native to the North Atlantic Ocean. They typically resemble the quahog—another clam—but they’re much rounder and don’t have a sinus. They live subtidally and can only be collected through dredging. They can grow to have shell heights greater than 50mm, and one individual specimen of ocean quahog was said to have lived to be 507 years old, making it the oldest non-colonial metazoan. The rings on their shells are thought to be markings like the rings found in a tree, with each ring marking another year spent here on good old planet Earth. They’re typically harvested commercially as a food source and just let that sink in for a minute: if you’ve ever eaten an ocean quahog, you could have been putting something that’s over 500 years old… in your mouth. Yikes. The ocean quahog: the slimy, shell-protected grandmothers of the sea.
3. Antarctic Sponge
These crazy-looking motha licka’s are made up with skeletons of silica, which is a mineral component found in glass! They’re located in Antarctica, which we bet you could have guessed, and typically grow really, reallllyyyy slowly. However, in 2013, some communities of Antarctic Sponges did double in biomass and triple in number over two growing seasons. They’re kinda famous for being some of the slowest growing creatures on Earth and have lifespans, not always, but sometimes, exceeding 1,550 years old! You heard me right, 1,550 years old! That means some of the specimens alive today could have also been around the first time smallpox ever hit Western Europe! These guys are here for a reason, and that reason is that they’re older than, well, everything, besides the last animal on this list.
2. Greenland Shark
Heyyyy, we’ve seen this guy recently! If you didn’t catch him in last weeks Talltanic collab, let us learn you a little bit of knowledge about this super cool, super long-living mother. These intimidating predators are a part of the family Somniosidae—also known as “sleeper sharks”—and they can be found mostly restricted to the frigid waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic Ocean. These old—like hobbit old—guys have the longest known lifespan of all of the different vertebrate species in the world. They are believed to be able to live upwards of 500 years, which, in our opinion, is mind-blowing. They live deep, deep in the water, and can grow up to 24 ft in length. They prey on mainly fish, but sometimes make snacks of parts of polar bears, moose, horses, seals, and one specimen was even found with an entire reindeer carcass inside! What they’re attracted to is the smell of rotting animals, so as long as you don’t go in any Arctic waters with gangrene, you should be okay. All jokes aside; with them living their shark lives in deeper waters, attacks on humans are pretty unlikely, which is good, because these things are nicknames sleeper sharks. Sounds like some new, horrifying government weapon if you ask us.
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