X-Message-Number: 29985
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:50:43 -0800 (PST)
From: 
Subject: Clam -- 405+ Years Old

Longest Living Animal? Clam -- 400 Years Old -- Found In Icelandic Waters
ScienceDaily (Oct. 29, 2007) - A clam dredged from Icelandic waters had
lived for 400 years - is this the longest-lived animal known to science?

Can you imagine living for four centuries?  A team of scientists from Bangor
University's School of Ocean Sciences believe they have found an animal
which did just that, a quahog clam, Arctica islandica, which was living and
growing on the seabed in the cold waters off the north coast of Iceland for
around 400 years.

When this animal was a juvenile, King James I replaced Queen Elizabeth I as
English monarch, Shakespeare was writing his greatest plays Hamlet, Othello,
King Lear and Macbeth and Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake for
espousing the view that the Sun rather than the Earth was the centre of the
universe.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, the existing record for the
longest-lived animal belongs to a 220 year old Arctica clam collected in
1982 from American waters.  Unofficially, the record belongs to a 374 year
old Icelandic clam which was found in a museum.  Both these records appear
to have been eclipsed by the latest specimen, whose age, between 405 and 410
years, has been assessed by counting the annual growth lines in the shell.
The Bangor scientists are sclerochronologists who study the growth and age
of clams using annual growth lines in the shell in much the same way as
dendrochronologists study the growth of trees using tree-rings.  Clam shell
growth is related to environmental conditions such as seawater temperature,
salinity and food availability.  The team analyse the shell growth histories
with a view to understanding changes in the ocean linked to climate change.
The clam was dredged up  by Team members Paul Butler and James Scourse
during a data collection cruise in Icelandic coastal waters in 2006 which
formed part of the EU MILLENNIUM project investigating climate changes over
the last 1000 years.    The exciting discovery was made by postdoctoral
scientist Al Wanamaker, the newest member of the 'Arctica' team.   "Al and
Paul rushed up to my office to announce that they had found a
record-breaker," said team member Chris Richardson.  A detailed assessment
later confirmed that, at 400 years, the clam had beaten the previous record
by a massive 30 years!!
It is very likely that longer lived individuals of the species remain to be
found.  Although Icelandic waters seem to provide the ideal conditions for
extreme longevity, clams with lifetimes well in excess of 200 years have
been found both in the Irish Sea and the North Sea.
So why do these clams live so long? The Bangor scientists are intrigued to
find out and believe that the clams may have evolved exceptionally effective
defences which hold back the destructive ageing processes that normally
occur.  "If, in Arctica islandica, evolution has created a model of
successful resistance to the damage of ageing, it is possible that an
investigation of the tissues of these real life Methuselahs might help us to
understand the processes of ageing," explains Chris.
 This ageing aspect is now going to be funded by a new grant to the team
from Help the Aged.
Adapted from materials provided by Bangor University

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