The World’s Oldest Living Thing May Surprise You

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

The World’s Oldest living thing is Seagrass!

Would you have ever thought that the oldest living thing was Seagrass?

Learning about this surprised me. I am always curious about things I see or touch especially when I go to foreign lands that are so much older than the United States, it truly fascinates me.

So it got me thinking, just what is the oldest living thing? I was pretty surprised, but I guess I didn’t really have an expectation of what it would be. So when I started researching it, here is what I found.

So here are some fun facts about the oldest living thing on earth

So you may be asking, “just how old is old?” Well originally the oldest living organism was thought to be 43,000 years old and this is called the Tasmanian plant.

But upon further research, scientists have uncovered enormous patches of Seagrass in the Mediterranean Sea that have been recognized as the oldest living thing in the world! These patches of seagrass are thought to be 200,000 thousand years old as reported by the United Press International. WOW! I’m impressed, how bout’ you?

The age was determined by the researchers by using DNA sequencing from 40 various sites of seagrass patches over a span of 2000 miles. The span went from Spain to Cyprus. This information was stated by the New Scientist magazine.

This study which was published in the journal called PLos One, determined that these organisms considered to be the oldest living thing on the planet,  stretch from 12,000 to 200,000 years of age and a large number of the patches itself are thought to be somewhere around 100,000 years old! Once again, I’m impressed!

Another cool fact about our oldest living thing, it’s been determined that seagrass weighs a whopping 6,000 tons and stretches on for at least 10 miles long.

The patches are able to reproduce sexually, but they advance very slowly. After a time thought, the seagrass will cover a very large area.

One reason scientists think they have lasted so long, is that seagrass has the ability to store nutrients in their branches, the branches are pretty long, so this allows for storage and access to the nutrients. Carlos Duarte, a professor from the University of Western Australia made mention of this.

Something that isn’t so nice about our oldest living thing, is that even thought seagrass is able to survive for so long in harsh conditions, scientists are worried that our oldest living organism is at risk of declining because of the change in our global climate. Something we all need to be concerned about.

Professor Carolos Duarte said “if climate change continues, the outlook for this species is very bad. The seagrass in the Mediterranean is already in clear decline due to shoreline construction and declining water quality and this decline has been exacerbated by climate change.”

Let’s hope this doesn’t happen and be conscious to do our part when it comes to being “green” and living a chemical free life as much as possible.

I hope you enjoyed this information and fun facts about the oldest living thing in our world.