Updates from Derren Brown and the Enigma Crew

Picture by Manu San-Felix

You think your wrinkly Nan is old? Not even! There are organisms, mainly plants, who are thousands of years old, even tens- or hundreds of thousands. At The Guardian we can read that scientists have found a 15 kilometre long patch of Mediterranean Seagrass near a Spanish island, with the beautiful Latin name Posidonia oceanica, of an extraordinary age. This patch of underwater salad may be up to 200.000 years old! A grand old breaking of the previous record of seagrass lifespan, which was recorded in Tasmanian waters and sat at around a measly 40.000 years of age. Barely out of nappies that one!

You may wonder whether  a single blade of seagrass is really as old as the dawn of the homo sapiens? Well, rest assured, no single blade is. Seagrass clones itself over vast stretches of seabed, growing by a dazzling speed of around 13 centimetres a year and is constantly nibbled away at by predators, destroyed by changing environments or gone old and mushy, leaving no single blades to become as ancient as our entire race. Regardless, this same patch of seagrass has been cloning (or simply “regrowing”) its exact, identical DNA for over all that time.

Compare it to the human body. You may have heard the myth that human cells are completely replaced every 7 or 10 years. This is false, but it does give some insight in how we can claim that the seagrass is the exact same organism for that long a period of time, even though its cells have been replaced many times over. In the case of human beings, our most important brain and heart cells don’t ever see replacement, they just die off. We call that forgetting. However, other parts of our body see a replenishment of cells up to 10% a year (like fat cells), effectively recreating parts of our human body over time. Unfortunately for us, this copying is fraught with errors, and gives us the concept of ageing or even cancer. Now imagine you’re all body, no brain, like the seagrass and you keep replicating over and over and over and over… Then yes, the seagrass is 200.000 years old.

As one scientist said in more detail;

“The finding of the ancient seagrass also illustrates the danger us humans pose to vulnerable ancient ecosystems. With our destructive fishing trawlers that needlessly destroy the ecosystems of the sea floor and the way we alter the climate with our rising CO2 emissions, of which most is stored in the oceans and seas, causing ocean acidification and uninhabitable dead-zones, we have caused a decline in seagrass development of 10% in the Mediterranean alone. And don’t forget the warming of the oceans happens at the same time. No wonder we are causing the largest era of biodiversity loss in millions of years. One even this hardy old patch of seagrass will likely not survive.”

Also check out this wondrous TED talk by artist Rachel Sussman, who is documenting the oldest living organisms and how they are under threat.