Scientific Discoveries: The World’s Oldest-Recorded Living Animal Was Killed By Researchers
Bangor UniversityThe shells of Ming the clam.
When researchers cracked open Ming the clam in 2006, they had no idea what they had gotten themselves into.
Named after the Chinese dynasty age in which he was born, Ming the clam is the world’s oldest recorded animal. However, the 507-year-old ocean quahog (Arctica islandica) met his untimely death when the scientists who studied him accidentally killed him.
When news of the clam’s ill-fated end broke, several headlines criticized the scientists. They claimed that Ming was killed just to see how old it was.
In 2007, the researchers discovered that Ming was not like the other ocean quahogs that they had plucked from the sea. The first examination into Ming’s age, figured out by counting the number of rings on its shell, placed the clam somewhere between 405 and 410-years-old.
Unfortunately, to appropriately study the clams, their shells must be removed and placed under a microscope. Until Ming’s shell was underneath the researchers’ microscope, they had no idea that they had miscounted the number of rings, as some of them were too narrow. Further examination revealed that the clam was actually 507-years-old. Scientists had just dismembered the world’s oldest known living animal.
But it turns out that ocean quahogs are known for their long life spans according to a 2011 study. So it is common to find members of the species that are older than 100.
According to James Scourse, a marine geologist and researcher on the project that killed Ming, if you’ve eaten clam chowder, you might have eaten an animal just as old as Ming:
“The same species of clam are caught commercially and eaten daily; anyone who has eaten clam chowder in New England has probably eaten flesh from this species, many of which are likely several hundred years old.”
Ming was just the oldest quahog that the researchers happened to find. Because of the ocean quahog’s longevity, the possibility that Ming was the oldest one in the whole ocean is “infinitesimally small.”
