Wanamaker added that several research teams want to study the tissue of living quahog clams to tease out the secret. "It is possible that an investigation of the tissues of these real-life Methuselahs might help us to understand the process of aging," team member Chris Richardson said in a media statement. Scientists believe the secret to the clams' longevity is a slowed cell-replacement process. "I think in my stomach if you start getting up around 600, then maybe that would be the maximum-but that's just pure speculation," he added. "There's probably many others that are actually quite older-we just haven't found them yet," Wanamaker said. The animal died when the researchers counted its rings. The new clam is at least 30 years older, according to the Bangor University team. Unofficially, the record belongs to a 374-year-old Icelandic clam housed in a German museum. Quahog clams are known for their longevity.Ī 220-year-old taken from American waters in 1982 holds the official Guinness Book of World Records oldest animal title. By this reckoning, the clam would be only the oldest non-colonial animal. Some protest the "oldest animal" designation, saying it should go to certain corals that grow together to form colonies. "On a side note, we discovered this very old clam," said Al Wanamaker, a postdoctoral researcher at the university. The team is studying growth lines in clam shells as part of a project to understand how the climate has changed over the past thousand years.
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The team plucked the mollusk from 262-feet-deep (80-meter-deep) waters off the northern coast of Iceland. When this animal was young, Shakespeare was writing his greatest plays and the English were establishing their first settlements in the Americas.
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A clam dredged from icy Arctic waters is being hailed as the world's longest-lived animal.Ĭlimate researchers at Bangor University in the United Kingdom recently counted 405 annual growth rings in the shells of a quahog clam.