Around three 100 ago , when Queen Anne was uniting England and Scotland , Voltaire was indite his works , and 60 years before the US would declare its independence from Britain , at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico a strange being was being take over .
survive in eonian darkness , under shell pressures , scientists have found one of thelongest - be creature on the satellite . Escarpia laminata , a type of tubeworm , are thought to know until 250 , though some larger specimens may reach historic period of up to 300 years old as they arise tardily in the frigid water supply . They have published their results inThe skill of Nature .
It was not long ago that investigator revealed that the Greenland shark , another creature of the inscrutable , is also one of the longest living . They happen that one female may have been up to 512 years older , cook it theoldest known vertebrate ever discovered , though the norm for the shark was think to have been only a slenderly more conservative 272 years of age , making the tubeworm not far off this criminal record .
The rich ocean is home to a particularly heavy number of long - experience organisms , ranging from shark and coral to octopus and these tubeworms . This is thought to be for the most part down to the fact that as the temperature drops as depth increases , the fauna ' metabolic rate follow suit and slow down . With many deep - sea critters , there is a gradient in relation to eubstance size and depth , and how long they are likely to populate .
But curiously for the tubeworms , they do n’t follow this rule as some shallower species can still hit telling ages . It was for this grounds that the researchers decided to focus on the strange bottom - domicile animal in really mystifying piddle , and see if they could instead figure out just how one-time they do get .
They caught and check 356 tubeworms belonging to the speciesEscarpia laminata , which tend to live in inhuman seeps between 1,000 and 3,300 meters ( 3,280 to 9,840 feet ) beneath the waves . Collected from various locations around the Gulf of Mexico , the team marked the tubeworms , and then let them get on with their life story . They tracked just how much the animals grow over a period of a class , in Holy Order to work out the speed at which the organism grow , before then being capable to reckon their long time based on their size .
They found that in relation to body size , the tubeworms were far old than the general formula would ordinarily prefigure . It seems there is much we do n’t yet empathize or know about the far reaches of our sea , or what other previous historic period fauna they may still be hiding .
