Man and Mystery v15 Near-Immortals by Pablo C Agsalud Jr Rev 06.pdf

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A collection of intriguing topics and fascinating stories
about the rare, the paranormal, and the strange
Near Immortals
Volume 15
Discover nature’s weirdest and longest-lived creatures.
Jump into the world of lost civilizations and extinct animal kingdom.
Pablo C. Agsalud Jr.
Revision 6
Foreword
In the past, things like
television,
and words and
ideas like
advertising, capitalism, microwave
and
cancer
all seemed too strange for the ordinary
man.
As man walks towards the future, overloaded with
information, more mysteries have been solved
through the wonders of science. Although some
things remained too odd for science to reproduce
or disprove, man had placed them in the gray
areas between
truth
and
skepticism
and labeled
them with terminologies fit for the modern age.
But the truth is, as long as the strange and
unexplainable cases keep piling up, the more likely
it would seem normal or natural. Answers are
always elusive and far too fewer than questions.
And yet, behind all the wonderful and frightening
phenomena around us, it is possible that what we
call
mysterious
today won’t be too strange
tomorrow.
This book might encourage you to believe or refute
what lies beyond your own understanding.
Nonetheless, I hope it will keep you entertained
and astonished.
The content of this book remains believable for as
long as the sources and/or the references from the
specified sources exist and that the validity of the
information remains unchallenged.
Longest-living Things
Ancient trees, long-lived shrub and oldest living animals .
List of long-living organisms
Wikipedia.org
This is a list of the oldest individual lifeforms. This is usually defined as:
Having a longer life span than any other known individual
Longevity record-holders
Biological immortality
If the mortality rate of a species does not increase after maturity, the species does not age
and is said to be biologically immortal. There are many examples of plants and animals for
which the mortality rate actually decreases with age, for all or part of the life cycle.[1] Coral
colonies and aspen trees are the clearest examples. Some large trees may routinely grow in
size for decades, while their mortality rates decrease. Some sources say that sharks, too,
grow larger in size while their mortality rate decreases, for long periods of their lives.
If the mortality rate remains constant, the rate determines the mean lifespan. The lifespan can
be long or short, even though the species technically "does not age". There are many
examples of species for which scientists have not detected an increase in mortality rate after
maturity. An alternative explanation for this phenomenon may be that the mean lifespan of
the species is so long that the modern scientific study of longevity and senescence has not yet
matured enough itself to measure longevity in the species.
Sanicula
is a herb, native to Europe and the Americas, which lives about 70 years in
the wild. Old saniculae do not die at a higher rate than younger ones.
Sea urchins, lobsters
and some
clams
have relatively high rates of mortality in the
ocean, but mortality does not appear to increase with age.
Hydras
were observed, in a study published in the journal Experimental Gerontology,
for four years without any increase in mortality rate.
There are stranger examples of species that have been observed to regress to a larval state
and regrow into adults multiple times:
The Hydrozoan species
Turritopsis nutricula
is capable of cycling from a mature
adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again. This means that there may be
no natural limit to its life span. However, no single specimen has been observed for
any extended period, and it is impossible to estimate the age of a specimen.
The
larvae of carrion beetles
have been made to undergo a degree of "reversed
development" when starved, and later to grow back to the previously attained level of
maturity. The cycle can be repeated many times.
Revived into activity after stasis
Various claims have been made about reviving
bacterial spores
to active metabolism
after millions of years. There are claims of spores from amber being revived after 40
million years, and spores from salt deposits in New Mexico being revived after 240
million years. These claims have been made by credible researchers, but are not
universally accepted. In a related find, a scientist was able to coax 34,000 year old
salt-captured bacteria to reproduce and his results were duplicated at a separate
independent laboratory facility.
A seed from the previously extinct
Judean date palm
was revived and managed to
sprout after nearly 2,000 years.
Silene stenophylla
was grown from fruit found in an ancient squirrel's cache. The
germinated plants bore viable seeds. The fruit was dated to be 31,800 years old ± 300
years.
In 1994, a seed from a
sacred lotus
(Nelumbo nucifera), dated at roughly 1,300
years old ± 270 years, was successfully germinated.
Clonal plant colonies
As with all long-lived plant and fungal species, no individual part of a clonal colony is
alive (in the sense of active metabolism) for more than a very small fraction of the life
of the entire clone. Some clonal colonies may be fully connected via their root
systems, while most are not actually interconnected, but are genetically identical
clones which populated an area through vegetative reproduction. Ages for clonal
colonies, often based on current growth rates, are estimates.
Pando
is a
Populus tremuloides
(Quaking Aspen) tree or clonal colony that has
been estimated at 80,000 years old. Unlike many other clonal "colonies" the above
ground trunks remain connected to each other via a single massive underground root
system. Whether it is to be considered a single tree is disputed, as it depends on one's
definition of an individual tree.
The
Jurupa Oak colony
is estimated to be at least 13,000 years of age, with other
estimates ranging from 5,000 to 30,000 years.
A huge colony of the sea grass
Posidonia oceanica
in the Mediterranean Sea is
estimated to be between 12,000 and 200,000 years old. The maximum age is
theoretical, as the region it occupies was above water at some point between 10,000
and 80,000 years ago.
King's Lomatia
in Tasmania: The sole surviving clonal colony of this species is
estimated to be at least 43,600 years old.
Eucalyptus recurva:
clones in Australia are claimed to be 13,000 years old.
King Clone
is a creosote bush (Larrea tridentata) in the Mojave desert estimated at
11,700 years old. Another creosote bush has been said to be 12,150 years old, but
this is as yet unconfirmed.
A
Huon Pine colony
on Mount Read, Tasmania is estimated at 10,000 years old, with
individual specimens living to over 3,000 years.
Old Tjikko,
a Norway Spruce in Sweden, is a tree on top of roots that have been
carbon dated to 9,550 years old. The tree is part of a clonal colony that was
established at the end of the last ice age. Discovered by Professor Leif Kullman, at
Umeå University, the tree is located in the county of Dalarna in Sweden. Old Tjikko is
small, only 5 metres (16 ft) in height.
A
box huckleberry
bush in Pennsylvania is thought to be perhaps 8,000 years of age.
An individual of the fungus species
Armillaria solidipes
in the Malheur National
Forest is thought to be between 2,000 and 8,500 years old. It is thought to be the
world's largest organism by area, at 2,384 acres (965 hectares).

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