There are all kinds of strange creatures on the earth, and each species is unique in the face of nature's countless amazing life.
Some creatures are fleeting like mayflies, but there are also creatures that seem unremarkable but have an amazing ability to live a long life.
There are 8 of the world's most unexpected long-lived creatures, some of which are even thought to have escaped the grip of time, and can live for thousands or even 10,000 years.
Is eternal life real in this world?What kind of creature can live for 10,000 years?
In fact, the lifespan of ordinary birds is not very long, small birds such as sparrows only live for a few years, and larger birds such as eagle vultures live for only forty or fifty years.
But there is one bird that can live to be seventy or eighty years old or even longer, and it can be said to be the longest-lived bird in the world, and it is the macaw.
The biggest difference between macaws and ordinary parrots is their size, ordinary parrots are relatively petite, coupled with bright feathers, some can also learn to speak, and are deeply loved by bird keepers.
The macaw is a large bird that lives in the Amazon rainforest, and the world's largest parrot species, the Violet Blue Macaw, can even reach a body length of about 1 meter.
Friends who raise birds should have heard a sentence, that is, it is not recommended to raise macaws after the New Year, because it is not possible to tell who sent whom away.
The reason why macaws live so long is because of the environment they live in, the environment of the rainforest is not good for humans to survive, but it can be regarded as a paradise for macaws.
The most important thing in the Amazon rainforest is the huge but difficult to open fruit on the palm trees, which the animals that live here have no way to take it, but the macaw can easily open it.
Macaws, whose main diet is nuts, vegetables and fruits, are also health experts in human society, and this lifestyle also allows them to live much longer than ordinary birds.
What's more, macaws can be said to be invulnerable, other small animals are afraid of eating poisonous fruits, and they are careful every time they pick them, but only macaws are not afraid, after all, there is no way to take them with ordinary poisonous fruits.
When it comes to long-lived animals, there must be a place in the first animal that comes to mind that belongs to the tortoise.
There is a saying in China that "the thousand-year-old king is eighty-thousand-year-old tortoise", which means that the tortoise usually looks motionless, but can live for dozens or hundreds of years.
Turtles have even been synonymous with longevity throughout history, but in modern times, we have more technical means to know how long a creature has survived in the world.
To date, we know that the longest-lived terrestrial tortoise is an Aldabra tortoise named Advita.
When the tortoise was found, it was known that it had lived for many years, but it was not known how old it was.
Later, experts used carbon measurements to determine Advita's age, and at that time it had survived for more than 250 years, and Aldabra was born roughly during the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty in China.
The average tortoise lives for about 100 years, but this tortoise was more than 200 years old, and after the death of two generations of its owners, Advita was taken to the zoo and passed away in 2006.
Bowhead whales are one of the world's most resilient creatures, spending their entire lives roaming the cold waters of the Arctic.
In the harsh living environment, bowhead whales can still compose the music of life, and the sound of bowhead whales is known as the most complex and beautiful music in the ocean.
Bowhead whales are amazed not only by their large bodies and beautiful singing voices, but also by their incredible longevity, bowhead whales are the longest-lived mammals on the planet.
In 2007, a bowhead whale was caught off the coast, and on its body a harpoon dating back to the 19th century was found.
This shows that this bowhead whale was at least more than 100 years old when it was caught, and it is very likely that it has reached the age of 200 years.
After professional testing, it was found that the age of this bowhead whale is more than 200 years old, because of living in a cold environment, the metabolism of bowhead whales is relatively slow, which also makes their lifespan much longer than that of ordinary whales.
For those who like to eat seafood, it is also said that sea urchin is a very familiar delicacy, and people only know that sea urchin is delicious and nutritious, but they do not know that sea urchin is also one of the longest-lived animals in the world.
The appearance of the sea urchin is actually to tell people that this is a creature that has existed since ancient times, as early as 5Sea urchins existed on Earth 700 million years ago.
Nowadays, there are nearly 1,000 species of sea urchins found in the world, and the longest-lived species of sea urchin is red sea urchin.
Red sea urchins in the shallow waters off the Pacific coast are particularly long-lived, with marine zoologists finding that the longest-lived ones have lived for more than 200 years.
The long-lived animals in the ocean are not only these, it is known that the longest-lived vertebrates on the earth are also in the ocean, and the average lifespan of the Greenland sleeping shark is basically more than 200 years, and some can even live to be four or five hundred years old.
Greenland sleeping sharks live in the deep waters of the Arctic and North Atlantic, and similar to bowhead whales, they have a slower metabolism because they live in cold waters.
Slow metabolism and less damage to biological tissues are the reasons why bowhead whales and Greenland sleeping sharks live longer.
But what Greenland sleeping sharks don't have is bowhead whales, which is a special ability to repair their DNA damage, plus the ability to resist disease, which makes them long-lived.
More than 10 years ago, a Danish oceanographer measured the age of 28 Greenland sleeping sharks and found that all the sleeping sharks at that time had a lifespan of more than 100 years.
One of them has a lifespan of nearly 400 years, and the expert also said that due to technical limitations, the measurement data may have some errors.
But one thing that is certain is that the oldest Greenland sleeping shark at that time lived between 270 and 520 years.
Although sponges are the simplest and arguably the most primitive of multicellular organisms, they have a fairly large family and have a long lifespan.
In the long history of the earth, countless organisms have evolved, and the sponge organism is just a loose aggregate of cells, but it has also undergone evolution.
In the course of evolution, sponge organisms have developed a large number of symbiotic relationships with aquatic microorganisms, and have escaped multiple mass extinctions, and have existed on Earth for more than 500 million years.
Sponge creatures are actually a bit like coral, although they are both animals, but they look very much like plants.
Glass sponges are a type of sponge organism that lives in the icy waters of the western Pacific Ocean, and are called "glass" sponges because the overall skeleton of this sponge creature is made up of silica bone needles.
In a study 11 years ago, experts said they had found a glass sponge that had been alive on Earth for 11,000 years.
It's not uncommon for sponges to live long, but this glass sponge has been around since we were primitive societies.
This glass sponge has a lifespan of more than 10,000 years, but it is not a creature capable of "immortality".
In 2010, in Nature and Science, a related researcher published an article saying that there is a creature that can theoretically achieve immortality.
This creature is called the lighthouse jellyfish, this creature gets its name from its appearance, because the body is transparent, you can see the red digestive system in the body, and the overall shape looks like a lighthouse in the sea, so it is called the lighthouse jellyfish.
The reason why researchers claim that lighthouse jellyfish can achieve immortality in the theoretical sense is that they can "grow in reverse" when threatened.
When all kinds of creatures are threatened, they have their own way of escaping, such as cuttlefish will spew ink to cover their escape.
When an adult lighthouse jellyfish is threatened, it will retract itself into a cyst and regrow into an adult jellyfish when the danger is gone.
Scientists believe that this unique ability, if kept circulating, could lead to theoretical immortality.
However, more scientists do not agree with this theory, because the research that can be done at this stage does not prove that the morphological transformation of lighthouse jellyfish is unlimited.
Theoretical immortality is almost impossible for lighthouse jellyfish to achieve, but hydroids are different, and many people believe that hydroids are the creatures that can truly achieve immortality theoretically.
Hydra is an invertebrate animal that is tiny from our point of view, but this little thing is thought to be able to achieve immortality.
Hydra is believed to be theoretically immortal because most of its body is made up of stem cells.
The regenerative ability of this cell is very powerful, and it is able to produce daughter cells that are exactly the same as themselves, which also causes the hydra to continuously produce the same cells that replace the original cells in the body.
Theoretically, this ability allows polyps to maintain their bodily functions at their peak, and in short, polyps do not age.
But why keep emphasizing theoretical immortality, because there is nothing in this world that will not affect the existence of all the time.
The regeneration and repair ability of hydra is indeed very strong, and even after the head is cut off, the body can induce the regeneration of a new head, and then carry out the differentiation and regeneration of other tissues.
However, the hydra can continue to differentiate and regenerate when it is not affected by the outside world, but the reason why it cannot achieve immortality in the true sense is that this creature will die if it is seriously threatened or hit.
For human beings, the pursuit of a healthy body and a longer life span is an eternal study, and from the known life forms, we see the greatness of the life force.
There are still many things in this world that we don't know, and perhaps in the future, human beings will be able to grasp the secrets of genes and go one step further on the road to eternal life.