Scientists Clone Oldest Living Organism

goran72 sends along the story of the world's oldest living organism, a shrub that grows in Tasmania and reproduces only by cloning. Tasmanian scientists have cloned Lomatia tasmanica as part of a battle to save it from a deadly fungus. From the RTBG's press release (which seems to load slowly in the US):"The Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens [RTBG] is working towards securing the future of a rare and ancient Tasmanian native plant... Lomatia tasmanica, commonly known as King's Lomatia, is critically endangered with less than 500 plants growing in the wild in a tiny pocket of Tasmania's isolated south west. The RTBG has been propagating the plant from cuttings since 1994... 'Fossil leaves of the plant found in the south west were dated at 43,600 years old and given that the species is a clone, it is possibly the oldest living plant in the world,' [Botanist Natalie Tapson] said."

Re:It's not the oldest living organism

[blueg3]

Oldest living single organism, not oldest species.

Re:It's not the oldest living organism

[Trepidity]

This is arguing something different--- not that it's the earliest-to-emerge species with still-living individuals, but that this particular individual is the oldest one still alive. That depends on your definition of "organism" and "individual" and such. Clonal colonies are a bit of an edge case--- they reproduce by continuously producing what could be seen as new individuals, or could be seen as just new branches of the original individual (they often come up from the same root system). To take a similar example, is Pando [wikipedia.org] a single organism with a lot of trunks, which has been alive for tens of thousands of years; or is it a colony of individual trees, each of which has been around a lot less long?

And you can find even more edge cases--- there are stable mats of seagrass that might be 100,000-year-old organisms, if you consider clonal colonies to be individual organisms.

List of long living organisms

[Powys]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_long-living_organisms [wikipedia.org]

Re:It's not the oldest living organism

[yincrash]

i believe they do core samples of the root systems and check rings. like ice cores. like all prehistoric analysis, it could be possible that 500 new rings grew in one year, but seeing as there is no evidence of that happening yet, it's improbable.

Re:why whatcouldpossiblygowrong?

[maxume]

Beer is a technology that employs biology.

Re:Way of the Dodo?

[Ian Alexander]

There's nothing unnatural about it at all. Cloning is a not-uncommon way for plants to reproduce. A branch falls off, and instead of dying, it just becomes a new plant. It isn't cloning in the specific way that us metazoans are cloned, but the net effect is the same- a new individual that's genetically identical to the originator. That's how Lomatia tasmanica reproduces and has reproduced for a long time now. All we've done is help it along since 1994.

Re:It's not the oldest living organism

[Dragonslicer]

The underlying assumption here of course is that each ring corresponds to one year.

And it's a reasonable assumption, since that's what has been observed in plants for a very long time.

Re:Way of the Dodo?

[mqduck]

It then feeds on the newly sentient species?

Re:Mucking with evolution

[bhartman34]

I think we can reasonably take "natural" as shorthand for "not influenced by humans".

How can that be reasonable when it is an absolutely false dichotomy?

People make the same error when it comes to "natural herbal supplements" vs. "drugs". (Chemicals are chemicals, no matter how they're created. If a compound has an effect on the human body, it can be toxic. Google "water intoxication". Anything "completely safe" is worthless, medically.) The actions of humans are no less "natural" than ants building a colony or beavers building a dam. We just happen to have the intelligence and opposable thumbs to manufacture more sophisticated materials.

We might have some competition for most disruptive force to ever appear on this planet (e.g. the first oxygen-exhaling organisms), but we're definitely the worst to appear in eons, and we're unique in that we're the first thing to appear that has a fair chance of killing off all life on the planet.

"Killing all life on the planet" ain't as easy as it looks. Even if we did our absolute worst and nuked each other all to Hell, while simultaneously letting global warming run amok, there would still be room, at the very least, for extremophiles [wikipedia.org].

Note: I'm not saying that's a good idea. I'm simply saying that one facet of human arrogance is the idea that we have the power to kill all life on the planet. We don't. You'd be almost as accurate if you said we had the power to destroy all life in the universe.

Basically what I'm saying is: come on, be reasonable. Of course humans are an abnormal influence on the planet.

Basically, you're incorrect.