and you thought fish were fun!
photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA well this one has I guess a fun life, at an estimated age between 92 and 101 years, Methuselah, an Australian lungfish, (Neoceratodus forsteri), at the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, is allegedly the oldest fish held in captivity, the fish arrived in 1938, on a steamboat from Australia, along with 230 other fish, Methuselah is the only one of the fish still alive today, scientists believe it’s a female, although they can’t be sure, scientists usually harvest the ear bones of fish after their death and count them like tree rings to estimate their age, but lungfish have very different ear bones, “Genetics is really quite straightforward for normal fish – but for lungfish, they’re so unique and so different that all of those techniques didn’t or don’t work,” David T Roberts, a senior scientist with Seqwater, told The Guardian,
“It’s always pushed the envelope on uncovering some of its secrets to be able to manage and conserve it – and age is a really important one.”, lungfish can breathe air using a single lung when they are out of water or when the water composition changes, and they also happen to have the largest genome out of all known animals – 43 billion base pairs. That’s roughly 14 times the number of pairs in humans, so how long is Methuselah going to live? as it happens no one knows, but by all accounts she/he seems to be as lively as ever.
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