26 September 2023

This fish is older than I am


And her lineage is also interesting, because she is a lungfish.
"... Methuselah is the oldest living fish in captivity, aged somewhere upwards of 92 and potentially as high as 101 years. She arrived on a steamship from Australia along with 230 other fish to the Steinhart aquarium in San Francisco in 1938 as a young, small fish... she’s a lungfish – a species more closely related to humans or cows than to ray-finned fish like salmon or cod – which can breathe air using a single lung when streams become stagnant, or when water quality changes...

Lungfish like Methuselah have long-held secrets, but scientists have only recently attempted to understand their evolution and life history. For one thing, the fish’s genome is the largest of any animal, containing 43bn base pairs – roughly 14 times the number in the human genome. The previous record holder, the Mexican axolotl, has a genome made up of 32bn base pairs..."

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