What Is The Oldest Fish Alive?
Researchers and scientists are both working hard to find out ways to know how to get the exact age of a living species. Animals living in certain conditions rarely approach their highest age. The death rates are very high due to mortality, diseases, predators, weather changes, habitat, and competition for food and shelter.
What is the oldest fish alive? Greenland shark is the oldest fish alive. They have been swimming during the Age of Englightenment and believed to live at least 272 years. It makes the species the longest-lived vertebrate in the world.
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In this short read, you will know some of the oldest living marine species in the world and their characters that make them unique.
Greenland Shark
The Greenland shark is known from the North Atlantic part of the world and known to be a slow swimmer. They move very slowly under the cold water at a speed of 1 kilometer per hour.
This pace is normal and has its reasoning. They do it to preserve their energy for hunting. The Greenland Shark is very unfortunate as from birth until the end of its life. It loses sight because of the parasitic crustacean eating its cornea.
Immortal Jellyfish
This type of jellyfish is a rare and bizarre one as it has a very unique feature. This jellyfish can rejuvenate and can return to a state of sexual immaturity after reaching maturity.
Whenever an Immortal Jellyfish encounter stress or physical attack, they return to asexual stage polyp through a cell development process called transdifferentiation. This process alters different stages of cell development, transforming them into new cells.
Orange Roughy
Orange Roughy is known to be around for 149 years. They can be found in different oceans across the world but stays and lives in very deep habitats. You can find them between 900 to 1,800 meters deep.
Sturgeon
This type of fish is related to caviar and belongs to one of the oldest families of bony fish across the globe. It doesn’t have scales like many fish and can reach up to 7 meters in length. Back in 2021, a sturgeon was caught and marked as 125 years old before releasing it back to the wild.
Koi Fish
Koi fish has a long history when it comes to fan fiction movies, especially in East Asian media. A koi lives for 25 to 30 years, but plenty of reported cases where a koi reaches over 200 years.
There was one famous koi in Japan, named Hanako which died back in 1977, and after studying the growth of her scales, it was found out that she was 226 years old.
Conclusion
Overall, there is still plenty of fish with their millennial age, and scientists and researchers are still finding some ways to verify it. It is still a mystery to them that they are adapting to the change happening in their surroundings.
The good news is, they are here to stay, and they hold the key in finding answers to these kinds of mysteries.
