It was a baby clam when Shakespeare was writing great plays and the first Queen Elizabeth ruled.
And now it is dead, having been dredged up off Iceland's coast. But before that, it lived a long life, which is believed to have lasted over four centuries.
It was nicknamed Ming by scientists because its 405- to 410-year lifespan began during the Ming Dynasty's rule of China. A researcher from north Wales's Bangor University, Dr. Alan Wanamaker, came up with its age by counting the rings on its shell.
Prior to Ming, the longest-living clam known, according to the Guinness Book of Records, was a 220-year-old found in 1982. There was, however, a clam in an Iceland museum, unofficially estimated to be even older, at 374.
Chris Richardson, a professor at the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor University, commented to the BBC about how the increments of growth revealed by the rings give a record of how the longest-living animal altered in its rate of growth as the years went by. "They are like tiny tape-records...," he said, in which food and water temperature are indicated.
The School of Ocean Sciences was dredging the seabed to the north of Iceland when a haul of 34 live mollusks and 3,000 empty shells were obtained. Ming died before his age was noticed.
Professor Richardson and his group at Bangor found it intriguing that the clams escaped growing old. This posed a question of the cell turnover rates involved. How long did each cell in the animal survive before replacement?
The answers may assist humanity. Bangor University was the recipient of money from the United Kingdom charity Help the Aged. If clams' long-life secrets can be gleaned, the aged will most definitely be helped in return.
One of the answers to the question of longevity is easy: clams live safe and quiet lives most of the time. Others are more elusive. Richard Faragher, a Brighton University gerontologist who has been working with the team from Bangor, notes that what needs to be learned is how the ocean quahog keeps its strength, avoids cancer, and retains its nervous system intact.
— Douglas Chapman
Telegraph. co.uk, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/28/nclam128.xml, 10/31/07
BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7066389.stm, 10/28/07