I would like to begin by making it clear that Ming the clam was not killed with any malice. Scientists at Bangor University were studying the ocean quahog clams (Arctica islandica) to investigate both climate changes in the ocean and the process of aging. It was only upon Ming's unfortunate death that its remarkable age was known.
Ming (so named as it would have begun it's life at the time of the Chinese Ming dynasty) has been making headlines recently as the oldest individual animal who's age could be accurately recorded, making it to around 507 years before being dredged up off the coast of Iceland. This species of clam are notoriously long-lived, in all probability Ming's much older relatives are still living content lives on the ocean floor.
Longevity in individual animals is of great interest to scientists. As we as a species are living longer, it benefits us to see how other creatures cope with the metabolic stress of lives spanning centuries.
Adwaita the Giant Tortoise reached 255 years
Giant tortoises are probably the most well known terrestrial animals to hit the two century mark, the most famous being Adwaita the male Aldabra Giant Tortoise. When he died in the Alipore Zoological Gardens in India in 2006 his age was estimated at 255 years, putting the average Blue Peter pet to shame. A pet of Clive of India, he was moved to the zoo in 1875, over a 100 years after his initial owner's suicide.
For marine animals however a couple of centuries of life is not uncommon. Specimens of black corals (Antipatharia) have been identified as the oldest continuously living animal on the planet - 4,265 years old being the key number here. To give a sense of scale, this coral began life in the late Bronze age, a millennium before the human population even reached 50 million.
On land, individual plants have become famous for their age. The UK boasts two of the top ten oldest individual trees in the world, with the Fortingall Yew (Perthshire, Scotland) clocking in at around 2500 years and the Llangernyw Yew ( Llangernyw, North Wales) thought to be over 4000 years old. Both are Taxus baccata, an ancient yew species not uncommon in European churchyards.
The exact location of the single most ancient individual tree in the world is kept secret to protect it from overenthusiastic tourists. It is know though that there is a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine (Pinus longaeva) who's ring count put it at 5063 years old. Located somewhere in the White Mountains of California, this tree was growing at the same time the pyramids were constructed.
Once we leave the world of individual creatures, longevity is expected. The world of colonial organisms is fascinating, from the world's largest organism (an individual fungus of the species Armillaria solidipes that covers 2,384 acres beneath the Malheur National Forest) to pine colonies in Tasmania estimated at 10,000 years old (individuals within the colony living to over 3,000 years).
These colonies can be fully connected via their root systems, and whilst at any given time only a fraction of the colony is "alive" in the sense of having an active metabolism, the colony is one genetically identical system. This can make calculating the age of colonial plant systems difficult, especially as the ages get more and more extreme, due to the many climate changes that they have likely survived through.
Pando - a colonal colony of Quaking Aspen
In the Fishlake National Forest, Utah, lives a colony know as The Trembling Giant, or Pando (latin for "I spread"). This clonal colony covers 106 acres, weighs 5900 tonnes, and has over 40,000 trunks emerging from the ground. All this is interconnected by a single root system. It is this one root system that allows Pando to break the record for oldest organism, estimated at 80,000 years old (some recent debate suggests it may be even older than that).
For those of you struggling to imagine just how long those same Quaking Aspen(Populus tremuloides) roots have been living and growing, eighty thousand years ago we as a species were thinking about leaving continental Africa.
These organisms have grown and thrived through millennia of human progress and spread. Likely they will continue well after we are done on this planet - as long as we can leave them well enough alone.
