How to live for centuries: common denominators of organisms with exceptional longevity (IMAGE)
Caption
Figure 1. 101 species with a maximum lifespan of at least 250 years. The maximum lifespan of humans is noted for comparison with other species. We obtained most maximum lifespan values from the AnAge database [14]. For the following species, maximum lifespan values were found in the indicated references: Juglans nigra, Fraxinus excelsior, Pinus sylvestris, Tsuga canadensis, Nyssa sylvatica, Olea europaea, Fagus sylvatica, Agathis microstachya, Pinus cembra, Juniperus communis, Dacrydium franklinii, Quercus velutina, Quercus montana, Quercus rubra, Quercus alba, Pinus rigida, Pyrus communis [15], Fitzroya cupressoides [16], Juniperus przewalskii [17], Pinus heldreichii, Quercus petraea [18], Acer pseudoplatanus [19], Liriodendron tulipifera [20], Quercus douglasii, Taxodium distichum [21], Posidonia oceanica [22], Pinus monophylla, Pseudotsuga macrocarpa [23], Pinus monticola, Pinus resinosa, Pinus aristata [24], Hydra magnipapillata [25], Monorhaphis chuni [26], Pinus tabuliformis [27], Welwitschia mirabilis [28], Ficus benghalensis [29], and Larrea tridentata [30]. For the remaining species shown on the figure that lack maximum lifespan values in the AnAge database, we found lifespan data in ref. [31]. Numbers on the side of each bar show the value of maximum lifespan for each species. The freshwater planarian Schmidtea mediterranea does not have a reported maximum lifespan in the AnAge database, and is considered potentially immortal [32]. Likewise, the jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii is considered potentially immortal [13]. We obtained the species images included from Phylopic, or from online resources under the creative commons license. Due to unavailability of Creative Commons Licensed images for Escarpia laminata, Cinachyra antarctica and Juniperus tibetica, we used Creative Commons Licensed images of their sister species Escarpia southwardae, Cinachyra australiensis and Juniperus virginiana, respectively. The image of Scolymastra joubini is taken from ref. [33]. The image of Juniperus tibetica is taken from https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/135889-Juniperus-tibetica/browse_photos. The figure was generated using R.
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Copyright: © 2026 Kapsetaki and Tavernarakis. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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