Some birds can live, oh, fifty, maybe a hundred years. I forget what kind, but I think they can be trained to talk, so that should narrow it down.
Hey, it’s not much of an answer, but it’s better than parrotting everyone else’s.
So what? You think you’re special or clever? You want a cracker for your efforts?
Hijack: These fish and turtles that don’t age, or age very slowly, what do they have that we don’t? Is there any way we can use our knowledge of them to improve the human genome to prevent or slow ageing?
How old are you? Need to make calculations…
The article I linked to in my first post, originally published in the scientific magazine Discover, discusses what helps these turtles live without aging and what some teams are doing to try to apply it to humans.
Enjoy,
Steven
Whales are actually the longest-lived mammals (tho of course I’d need a very big swimming pool to have one as a pet).
I found this mention of a koi that apparently was 226 years old when it died.
There’s a billion heartbeat rule. Virtually all mammals have a life expectancy that’s about the same amount of time it takes their heart to beat a billion times. Small mammals tend to have rapid heart rates and short lives. Big mammals have slower heart rates and longer lives.
The exceptions are primates. Chimps and gorillas last for about one and a half billion heartbeats and humans last for about two billion heartbeats.
I shoulda seed that comin’. :rolleyes:
Lobsters can live to be over 100, though I don’t know if I’d want a pet that was quite so delicious. One drunk hungry night and I might do a terrible, terrible thing to Mr. Nipper.
Because the fish and turtles don’t need to age, mainly.
See, at first, creatures just grow. From childhood to adulthood, they grow bigger all over. And in theory, if we rearranged some genetic factors, we could keep growing indefinitely. Just keep growing new cells at a faster rate than the old ones die. However, if a creature grew like that in normal conditions, they’d die, soon enough, simply because their bones couldn’t support their mass, and because their blood vessels couldn’t pipe blood to their extremities fast enough. This is because of the square cube law–that is, because the proportional mass grows as a cube, but the proportional strength grows as a square. This is why ants can lift so much, and why elephants can’t jump.
Anyway, there’s a genetic process that kicks in in adulthood that slows cell growth. However, that mechanism causes cell growth to decelerate. The effects of aging are the results of various body parts and mechanisms working with fewer cells then necessary to run properly.
Now, there are a few creatures that don’t need to worry about the square-cube law, and thus don’t ‘age’ like most creatures do. Trees, because they’re rooted to the ground. Marine life, because the buoyant nature of water supplements a lack of strength. And turtles, because they move so slowly and infrequently.
I’ve found the answer. You need to get a tuatara, just read this: “Wild tuatara are known to be still reproducing at about 60 years of age—“Henry”, a 111-year-old tuatara at Southland Museum in Invercargill, New Zealand, became a father (possibly for the first time) on 23 January 2009.” I don’t know what type of life-span you had in mind, but anything that active past age 100 has got to meet your demands.
Turtles will outlive you.
I used to own a 100-year-old parrot. In 1960. Only once. Her name was “Rio”.
Turritopsis nutricula, a type of tiny jellyfish, can revert from its adult form to polyp stage and back again, which technically makes it biologically immortal.
Yeah I used to be involved in an endangered turtle breeding program. I bred Clemys guttata and Blandings. They’re awesome little turtles. Someone brought me one once that they’d found in the well of a tire used as a boat bumper on a pier on Lake Michigan, downtown, near the Shedd. It was a hatchling, around the size of a quarter, so I know there’s at least one breeding female still out there somewhere.
My favorite genus of fish is the Polypterus. They’re very closely related to the first fish to crawl out on land, so they’re kind of your distant cousin. They have a lot of personality, are extremely hardy and easy to feed, and live (I’ve been told) 60 - 80 years.
Oh and they’re scaly as a snake and breathe air, so they could basically live on a wet washcloth if they had to. Very hard to kill.
I barely remember good ol’ Rio. I raised her from an egg staying up day and night with an eye-dropper. She learned over one hundred words and phrases, most of which were obscenities mainly because I used to line her cage with shredded dictionaries and Hustler magazines. I sold her to you for $5 dollars cash just to give her a good home. I am happy to know that she is alive and well. Tell her I said hi and that she invented my user name. She was like having a wife except I knew she would live longer so something had to give. I have a clause in my will to have her buried in the Mariana Trench when I pass and I have the money set aside for it.
I’ve found the perfect pet. It will definately out live you. It takes minimal care. It eats very little. See it here.
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I’m sure thispet will outlive you
[ul]
[li]Galapagos Land Tortoise 193[/li][li]American Box Turtle 123[/li][li] Amazon Parrot 104[/li][li]Carp 100[/li][li]Sulphur Crested Cockatoo 80[/li][li]African Grey Parrot 73[/li][li]Elephant 70[/li][li]Macaw 64[/li][li]Snapping Turtle 57[/li][li]American Alligator 56[/li][li]Camel 50[/li][li]Crocodile 45[/li][li]Donkey 45[/li][li]Hippopotamus 45[/li][li]Bear 40[/li][li]Horse 40[/li][li]Pionus Parrot 40[/li][li]Rhinoceros 40[/li][li]Superb Parrot 36[/li][li]Cockatiel 35[/li][li]Lion 35[/li][li]Trumpeter Swan 33[/li][li]Red Eared Turtle 30.5[/li][li]Tapir 30[/li][li]Eclectus Parrot 30[/li][li]Banksian Cockatoo 29.3[/li][li]Mallard 29[/li][li]Budgerigar 29[/li][li]Hellbender 29[/li][li]Bull 28[/li][li]Caiman 28[/li][li]Galah 27.2[/li][li]Congo Eel 27[/li][/ul]
You guys have some strange definitions of pets, I must say.