Life span is one of the most important parameters of any living organism.
Plants generally live longer than animals though this is not always the case. For instance, a turtle lives longer than rice.
Some typical life spans:
Maximal age recorded by any living human is 138 years, though some people in Asia are reported to have lived over 150 years.
- Blue whales can live from 40 to 80 years.
- Dogs live up to 25 years.
- A virus does not have a limited life span. Since it gets copied and reproduced whenever it is not just a particle, some biologists argue that its living span is much greater than that of a typical bacterium, and even greater than that of a multicellular organism.
- The baobab can live 4000 years. It outlives olive trees, domesticated in the Mediterranean. It is interesting to note that many olive trees were alive and nurtured by ancient Greeks - a stunning fact which illustrates the differences in the life spans.
- Many corals live over 100,000 years. However, there is no consensus among marine biologists how to determine age of a coral, and whether or not it is really a single organism.