Clam Claim May Be Climatic Clue

LONDON, Nov. 1, 2007 — -- A clam that has lived for more than 400 years has been discovered, dredged up off the coast of Iceland, claiming the crown for the longest-lived creature ever known.

When this mollusk was still in its infancy, the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, later known as New York, had just been established in North America. Shakespeare was staging "Hamlet", "Othello" and "Macbeth" in the theaters, and people were still burned at the stake as punishment for claiming that Earth revolved around the sun.

This particular ocean quahog clam – nicknamed "Ming" after the Chinese dynasty that ruled 400 years ago at the time of its birth – was found by a team of scientists from Bangor University's School of Ocean Studies in Wales. The team is part of a group studying the impact that humans have had on the environment in the past 50 years by measuring how the clams form rings inside their shells.

Each ring represents a year, and the thickness of each ring corresponds to climatic changes that have taken place in particular water temperature levels.

When they came across the mollusk, there were no clues that gave away Ming's spectacular lifespan.

"It didn't look out of the ordinary," one of the group's research fellows, Al Wanamaker, told ABC News, "It was largish -- these claims commonly live for 100 to 200 years, but we weren't expecting that it was going to be 400 years old!"

After sectioning the clam's shell and counting the rings inside, the team calculated its age was between 405-410 years old. Of course, that was the end of the clam's life, but the scientists had no way of knowing that this clam would be a record-breaker.

Other clams have been found that reached a ripe old age (the Guinness World Records claims that the existing record for the longest-living animal was a 220 year-old Arctica clam found in American waters, but the unofficial record holder was a 374-year-old Icelandic clam, which was found in a museum).

"I was very excited," said Wanamaker. "It was very surprising from our standpoint, granted that it's an old animal. What it means for us is that we have a potential climate record for the last 400 years of the north Icelandic coast."