Question: How old can some sea creatures get?

Sean Clement answered on 24 Jun 2011:

Very! It’s hard to put an exact date on the age of larger examples of oceanic creatures because, for the most part, once they die, they sink into the depths of the Ocean and this means it’s pretty hard to get an exact age from tissue or bone samples because we can’t get to the body! It’s thought that Blue Whales can live for up to 80 years, as do Green Turtles.

The absolute winners in terms of longevity though are my favourites: Corals. It’s been estimated that some colonies of Hard Coral are in excess of 600 years old. Corals are very slow growing and are constantly renewing themselves but aren’t in fact a single living animal but a collection of very small ‘polyps’ which are each their own self-contained organism. With this in mind, it’s hard to say whether Coral colonies are a single very old creature or a collection of constantly renewing ones…