this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2024
2 points (51.9% liked)
Asklemmy
43847 readers
664 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Reputedly, they don't age. I have no idea if there's anything else interesting about them.
Crocodiles are also the same, eventually though they will die of something. Whether it be cancer or an incident.
That cannot be right. Can it? They're vertebrates. Not ageing is some weird exotic invertebrate shit, like sleeping in 1-second increments or regrowing from a bit of gore.
Hmm, Wikipedia doesn't really mention the matter, but it does say some have lived over a century. R*ddit says a bunch of things, but the most "authoritative sounding" person says they do age, just kind of subtly. StackExchange roughly agrees, albeit in a way that makes me wonder what they consider "true ageing". We don't talk about humans dying from "old age" anymore medically, because we can pin down which organ finally gave up, or got cancer. Even if the answer is "more than one".
The 70-120 sort of lifespan makes me think they do age, even if they seem spry externally while they do it, but we can't yet measure how, do to reptile biology being economically unimportant and so less studied.
Also TIL they're considered fairly intelligent, and do things like play and set out bait.
Thank you for sharing that. Sounds like it was an interesting rabbit hole. The big ones are all gone and hunted out now (in Australia). There are photos of absolute units in museums. It would be truly terrifying to see one of those big ones in real life.