How Long Can Fungi Live? Some Can Be Thousands Of Years Old, But It’s Surprisingly Hard To Age These “Invisible” Lifeforms

How Long Can Fungi Live? Some Can Be Thousands Of Years Old, But It’s Surprisingly Hard To Age These “Invisible” Lifeforms

We can’t age a fungus until we can identify an individual, and they don’t make it easy.

Determining a Fungus’s Age Is Surprisingly Difficult, Scientists Say

Fungi may be among the oldest living organisms on Earth, yet scientists still cannot answer one of the simplest questions about them: how long do they live? A new opinion paper in Trends in Microbiology argues that fungal longevity remains one of biology’s most overlooked mysteries. Unlike animals, which can often be aged by counting growth rings, birthdays, or developmental stages, fungi frequently exist as dynamic networks that grow, fragment,…