THE Methuselahs of the marine world are 250-year-old tubeworms living around
seeping hydrocarbon vents on the seafloor.
Charles Fisher of Pennsylvania State University in University Park and his
colleagues used a deep-diving submersible to stain the tubes of
Lamellibrachia tubeworms clustered around hydrocarbon seeps in the Gulf of
Mexico.
By collecting stained animals in subsequent years, the team measured how much
tube had grown above the stain, and so worked out a growth rate.
They found that the tubeworms grow very slowly, taking up to 250 years to
reach their maximum length of 2 metres (Nature, vol 403, p 499).…
