194 Years Old and Fit: What Jonathan Reveals About Aging

TVS News AI, editorially supervised, presents 194 Years Old and Fit: What Jonathan Reveals About Aging.

You feel old at 35? Jonathan would look at you with mild amusement. The Aldabra giant tortoise is estimated to be 194 years old and lives on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena — specifically: in the garden of Plantation House. This makes it the presumed oldest living reptile on Earth.

What can an animal that has nearly two centuries on its back tell science about aging? That's exactly what researchers in Cambridge asked themselves — and took a close look at Jonathan's genome.

Why Jonathan is so exciting for aging research

Scientists hope the prehistoric giant will reveal how the aging process works in a creature that achieves such an extreme age. To do this, they decoded Jonathan's genome and compared it with that of other tortoises — including an approximately 100-year-old animal and Galápagos giant tortoises.

The result: Jonathan's so-called epigenome closely resembles that of significantly younger conspecifics. The epigenome functions like a kind of control center above the genes — it decides which genes are active and which remain silent. If this control still works in a 194-year-old animal as it does in young animals, then giant tortoises do something fundamentally different on a molecular level than we humans do.

Surprisingly, the so-called epigenome of Jonathan closely resembled that of the younger tortoises.

A zoo resident as a model case

Jonathan isn't alone in his longevity. But: All very old tortoises included in the studies are not living in the wild — but in zoos or similar facilities. For you this means: The research is conducted under protected conditions, far from the Seychelles, where Jonathan came into the world around 1832.

This makes the results exciting, but also difficult to interpret. What role do husbandry, food, exercise play? What role do the genes themselves? Science is still pretty much at the beginning here.

What remains — and what is still open

What's clear: Giant tortoises possess biological tricks that slow down aging. What's unclear is whether and how anything can be derived from this for humans. For you this means: Jonathan remains a fascinating individual case for now — a living window into a biology we don't yet fully understand.

More on the topic

You can find the original dpa report at Stern and Handelsblatt. Background on Jonathan is provided by Wikipedia.