SciShow Tangents - Bonus Backlog Bonanza - Ep. 35

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

This bonus episode was originally posted on Patreon on May 31, 2024 titled "Bonus Content!"Original Patreon description: This month we have a special cut-for-time bonus science couch question from our Turtles episode!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents!And go to https://complexly.store/collections/scishow-tangents to buy some great Tangents merch!While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on socials:Ceri: @ceriley.bsky.social@rhinoceri on InstagramSam: @im-sam-schultz.bsky.social@im_sam_schultz on InstagramHank: @hankgreen on X

For our listeners on Patreon, we're answering a bonus science couch question, Sam, what is our second question? At Angry Face 01 on YouTube asks, do turtles really want? live more than a hundred years? Some do, right? Yes, some definitely, yes. Like, especially, so we've established that tortoises are turtles. Uh-huh. Tortoises.

I think can live more than maybe any land animal. Oh. Are they the top living land animal? The big voice. The record holder is a guy named Jonathan hatched in 1832. And my man Jonathan is still. Alive. He's still micken?

Yeah. We don't even know how long turtles can go for. We don't know because he's still alive. He's estimated to be a 191 or 2 as of 2024. He's the oldest living land animal. They didn't mark down the day, just the year. Just the year. Yeah, I guess.

I don't know whether they captured him after birth or not. Yeah. Jonathan is quite old, lonesome George, another famous old guy. He was born around. 1910 or so and unfortunately died in 2012 he was the one in the lot of news stories they can't yes they can in fact die uh turtles are not immortal um and was a a pinta island tortoise and so he was the one where they were like advertising like let's find george mate let's see if he can find the ladies because he was the last one of his species his species was declared extinct while he was still

alive and in captive. And they didn't, they didn't do it. So it's really a huge shame that he was not immortal. Yeah. Let's see what, we saw a turtle go extinct. My favorite turtle that is old, that is, I found

on Wikipedia, is named Timothy. Timothy was born. They just got names. Lonesome George is great, but the others are named John and Tim. When you get right down to it, his name is just George, too. Yeah. Yeah, I guess you're right. George, Tim, John. Tim was born in around 1844 and died, also died in 2004.

And she was the UK's oldest known resident. And how to sex tortoises or turtles was not properly known in the 19th century. So she was named Tim and lived her life until another scientist, a more modern scientist, looked and was like, well, I don't know what word is she will say? Corblimy. Blimey Tim You got lady bits Girl Yeah

But she was about 160 years old And was like a War survivor or whatnot I think she I don't know if she was a mascot or something But something important Yeah She did important war things for England

Yeah I'm sure She was like a very slow carrier pigeon no one would ever expect it no one would expect him um so yes turtles can live over a hundred years based on those three evidence um but but in general like more broadly um not all turtles and when when we talk about this we're talking about um this idea of senescence so what biologically is going on as an organism ages so can you humans and a lot of animals as we age things start to break down um which i think

Hank probably is more familiar with modern stuff than me but it's like older than us oh man what are you saying right now you know i think Hank is as a man who has a bunch of old man diseases the nest the most yes i was not as his body deteriorated and became but incapable of holding back the cancer cells. Hank must know a lot about it. Wow. If you, believe me, I was not actually thinking of that. I was thinking you've been reading a lot about cancer and how people die of natural causes and how natural causes is cancer.

I have. Yeah. And not like a day at you. It's very weird. Poorly, I'm, you know, more well understood now. But like, there's sort of an entropic perspective on it where it's just like, you know, things fall apart. And, and, and, and, but the, the, the, you know, of course, yes, but also things hold themselves together pretty well for the first 40 or so years of a human's life. And then things start to fall apart. It's almost as if there's a bit of a clock involved and there isn't necessarily a, like,

there's not like a, a time limit on how long a thing can live. There's a, like, there are systems that are designed to last a certain amount of designed. It's always a trick. But there are systems that work for a certain amount of time, and then they kind of stop working because the point isn't to live forever. The point is for your genes to live forever. So that makes Turtle so good at it.

Well, it's probably just like the things that usually end up extending lifespan is like being bigger means that it takes longer to reach your age of being able to make babies. So the longer it takes between like being born and when you can make a baby, the longer your natural lifespan becomes. Because you have to have those systems operate for a longer amount of time. And also when you're bigger, you have more cells and you have to have a bunch of systems for keeping your cells from going bad and doing cancer.

So they get refreshed more or something? Is that what? They're better at fixing themselves. They're better at fixing themselves, and they create fewer of themselves. So like bigger organisms tend to have cells that just live a really long time rather than replicating. Right. Yeah. And like every time you replicate a cell, that's a danger that a cell is going to go bad in some way.

Or that your DNA is going to become damaged in some way because every time you replicate a cell, you have to copy everything that's in it. and we fix it pretty good most of the time when we don't fix it that's when disease happens but we think that organisms like turtles have something at play in DNA damage repair in just like maintenance of your genome and something to do with the immune system as well so like preventing that damage in the first place and we don't really know why like it's like hard I think we genetics is still a really difficult place of study where we're like we can we can see that turtles particularly the ones in captivity and I guess that's the other the other piece of this is like anything I get eaten doesn't matter who you are if you're like at risk of predation or if you like can't find food if you're bad at finding food you're going to die right even if you're a Jonathan or a Timothy right but these turtles lived bougie lives and so there's this theory that yeah you can focus on all your energy on survival rather than protection or foraging. And we see this in other ways, too, where, like, stress leads to disease or whatnot in humans.

That's also true for animals. So there's this idea that these really long-lived turtles have lived in really cushy environments. And so they, in addition to having these adaptations to extend their lifespan, they can also just focus on living and growing. Yeah. Yeah. Animals in captivity almost always live longer than animals in the wild. It's nasty out there. Yeah.

There's not a bunch of humans being around being like, hey, what do you want for breakfast? And also, are you ill? We could help you. We could flush your system. Do cloaca stuff to help out. There's just a big eagle that says, you're my food now. Yeah. Or a man who cracks you on the back and a steam comes out.

And eats all the soup out of your guts. Since this is a Patreon episode, now we all have to go around and say our deepest, the darkest secrets. That's not what we're doing at all. Oh, okay. Never mind. Our patrons are the best. Thank you, Patreon patrons. We're so grateful for your support.