Which animal has the shortest lifespan?

Mayflies are strong contenders for the shortest-lived group of animals, with some not even living more than five minutes after reaching adulthood.

Palingenia longicauda mayfly on the Tisza River in Europe. Photo: Nastasic/Getty

According to researchers, it is not easy to find out exactly which animals have the shortest lifespan. Creatures with short lifespans are difficult for scientists to study in detail. In addition, there are many animals that they do not know about in the wild.

The Ephemeroptera are a strong contender for the shortest lifespan. This group of aquatic insects hatch from eggs, become nymphs, and live in water for up to two years. They then develop wings for the final stages of their life cycle — subimago and imago — in order to mate. Many mayflies live less than 24 hours in their winged form, while some don't even last more than five minutes.

Most plankton transition from living in water to living on land and air as subadults, then reproduce as adults. They have no mouth or functioning digestive system at either stage, living off the energy stored as larvae, according to Luke Jacobus, a professor of biology at Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus.

"Without a bulky digestive system, females have more room for eggs. I have seen one individual with so many eggs that it even had eggs in its head. With egg counts sometimes reaching over 10,000, females can make efficient use of their short adult lives," Jacobus said. Like other fast-living, short-lived creatures, mayflies are targeted by many predators and need to produce many offspring to have enough to survive to adulthood and reproduce.

“The fossils of ancient mayflies are not that different from what we see today,” Jacobus says. That means that for mayflies, the systems they have are still very effective. This group of insects first appeared about 350 million years ago, says Heath Ogden, an evolutionary biology professor at Utah Valley University.

The dwarf goby Eviota sigillata has the shortest lifespan of any vertebrate. Photo: Marli Wakeling/Alamy

The American sandburrowing mayfly ( Dolania americana ) has the shortest adult lifespan, according to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ Biodiversity Portal. Males live less than an hour after reaching adulthood, and females have just five minutes to reproduce before dying. But before that, the animal can live up to two years as a nymph.

The dwarf goby Eviota sigillata completes its entire life cycle in just two months. It has the shortest lifespan of any vertebrate, according to the Australian Museum. It spends three weeks as a larval stage in the open ocean, settles on a coral reef for one to two weeks to mature, and then experiences adulthood in three and a half weeks, according to a 2005 study in the journal Current Biology .

Thu Thao (According to Live Science )

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