'Human fish' salamander breaks lifespan recor...

'Human fish' salamander breaks lifespan record
Sightless cave dweller can live to 100, far longer than other amphibians

Discovery News The salamander, also called olm and Proteus, has a maximum lifespan of over 100 years. That's nearly double the age of other often-elderly amphibians: the Japanese giant salamander (55 years), the African bullfrog (45 years), the common European toad (40 years) and the mudpuppy (34 years).
by Jennifer Viegas
updated 7/20/2010 8:03:05 PM ET
A small cave salamander, nicknamed "the human fish" because of its human-like skin tone, has just broken the world's record for longest-lived amphibian, according to a new study.
The salamander, also called olm and Proteus, has a maximum lifespan of over 100 years, concludes the new study, published in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters. That's nearly double the age of other often-elderly amphibians: the Japanese giant salamander (55 years), the African bullfrog (45 years), the common European toad (40 years) and the mudpuppy (34 years).
"Among amphibians the human fish is clearly the most long-lived species," lead author Yann Voituron told Discovery News.
Voituron, a professor at Claude Bernard Lyon University, and his team calculated growth rates, generation times and the lifespan of olms living in a cave at Moulis, Saint-Girons, France. Since the 1950s, conservationists have established a breeding program there for the threatened salamanders.
In addition to determining the lifespan of the cave salamanders, the researchers found that this species becomes sexually mature at around age 16 and lays, on average, 35 eggs every 12.5 years.
"What promotes its longevity is probably very low activity, low reproduction, no environmental stress and its peculiar physiology," Voituron said.
He described "the human fish" as having a snakelike body, up to 16 inches long. It is blind, with eyes regressed and covered by a layer of skin. The human-like skin tone derives from oxygen-rich blood that shows through the salamander's non-pigmented skin.