The Shortest Lifespan in Animals: Mayflies and the Dwarf Goby

KOMPAS.com – The Greenland shark is known as an animal that can live for more than 100 years. But what about animals that have the shortest lifespan?

One of the animals with the shortest lifespan is the mayfly or mayfly. This insect is a strong candidate as the creature with the shortest lifespan.

Quoted from Live Science, Wednesday (13/9/2023) these water insects hatch from eggs as nymphs and live underwater for up to 2 years.

The animals then develop wings for the final stages (subimago and imago stages) of their life cycle for mating.

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Benefits of short lifespan in animals

So how long do animals like this mayfly survive?

Many mayflies live less than 24 hours in their winged form, while some don’t even survive 5 minutes.

However, in that short time, these animals are able to maximize their lives.

“They don’t have mouthparts or functioning digestive systems at either stage and live off energy reserves accumulated as nymphs, said Luke Jacobus,” a mayfly researcher and professor of biology at Indiana University.

In the absence of a large digestive system, females have more room for eggs in their bodies.

“I once saw an individual that was full of eggs even inside its head. Sometimes with more than 10,000 eggs per female, they can make efficient use of their short adult life,” explained Jacobus.

Mayflies also have a lot of prey, so they need to produce large numbers of young so that they have enough to survive to maturity and reproduce.

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However, Jacobus notes that there is no definite answer as to why mayflies only live so short.

“The fossils of ancient mayflies are not much different from what we see today. The system they had worked very well for them,” explained Jacobus.

Heath Ogden, a professor of evolutionary biology at Utah Valley University who studies the evolution of mayflies, said these insects first appeared about 350 million years ago.

According to him, evolution in mayflies shows that investing more time as a nymph is a good strategy.

“It seems that evolution decided that mayflies would only collect nutrients as nymphs and become adults to fly, reproduce and lay eggs,” said Ogden.

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The American sand-digging mayfly (Dolania americana) itself is a species that has the shortest adult lifespan of all recorded species.

Males live less than an hour after reaching adulthood, and females have only five minutes to reproduce before dying.

However, sand-burrowing American mayflies still spend up to two years as nymphs before the very short adult stage.

Apart from the mayfly, in the rest of the animal world the dwarf goby (Eviota sigillata) completes its entire life cycle in two months and has the shortest life span of any known vertebrate.

This fish spends three weeks of its life in the form of juvenile larvae in the open sea. They then remain on the reef for a week or two to mature, before living no more than three and a half weeks as adults.

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2023-09-16 05:00:00
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