Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bonolio | Hacker News Reader

One has to consider that if the longest lived spider ever, is one out of possible millions, chosen for a particular study, that maybe 43 years isn't actually that long for a spider. It seems unlikely that at random they just happened to choose the spider that would live longer than them all.

View on HN

Can't they make different studies to determine age?

We know that some turtles, sharks and whales can live way more than a century if not multiple centuries, but we don't know that because we have been following them from centuries.

There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet.

We have a picture of it dating 1886: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Jonathan...

> There's a tortoise living on the Seychelle's governor garden since 1882 and has outlived every single governor yet.

Is this just a fancy way to say that the tortoise is alive, and whoever was governor in 1882 is dead?

No, actually it is saying that every governor since 1882 (except, by implication of “yet”, the current one implied to exist) is also dead, not just that the 1882 governor is dead. Of course, in the limit case if there were no governors after 1882 (except the current one, if any) it would just say the one in 1882 was dead, but there were, in fact, 24 or 25, depending on exactly when in 1882 the tortoise arrived (not sure on that), subsequent governors before the position was abolished with home rule which quickly transitioned into independence.

Which makes the “yet” weird, but I suppose it admits the possibility that the office might be restored before the tortoise dies, and the tortoise might not outlive the potential future governor.

Sure, the "yet" seemed to imply that one governor has taken over. There's no further information regarding the number of governors, and I refrained from speculation. All I could deduce was that the 1882 governor is dead, the current one is alive, and there is a nonnegative whole number of intervening governors (zero or more).

Very few people seem to be able to distinguish between "the largest number on record" and "the largest thing that ever happened", even if they know perfectly well that records of whatever the phenomenon is are never kept.

Imagine the life of a spider. Imagine it for forty three years. Lurking in your burrow, waiting for a snack to wander by. Getting fucked by spider boys and maybe eating them. Do trapdoor spiders eat their mates? I’m not sure. Laying eggs and watching the spiderlings go running off. Again and again for forty three years.

That just feels like a long time to be a spider.

Black widow spiders last something like a thousand eggs, and the hatchlings murder and easy one another until only a couple survive... Who go in to live for as long as black widows live for. The average lifespan is likely quite low, however.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com