Are there any animals with a long life span?

[jonesy]

It might make it easier if the monster/animal stats had a 'lifespan' attribute to indicate the avarage life expectancy of your everyday fantasy creatures.

 

[RigaMortus]

The Giant Tortoise lives the longest, about 177 years in captivity, and the gastrotrich (a minute aquatic animal) lives the shortest--as short as a three days.

 

[Damon Griffin]

Actually, this brings up a good question... My PC is a half elf sorcerer who has a familiar (a bat). Since a familiar is like part of you and not like a regular animal, it should live much longer than a typical animal right?

I believe there are two separate questions being discussed here: how long do animals usually live, and how long should I expect my familiar to live?

IIRC, familiars, appearance to the contrary are not animals. They are magical beasts, so they don't have to conform to what might be usual for the animal whose outward appearance they retain.

 

[dunii_rgr]

So it seems the elven ranger will go through a lot of companions unless he wants a turtle.

 

[Xeriar]

Here's one link, And Another about animal lifespans. The first seems.. a little questionable or perhaps out of date, regarding human averages? I knew they were lower than today but not quite that low. The second is interesting, because it lists captivity ages, ages in the wild, oldest known living, etc.

They seem to be including infant mortality. Roman statistics suggested that those who would succumb to infant mortality accounted for something like 2% of their population during any given year.

Though, during the worst of the dark ages, life expectancy could have gotten pretty low. Human life expectancy at 1 year was 40 +/- 5 until the early 20th century. +5 before agriculture and nearer to the end of the 19th century.

 

[Xeriar]

Oooh, something else.

If you toss out infant mortality, there is something close to a nice, linear age progression that pops up.

0-5 years: 10%
6-10 years: 9.5%
11-15 years: 9%

...

And so on. This isn't entirely accurate, but the numbers end up pretty close even if they extend human life to the better extremes of 'pre-modern' times.

 

[kenjib]

If you were a druid and hauled around a Joshua Tree you could expect it to live over 10,000 years. There are a couple that live longer, but that is the only one I remembered.

Do you mean 1000 years? The bristlecone pine is the longest living tree. One of them is recorded at 4,767+ years. It's just stunning for me to think of the large swath of human history that this one tree has been the contemporary of.

Incidentally, this makes California the home of the largest trees (sequoia), the tallest trees (redwood), and the oldest trees (bristlecone pine), on Earth. Pretty cool.

 

[Welverin]

Do you mean 1000 years?

Hmm, Joshua Tree, why does that sound so familiar?

 

[Krug]

galapagas tortoise... I don't believe that they have worked out the exact life span..

but they are more like a pet rock than a pet animal

With the right spells, I'm sure they'll make devastating damange when used as slingstones.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

The way I have always heard civilized human age demographics explained is that living past 30 was a royal pain. Very very hard to do. If you could do it, keep a fairly steady diet, and avoid Vikings you were nearly indestructible and were near guaranteed to live well past 50 and on into the early seventies.

There was a great game called Kingmaker based on the war of Roses. It had a mechanic that killed off the heads of your households with plague, but they included an apology at the end since noone who had survived to be the head of a noble house would ever die of plague.

That said, there are some aquatic creatures, sharks and some reef fish, who are pretty sophisticated and live a long to underdeterminedly long time.