system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
For species with very long life spans (everything from Johnathan, the 187-year-old tortoise, or Pando, the 80,000-year-old clonal tree system), are there observable evolutionary differences between old, still-living individuals and "newborn" individuals?
gpt
Not really. 187 years is long compared to a human but still the blink of an eye evolutionary. Even Pando is still more or less identical to modern day aspens although mostly inconsequential mutations were used in part to estimate its age. It's possible we'd see differences in Pando if it flowered, but AFAIK it's been ten thousand years since that happened. In some ~32,000 year old seeds from the Arctic the flowers that grew from them had slightly longer petals, but that could also be a regional thing where some now extinct populations had longer petals than most of the others.