Would you eat an animal if you knew it was as old as the U.S. Constitution?
Scientists in New Zealand have aged a fish called an orange roughy at between 230 and 245 years old, making it one of the longest-lived fin-fish on record.
The ancient fish was born in the late 1700s — and then caught in 2015 by a New Zealand commercial fishing boat on the Louisville Ridge, a chain of seamounts in the South Pacific around 930 miles east of the mainland.
The spiny, scarlet creature was hauled in by a trawl net from its deep, dark home more than 3,000 feet below the surface, along with many hundreds of its schoolmates. But before it was sold and eaten, New Zealand government observers on board the ship extracted samples from inside the creature’s head to determine its age.
Orange roughy — known as “slimehead” before a marketing ...
