Today’s most aged bats are not meant to exist. Ounce for ounce and pound for pound, they are categorically teeny mammals according to the evolutionary principles that keep throughout species, they must be small-lived, like other tiny-bodied creatures.

And nonetheless, several of Earth’s winged mammals buck this pattern, occasionally blowing decades earlier their predicted expiration date. 1 species, Brandt’s bat, which weighs just 4 to nine grams as an adult—all the heft of a quarter—has been recorded surviving to the age of 41 in the wild, practically as prolonged as a typical four-ton Asian elephant, and virtually 10 instances as extended as its body proportions may well otherwise predict. “That’s just surprisingly extensive-lived for their sizing,” suggests Jerry Wilkinson, a biologist at the College of Maryland. “Longer than any other mammal.”

No single aspect can demonstrate the astounding longevity of bats. They are intelligent and collaborative, and their superpowered immune methods enable them tolerate viruses that make other animals disastrously sick—traits that undoubtedly enable them endure. But one particular of their anti-aging methods, between the most biologically elusive in the environment, is to basically set off acquiring more mature for months out of just about every calendar year.

Browse: What human beings can understand from nature’s major hibernators

As fall dips into wintertime, the minimal mammals huddle into caves, trees, and mines, folding up their wings and hanging toes in excess of head. Their overall body temperature plunges, at times approaching freezing their coronary heart amount slows to a handful of beats for each moment they scarcely get any breaths at all. “They basically shut down their full human body, considerably lessening all the features that we normally associate with life,” says Aline Ingelson-Filpula, a biologist at Carleton College. Stretches of hibernation like these have prolonged been comprehended as just about suspended animation, applied to preserve the body’s resources in instances of terrific require. For bats, Wilkinson and his colleagues have located that it may well also drastically extend their tenure on Earth.

Time, per se, is not seriously what kills us it is how we spend it that does us in. For most creatures, the calendar of times…