Or are the mechanisms of aging death more general, and there are a few species which found out how to avoid them?
There’s a fun question. One of the main things which spurred the current wave of aging research was the discovery that certain interventions increase lifespan across a huge range of different species (e.g. calorie restricted diets). That strongly suggests conserved mechanisms, although it doesn’t rule out some species-specific mechanisms also operating in parallel.
I haven’t looked this up, but I’m fairly confident the negligibly-senescent species are descendents of species which age. Examples of negligibly-senescent species include someturtles, rougheye rockfish, and naked mole rats; I’m pretty sure the closest relatives of most of those species do age. Again, I don’t have numbers, but I have the general impression that negligible senescence is an unusual trait which occurs in a handful of isolated species scattered around the evolutionary tree.
There’s a fun question. One of the main things which spurred the current wave of aging research was the discovery that certain interventions increase lifespan across a huge range of different species (e.g. calorie restricted diets). That strongly suggests conserved mechanisms, although it doesn’t rule out some species-specific mechanisms also operating in parallel.
I haven’t looked this up, but I’m fairly confident the negligibly-senescent species are descendents of species which age. Examples of negligibly-senescent species include some turtles, rougheye rockfish, and naked mole rats; I’m pretty sure the closest relatives of most of those species do age. Again, I don’t have numbers, but I have the general impression that negligible senescence is an unusual trait which occurs in a handful of isolated species scattered around the evolutionary tree.