Mitochondrial DNA and animal longevity

Why do some animals live 507 years and others 1.9 months?

Compare the mitochondrial genomes of 2,335 species, from base composition to codon usage, against their maximum lifespan.

Human Naked mole-rat Bowhead whale House mouse

2,335

species with a complete mtDNA

23

classes, 176 orders

13

protein-coding genes per genome

507 yr

longest lifespan: Ocean quahog clam

Taxonomy

Browse by class

All 23 classes in the taxonomy tree

GC content against lifespan

Whole mtDNA, all 2,335 species

Hover or tap a point to see the species; select it again to open its page. Legend buttons spotlight a class.

Plot any mtDNA feature

Compare mitochondrial DNA

Composition, skews, length and codon usage of every region, by class, order and family.

Statistics you can trust

Correlations per clade, corrected for multiple testing and shared ancestry.

Open data

Every table as Parquet and CSV, ready for Python, R or DuckDB.

2 (2026-11-13) · data from MitoAge build 1, NCBI RefSeq mitochondrion release, NCBI Taxonomy (new_taxdump), AnAge, FishBase, SeaLifeBase, USGS Bird Banding Laboratory longevity records, EURING longevity list, NCBI RefSeq records cited by build 1 (E-utilities efetch, cached), Open Tree of Life synthetic tree, TimeTree 5