The snapper is two decades older than the previous record holder for tropical reef fishes. “That was quite a surprising thing for me to see,” says Brett Taylor, a fish ecologist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), who helped find the senior fish. The octogenarian snapper is one of 11 snappers over the age of 60 discovered by Taylor and his colleagues off the coast of Western Australia between 2016 and 2020.

The decades-old fish were collected by scientists as part of a long-term study on the longevity of marine fishes. Among them were a 79-year-old two-spot red snapper and a 53-year-old black and white snapper.