Short-Lived Organism

Grub: So what's it like having a very short life cycle?
Fly: [child voice] It's great, mister! When I grow up—[becomes an adult] … I'm gonna—[ages into a rickety old grandpa] … wish I had done more with my life, sonny! [coughs, falls over, and dies]

—Epic (2013)

Someone or something that has a short natural lifespan. This often varies depending on the work, but the lifespan is generally much shorter than most of the cast. Extreme cases can show the character undergoing Rapid Aging in a matter of minutes or seconds.

For something to qualify as this trope, they need to have an abnormally short lifespan compared to most of the characters in the work, and they must be naturally short-lived, without any acquired curses or effects that shorten their lifespan.

This trope is often presented in one of two ways:

• The character or species undergoes Rapid Aging, often in the span of a few seconds as soon as they're born. Often Played for Laughs, Black Comedy style.
• The character or species with a short lifespan is aware of this. They could either be accepting of it as natural, build their society and culture around their short lifespan, or even have their primary motives based around this, like finding ways to extend their life.

Compare We Are as Mayflies, where humans are this trope to other intelligent races. Compare with Rapid Aging, where an entity ages quickly but very often due to non-natural factors.

Proportional Aging may or may not be involved. Opposite of Long-Lived.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Delicious in Dungeon: Half-feet live for fifty years on average, and their lives run proportionally faster. Chilchuck, nearing twenty-nine, is middle-aged or close to it (despite his childlike looks), and has three daughters who are all grown adults at thirteen. However, it's mentioned centenarian half-feet are possible, if rare.
• In Macross Delta Windermerians live an average of 30 years in exchange for enhanced physical abilities, but it can be shortened even more by use of their powers.
• In Tokyo Ghoul one variant of a half-ghoul is a Half-Human. The most prominent example in the series is Kishou Arima, and they are essentially human with increased physical ability and no other ghoul traits, and they are able to digest human food as opposed to being only able to eat human flesh like a full ghoul. However, they age much faster than either parent species and show age-related conditions in their 20s, with most lucky to make it into their 30s. Naturally born One-Eyed Ghouls like Eto Yoshimura, on the other hand, have a normal human lifespan with the best traits of both species and can eat anything with no issue. It's not entirely clear what causes one to be born a Half-Human as opposed to a One-Eyed Ghoul, but it's notable that the most prominent examples of the latter in the series are born to loving couples while the former are the results of a generations long Super Breeding Program and all the horror that implies.

Comic Books

• Doctor Strange: In Issue #390, Spider-Man asks Doctor Strange if he could talk to a spider with magic. When Strange agrees, Spider-Man experiences a sequence where he talks to a human-sized spider. The spider remarks that Spider-Man must be very accomplished to do everything he has in under a year, as most spiders die in a little over a year even in the most ideal conditions. Since Spider-Man has spider-like powers, he'd surely be given a spider's life cycle too. While this isn't true, the thought of it gives Spider-Man a brief existential crisis before the magical connection is cut off.
• Invincible: The Thraxans, whom Omni-Man lives with for a short while, can survive only up to a full year before dying because of their natural accelerated aging. The only exception to this rule is Oliver, a Viltrumite/Thraxan hybrid whose Viltrumite genes from Nolan ensure that he'll live much longer but at the same time, his Thraxan genes still don't allow him to have a longer childhood, as he reaches physical adulthood in only a few short years. It's for this reason that Oliver's mother Andressa asks Mark to take his brother back to Earth, since after Nolan's capture Oliver will soon outlive everyone he's ever known on his home planet.
• Kamandi: The Crater People are a race of mutated humans who are born with adult-level intellect, but age extremely quickly. They reach adulthood at three years of age but spontaneously die at five or six. They obsessively pursue Kamandi due to the belief that he, the last normal boy on Earth, is the key for them to achieve longevity.

Comic Strips

• The Far Side: A mayfly is at an insect diner being told off by one of its other patrons:
  "Yeah, yeah, buddy, I've heard it all before: You've just metamorphosed and you've got 24 hours to find a mate and breed before you die. ... Well, get lost!"

Fan Works

• Dæmorphing: It's mentioned that Hork-Bajir reach maturity at two years of age and rarely live to be twenty.
• Hostage Situation: Amy engineers a bacterium to eat metal to break Saint's Powered Armor and get free, but ensures it will only survive for an hour, lest it become a civilization-ending Grey Goo threat.

Films — Animated

• Epic (2013): Played for Laughs with the Fruit Fly, who goes through an entire lifecycle in the course of several seconds.
  Mub: Fruit fly, huh?
  Grub: So, what's it like, having a very short life cycle?
  Fly: [child voice] It's great, mister! When I grow up— [becomes an adult] ...I'm gonna— [ages into a rickety old grandpa] ...wish I had done more with my life, sonny! *cough* [falls over and dies]

Films — Live-Action

• Blade Runner: Most replicants are deliberately engineered to have three-year lifespans (they are "born" fully physically matured) so that, even if they start contemplating a rebellion, none of them would have the time to actually put it in motion. The film's protagonist hunts one such rebellious group nearing the end of their respective lifespans and eventually witnesses their leader abruptly die in front of him as his time literally runs out.
• Guardians of the Galaxy: Discussed by Rocket, an uplifted raccoon, who claims that his lifespan isn't that long anyway.^note This is Truth in Television; wild raccoons have a lifespan of around 3 years, while captive raccoons tend to live up to 20 years. Subverted in that Rocket is still shown perfectly alive and well even after the Time Skip in Avengers: Endgame.
• Star Wars: The Chadra-Fan species only have lifespans of about forty years.

Literature

• Animorphs: Implied with the Hork-Bajir. Three of their generations have passed in the span of thirty years, and Toby Hamee is nearly fully grown by the time she's roughly two years old.
• The Beyonders: The drinlings, one of the Wizardborn races, tend to live no longer than ten years, aging and maturing fast. Unlike the other Wizardborn, however, they're also capable of breeding true, meaning their population has been making a steady recovery.
• Charlotte's Web: Charlotte, being a spider, only lives for about a year, and she dies at the end of the book.
• A Christmas Carol: The Spirit of Christmas Present can only live for the duration of Christmas itself — he states that his life ends at midnight — and suddenly ages and turns grey-haired towards the end of his journey with Scrooge.
• His Dark Materials: Gallivespians don't live longer than ten years. Lady Salmakia and Chevalier Tialys are nearing the end of this lifespan and, predictably, have died by the end.
• Reaper Man: In one segment, this is parodied when a pair of elderly mayflies reminisce about how things were in "the good old hours" when they were young, such as how the sun was a proper yellow color instead of this red business.
• Star Wars Legends: Trandoshans become adults at fifteen, middle-aged at thirty-five and elderly at fifty, and very rarely live past sixty. This is one of the several reasons behind their ancient feud with the Wookiees, as the Trandoshans bitterly envy the latter's multicentenarian lifespans.
• Dragons in The Summer King Chronicles live only one year. Unfortunately, this means their history can get twisted in a very short time (by other species' standards).
• The Witches: When the hero is turned into a mouse, he asks his grandmother how long a mouse lives. She reluctantly tells him that an ordinary mouse only lives about three years, but that, as he is a human transformed into a mouse, he will live about nine years. To his grandmother's surprise, he is delighted by this news, as he does not want to outlive her.

Live-Action TV

• Smallville: When two meteor freaks hook up at a Wild Teen Party, the girl gets pregnant, gives birth a few hours later, then the baby grows into a child, teenager, adult, and dies of old age within a matter of days.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Emergence": The Enterprise exhibits peculiar behavior. The crew determines that the ship's computers are becoming sentient, and have embarked upon assembling a construct in one of the holodecks. Once this construct is teleported outside the Enterprise, the ship returns to normal, having attained sentience for only the one episode, just long enough to produce an "offspring".
  • Star Trek: Voyager: The Ocampans have a lifespan of only nine years, reaching their young adult stage within a year, reaching sexual maturation by about four or five, hitting middle age by seven, and rapidly aging at the age of nine before dying. As an upside, they also develop mentally very quickly.
  • Star Trek: Enterprise: "Similitude": Doctor Phlox uses Lyssarian desert larvae to make a clone of Trip. The clone goes through a full human lifespan in fifteen days.
• Today's Special: In "Butterflies", one-shot character Hazel the butterfly reaches her one-year lifespan and dies much to the sadness of the main characters.
• Ultraman Cosmos: A mayfly kaiju, Ephemera, has a 24-hour lifespan. The episode's final battle has Cosmos, being a Badass Pacifist, keeping Ephemera confined to an open field rather than killing it outright, with the monster dying on its own when its lifespan is spent.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • When introduced as player characters in the Dark Sun setting, thri-kreen are revealed to be adults at six and considered venerable at twenty-five (although they suffer far fewer penalties from aging than other races). They have an average lifespan of thirty years, although considering how harsh life on Athas is, only a rare few die of old age.
  • In 5th edition, Aarakocra mature at the age of three, and live for thirty years. When re-introduced in Monsters of the Multiverse, the age information was absent, implying they live for a normal human lifespan.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • The aetherborn of Kaladesh are humanoids who spontaneously form in areas where magic gathers. They're "born" as fully aware adults, but the solidified aether that makes up their bodies isn't stable and, from the moment of their birth, begins to dissolve back into the environment. Average aetherborn lifespans range from four years to as little as four weeks. Culturally, they're split into two camps about this: some accept their short lives and strive to savor and enjoy each moment that they have, while others vampirically drain life from other beings to sustain their crumbling bodies.
  • Exaggerated with Voidslime, which is an Instant spell mechanically, but is flavored as an ooze that lives for only a few seconds but voraciously devours magical power during that time.
• Warhammer 40,000: Tyranid Hormagaunts are usually birthed without digestive systems, so even if they wanted to they wouldn't live beyond the battle they were bred to fight. Then again, their purpose is to overwhelm opponents by sheer numbers, so they're often killed in vast numbers hours if not minutes after they're pumped out onto the battlefield.
• Warhammer Fantasy: On average, the ratlike Skaven have a maximum lifespan of about twenty years, but most die a lot earlier than that due to backstabbing, starvation, industrial accidents, being conscripted as cannon fodder or a hundred other different things. However, magic-users such as Grey Seers and plague priests can live to be hundreds of years old as long as they can navigate the pit of treachery of Skaven politics.

Video Games

• AI War: Fleet Command: The Neinzul are especially short-lived, with individuals often living no longer than a single Earth day. Some of them can "mature" into longer-lived forms, but most of them have to resort to depositing their Genetic Memory back at their Enclave so that the next generation can pick up where they left off.
• Cult of the Lamb implies this, as, while the eponymous Lamb can never truly die as long as they have a flock, the cultists themselves age very quickly. As in, they reach elder age after only over a month or two in-game. There's no real Watsonian explanation for this, apart from the setting being a Crapsaccharine World (the Doylist explanation being, of course, that the point of an aging mechanic in a game is to happen in a gameplay-relevant time frame).
• Destiny: The eusocial proto-Hive species were referred to metaphorically as "krill" due to their large numbers and short lifespans. If they weren't eaten by predators or killed by some other danger, they would die of old age after ten years. Supposedly, they evolved this way so their species would adapt more quickly to threats. However, like other eusocial species, their "queens" lived much longer, though it isn't specified just how long. The desire to surpass their brief decade of life was part of the reason they chose to become the monstrous Hive.
• Digimon: Rafflesimon is a mega-level Digimon and the result of Rosemon and Lotosmon DNA Digivolving together. Rafflesimon's life span is very short and it dies after just several days.
• Final Fantasy IX: The Black Mages are artificially created to be automaton soldiers for The Empire, but some of the Black Mages spontaneously become sentient with human intelligence. The self-aware Black Mages form a community to live out their lives in peace, and find that they have a life span of only about one year.
• Final Fantasy XIV: The Qitari are a diminutive rat-like race who rarely live past the ripe old age of twenty. This has led them to preserve their culture through meticulously kept records, a habit that made them ideal scribes for the Ronkan Empire before its fall. They also mature faster than other races, as Chaqurl Qhotl is a capable explorer at three years old, though he still has a Wide-Eyed Idealist mindset and fumbles the pronunciation of longer words frequently.
• Flight Rising: Zig-zagged with Imperial dragons. According to their lore, some Imperials have a lifespan of as short as ten years — however, some of them can live as long as several centuries.
• Honkai: Star Rail:
  • This is played with a certain NPC in Xianzhou Luofu. She's a Vidyadhara, who normally undergo "hatching rebirth" after living for a hundred or more years; she, however, has an anomalous condition where she would undergo rebirth after only a few months, making her quickly forget her old lives.
  • Exaggerated with the cloned version of Skaracabaz, Emanator of Propagation, which could only exist for fifty-six seconds.
• Inazuma Eleven Go Galaxy: The fourth planet Earth Eleven goes to is Ratoniik, a jungle planet whose inhabitants evolved from bugs. This causes their lifespans to span from at least a week to a year at most, depending on the individual.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Rito are mentioned to have a lifespan of about forty years.
• Mass Effect:
  • The salarians are an amphibious species with by far the shortest lifespan of the Citadel Council races, maxing out around forty years. (For comparison, given the advancements in the setting, humans regularly live past 100.) To offset this, the salarians only need to sleep about one hour per night, allowing them to get more accomplished in their shorter overall lifespan. On the downside, they are also the most short-sighted of the Council races, caring little about the long-term ramifications of their actions if it means short-term gain.
  • The vorcha are the shortest-lived sapient species in the galaxy, rarely living past 20. On the plus side, they possess a powerful Adaptive Ability that allows them to survive in nearly any environment. Extreme temperatures, poisonous environments, even without oxygen... However, this extreme adaptability and short lifespan means that the vorcha have basically no culture or society of their own. Some asari tried an experiment involving raising vorcha like they were their own children, but it ended fairly tragically as it was discovered that they just didn't live long enough to raise their own children and the asari found it too depressing to keep going after raising several generations only to watch them die.
• Paper Mario: The Origami King: Bob-Ombs are said to have incredibly short lifespans, being bombs and all. After all, they were built to blow up, which would kill them shortly after being built. According to Bobby, a Bob-Omb knows that their life is short, so their ultimate goal is to make something of themselves in the limited amount of time that they have. That's why Bobby ultimately decides to blow himself up in order to destroy a rock that was trapping Olivia, performing a Heroic Sacrifice in his last moments.
• Stellaris: Leaders from species with the "fleeting" trait have -10 to their life expectancy, while Clone Soldiers take a -40, while all of the traits associated with the "Overtuned" origin reduce lifespan by anywhere from -10 to -30.

Web Animation

• Minilife TV: In "Snowball's Late Night Adventure", Snowball learns from Rob that vampires like them are treated as servants to their creators and last only a few years, which he's not pleased to find out.

Webcomics

• Dive Quest: Implied of kobolds. When visiting Tislomer's hometown, the village elder mentions he's almost fifteen years old.
• Drive (Dave Kellett): Veetans have an average lifespan of about twenty years. On learning this, Skitter is horrified and asks if Veetan years are longer than Earth years; his Veetan friend Nosh replies that no, it's twenty regular years, which to them is a perfectly long and fulfilling life.
• In Our Shadow: Most of the uplifted animals of post-human Earth live less than a decade. Rats are particularly short-lived, generally only making it for seven years or so. Emperor Schorl, whose lifespan was extended by ancient human tech, is treated as practically an immortal god at the age of forty.
• Homestuck:
  • A troll's lifespan is dependent on their place on the hemospectrum, and, while higher castes are very long-lived, low-caste trolls have shorter lifespans than humans do. Burgundy-bloods live only to a dozen or two sweeps of age (about 26 to 52 Earth years), and Mindfang's journals mention that she, as a cerulean-blood, was already an adult centuries before her eventual bronze-blooded lover was even born.
  • While no specific figures are given, salamanders don't live very long. One encountered in Egbertbound comments on this when hoping to see John control the Breeze again "before the end of my sadly short amphibious lifespan".
• Kevin & Kell has mayflies following a similar lifespan to their real-world counterparts, also integrated into society. They attend college for a shorter period of time, where their student debt is only 35 cents, and also receive placement as temporary workers known to die mid-task.
• Unsounded: The Fantastic Caste System in Alderode affects lifespan, from 400 years for Coppers to 30 for Platinums. The in-universe explanation for the lifespan of the Plats is they are so loved by the Gods that they can't bear to be parted with them for long. Most Platinums live in segregated communities with No Blood Ties as a result. One exception, Mathis Quigley, is a Punch-Clock Villain specifically so his son will be financially secure after his death.
• TwoKinds: Keidrans live for about twenty years naturally, and hit adulthood at age 8 or 9. Since this gives them an effective adult lifespan of just a little over a decade, this can be a serious issue for inter-species relationships, romantic and non, with the longer-lived humans and basitins.

Web Original

• Hamster's Paradise: The harmsters, thanks to their natural aggression and sadism, usually don't live for very long before they die either as a result of their numbers-based combat style or killed by one of their own. Even for the ones who do survive, they won't have a very lengthy existence as fifteen is actually considered elderly to them.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs (2020): The sketch "Exercise Minute" has the Warner siblings encouraging the viewers to take a break from watching cartoons and do some exercise, joined by May, an anthropomorphic mayfly. Throughout the sketch, May insists that she doesn't have the time for exercise due to the mayfly's tiny lifespan, wanting to do more with life than exercise. Unfortunately for May, the Warners remain utterly oblivious and ultimately, she dies of old age before the workout is over. Her tombstone reads her birth and death as "9:15 AM — 9:18 AM".
• Batman: The Animated Series: In "House and Garden", Poison Ivy had created a plant producing human/plant hybrids with a lifespan of several days. When Batman busts the operation, Ivy needs some muscle quickly, so she gives the newborn creatures a formula that accelerates their growth so that they'll only live a few minutes but hopefully kill Batman within that time.
• The Fairly OddParents!: A Running Gag in " Super Humor" has Timmy, who had wished for the power to talk to animals, meeting a fly who goes through his 24-hour lifespan over the course of the episode.
• Men in Black: The Series: The organization has the technology to produce "Quick Clones", which are duplicates of people who have a very short lifespan. They reveal themselves to be quick clones when they start babbling gibberish, and then melt. They can also be deactivated by pressing an area on the jugular vein behind their ear. Quick Clones know both that they are copies and don't live long, but they don't take issue with it.
• Rick and Morty: In the pilot episode, Morty accidentally releases a being from a glass jar that quickly goes from being an infant to old age and dies in a matter of seconds. Rick's response to Morty regarding it is "don't think about it".
• Robot Chicken: In the skit "A Bug's Short Life", a parody of Disney/Pixar's A Bug's Life, Flik is annoyed and kept up all night by mayflies who are attempting to cram an entire lifetime of experiences (sex, having children, mid-life crises) into their three-hour lifespan.
• Rocko's Modern Life: In "Bye Bye Birdie", Rocko and Heffer are tasked with looking after Turdy, Filburt's pet mynah bird while Filburt goes to the hospital. Turdy dies while in their care, and when Rocko breaks the bad news to Filburt, Filburt takes it surprisingly well, saying that Turdy was from a rare species of bird called "Tirdis Minimus" which has a three-week lifespan. Turdy actually lasted a long time, and Filburt tells Rocko that even though he'll miss his pet, life goes on. Subverted when Heffer tells Filburt the real cause of Turdy's death; he accidentally sat on him.
• Star Trek: The Animated Series: "The Counter-Clock Incident" has the Enterprise transport Commodore Robert April and his wife Sarah to a fête on planet Babel. Sarah has a flower with her, plucked from Capella 4. It has a lifespan of only a few hours; it was just a seedling when taken aboard but is now withering. When the Enterprise finds itself dragged into an alternate dimension, the crew discovers that time runs backwards when Sarah's flower reverts to full bloom again. The same effect is happening to the crew, as they un-age into children.
• ThunderCats (2011): In "Song of the Petalars", the ThunderCats encounter a race of beings who live their entire lives in a single day. Lion-O befriends a young Petalar named Emrick, who over the course of hours grows from child to teenager to adult, then finally dies of old age.
• Wild Kratts: In "Animals Who Live to be 100 Years Old," Martin is saddened by the death of his pet fruit fly, Juice, and learns that fruit flies only live for a few weeks. After this, the crew sets out to find animals who live to be 100.

Real Life

• Mayflies are often cited as the premier example of this trope, the adults living for one or two days with some species having a lifespan of five minutes. However, most of a mayfly's lifespan is spent as an aquatic nymph, which can last from several months to a year.
• Fruit flies. Contrary to popular belief that they have a one-day or one-week lifespan, they can actually survive up to forty or fifty days under proper food and environmental conditions.
• Gastrotrichs are microscopic wormlike animals with a lifespan of three to twenty-one days and mature extremely rapidly.
• Several species of bacteria live for a few seconds each. This rapid life cycle makes them ideal for studying evolution.
• Labord's chameleon (Furcifer labordi) is the tetrapod species with the shortest known lifespan, living only four to nine months total in the wild. This is because they hatch at the beginning of the wet season and generally die right after breeding, just as the harsh dry season starts.
• The vertebrate with the shortest lifespan is a species of tiny reef goby, Eviota sigillata, which only lives about eight weeks. This is because it's near the bottom of the food-chain, suffering an 8% mortality rate per day, so it's evolved to mature and breed as quickly as possible.
• Possibly the shortest birth-to-death life cycle of any animal is in Adactylidium, a type of parasitic mite. The male mates with his sisters inside the womb (every litter always consists of one male and several females) and then the females eat their way out; in some species he emerges with them and then dies in a few hours, while in other species he dies inside the womb, meaning the natural birth-to-death life cycle length is technically zero. The females have only a slightly longer lifespan of about four days.

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