3.P - Are Hiveminded Swarms Effectively Immortal?

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Say you have a hiveminded swarm creature, such as the hellwasp swarm (https://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/swarm.htm#hellwaspSwarm). The swarm's body is made up of many hundreds or thousands of different creatures, all under the control of a single mind. Of course, the swarm could also be made of magical rats or psychic snakes, or whatever. Point is, it's a single mind with lots of bodies, and those bodies are born, live, breed, and eventually die, to be replaced with new bodies as their life cycles...err, cycle.

But since the older bodies are replaced with new ones, and the entire swarm organism is continually renewed at about the same rate as it ages, wouldn't that make such a creature potentially ageless and therefore immortal? Yes, it can be killed or die from disease or starvation or whatever, but it won't ever die from old age, no matter how long it lives.

Is it just me, or is that yet another way for a character to gain immortality? Just catch "swarm of crows" lycanthropy, and now you can suddenly live forever, so long as you're willing to spend significant amounts of time in swarm-form.

[Inevitability]

Which ship is theseus's?

In all seriousness: there isn't enough information to draw a conclusion. Maybe hellwasp swarms, like normal wasp swarms, have a queen somewhere in there and when she dies the entire swarm goes. Maybe the hive mind is highly volatile and becomes a 'new person' within a single wasp generation. Maybe hiveminds are just a weird sort of soul floating among bodies (like dvati) and this soul will pass whenever its time is up, like monks and druids, with the state of the physical vessel(s) having little to do with it.

It's also worth asking about the possibility of your swarm dropping beneath the HP threshold. If you heal the swarm back up, does it regain the old hive mind, or a new one? "What does it look like when a swarm heals" isn't even really explained by the rules, so the question seems heavily dependent on DM calls too.

[Chronos]

Human societies have lifespans. They're usually much longer than the lifespans of the individual humans, but societies still age and die.

Each individual wasp in the swarm is made up of cells. The cells each have their own lifespan, and die and are replaced, but the wasp lives on longer than any of the cells (but still eventually dies).

I think it's quite plausible, then, that a hivemind swarm might also have a maximum lifespan, longer than the lifespan of any individual wasp, but still finite. But how long that lifespan would be, I have no idea.