For as long as creatures have been alive, they have been striving to avoid death. From the smallest plant to the largest whale, every organism spends its life avoiding death for as long as possible until the inevitable catches up to them. With our advanced tools and minds, Humans have learned how to live for longer and longer periods as time goes on thanks to new understandings of medicine and lifestyle. The next step, and one that a Russian scientific team believe will be possible in the near future, is immortality. The ability to live forever in some form, freed from biological shackles and able to experience life without the fear of running out of time. Immortality is controversial, being the topic of many debates in religion, ethics and philosophy. It can be seen as the ultimate goal, the Holy Grail of scientific achievements, or the first step in humanity’s downfall.
Not caring much about human philosophy, Mother Nature went ahead and made immortality possible. Not in the way we picture it, but in a far more specific and convoluted way.
There is a species of jellyfish with the catchy name ‘Turritopsis dohrnii‘. Luckily, they’re also colloquially known as the Immortal Jellyfish. These incredible little blobs of slime have evolved an incredibly useful survival method, which it can also use to cheat death itself.
When a normal jellyfish is damaged, facing starvation or suffers a drastic change in water temperature, the most likely outcome is death. The Immortal Jellyfish decided that actually it wasn’t quite done floating around like a plastic bag, and it’s body begins to change when under these extreme conditions. To truly understand this idea, take a look at the life cycle of a normal jellyfish.
Pretty simple, right? Well the Immortal Jellyfish shares this same life cycle, except with a crucial difference. If the Jellyfish encounters harsh conditions during the maturing process or when it is fully mature, it can revert its own body back into a polyp state. Effectively, this means that the teenager or adult organism reverts back into its childhood form. Picture a human getting hit by a bus, curling into a very tight ball and then emerging as a toddler. Now stop picturing that because it’s pretty horrifying, but hopefully it highlights how unnatural this natural phenomenon is.
There are obviously some downsides to this life and process. First of all, you’re a jellyfish and so the scope of your infinite life cycle probably doesn’t register in your brainless existence. Secondly, you’re a jellyfish and so its far more likely that something eats you completely rather than just a little bit, and there’s only so much you can recover from. Still, it is an incredible feat of evolution which scientists are already studying, with the hopes of applying the science to creating regenerative medicines for humans. While not quite the ticket to immortality, its a very good start.
So there you are, the Fountain of Youth has been discovered and the secret to eternal life has been revealed: be a small brainless jellyfish that goes through puberty forever. What a life. It is fascinating though that a life form such as this can even exist in the first place, and raises a lot of very interesting questions. Where will evolution take this creature in the future? If this jellyfish could evolve immortality, could other organisms be on their way to achieving this same lofty goal? Maybe most interestingly to humans, could there be a way to splice this immortality into our own biological meat-suits and take on some of the traits? For now these are all just theories and unanswered questions, but the answers may be found sooner than you might think.
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Fish fact of the day?