6 ms·
The world's only immortal animal
- bh23ha 17y agoWhat about single celled life? In a division one call seems to get renewed while another seems to age, you say. What if this animal is doing something similar?
- pyre 17y agoThere are a number of things that lead to cell mortality in multi-cellular organisms.
- steveitis 17y agoIt's my understanding that certain turtles don't exhibit telomere shortening, and are effectively 'immortal' as well in that they don't age.
- zackattack 17y agoDo they not get cancer?
- steveitis 17y agoI believe that they do,and at very high rates but they get run over by cars much more frequently. I think that neither really makes them less 'immortal' in the sense that this article means. Though I can see the argument that errors in cell replication leading to cancerous growths could be counted as a form of natural life span limitation, I would be surprised if it didn't also happen to this jellyfish.
- Groxx 17y agoThere's still background radiation. That the telomere doesn't shorten basically means the DNA doesn't "age"; cells don't become more likely to mutate after X duplications begin to damage the code, like ours do.
- zackattack 17y agoIs telomere shortening the sole cause of DNA replication errors? (Besides radiation, which damages the DNA directly?)
- a-priori 17y agoNo, it's not. DNA transcription errors occur all the time in our bodies, but there are elaborate repair mechanisms in the DNA that either correct it or, if its uncorrectable, kill off the cell. But, sometimes these mechanisms fail and a cell survives with mutated DNA. If the right genes are mutated, then it grows uncontrolled and you've got cancer. In order to get immortality, these repair mechanisms would have to be as robust after 1000 years as they are after 20 years. In humans, the repair mechanisms tend to degrade as you age, which is why, the theory goes, people are more likely to get cancer as they get older. It's not that there are more errors then, but that they're not corrected as well.
- glhaynes 17y agoBecause they are able to bypass death, the number of individuals is spiking. Did they like ... just evolve or something? You'd think they'd have spiked before now and reached equilibrium.
- kiba 17y agoI think they got eaten instead. Biological immortality no good if you get ate pretty soon.
- glhaynes 17y agoIf it's not one thing it's another.
- electromagnetic 17y agoThey've reached true immortality when they can go in one end of an animal and come out the other still alive.
- derefr 17y agoLots of animals can do that, although the ones that can survive in a body—for example, tapeworms—usually start preferring to survive in that body (it relieves you of all the work of creating a biological equilibrium of your own), so they evolve to hold on inside instead of coming out.
- hristov 17y agoGood point. This might have something to do with global warming and extinction of predators.
- CUViper 17y agoAccording to one of the linked articles, they are suspected to be hitchhiking in the ballast of large ships, so their habitat is unnaturally expanding. There could always be other factors too, like an over-fished predator.
- jdunck 17y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula
- itistoday 17y agoThis form of immortality displeases me. I'd rather not turn back into a fetus for the sake of immortality.
- tyler 17y agoPersonally, I'm not particularly picky about my forms of immortality.
- boucher 17y agoSeems like immortality without memory is useless, so really that's the question.
- pyre 17y agoDepends on whether or not you can selectively preserve memory. If could be useful if it acted sort of like amnesia where you retain things like muscle memory and factual memory, but not personal memory. Though I wouldn't necessarily look forward to the prospect of losing my life experiences.
- Qz 17y agoMakes you wonder if immortality without memory is even immortality at all.
- pyre 17y agoIt still is immortality. In a world with a large population we might think more about what makes us individuals as what we wish to preserve, but from a survival-of-the-species point of view, it is immortality.
- patio11 17y agoWrite stuff down! BAM, problem solved. (Seriously speaking, consider the sci-fi short story possibilities of an individual who had to reboot every 80 years or so, but who had had access to a computer and competent legal/investment advice for roughly the same timescale as the present-day Catholic Church has been in operation. Age 0 through 24 is essentially one long data dump, but he's gotten pretty good at constructing his curricula, given a few millenia to practice it. They call him Jerome the Eldest, he is richer than most nations, and he lives life depressed and alone, until one day...)
- javajones 17y agoSo is this animals natural predator diminishing in numbers, which is why they are spiking?
- pyre 17y agoIt could be any number of things. I saw a documentary about a different type of jellyfish that is becoming a problem in East Asia due to a combination of over-fishing of predators and warmer waters which increases their reproduction yields.
- hristov 17y agoWhat about enthropy? I would expect that after going between polyp and adult many times the DNA of some cells may get damaged, and the cells may not convert correctly to their new cell types, and eventually the organism will become more and more wrong until it dies.
- rflrob 17y agoIt all depends on how well the organism can distinguish between the incorrectly copied DNA (this is probably what you mean by damage) and the right sequence. Given that most of the DNA will be copied correctly, if slightly wrong bits can be detected and excised, then the organism should stay healthy. Biological codes are just as digital as computer ones.
- roundsquare 17y agoI think @hristov is referring to the cells eventually not being able to perform their function... as a result of friction (or something else) eventually making each cell less effective. Or at least, that was my first thought.
- dbz 17y agoIn humans, DNA Polymerase (the thing that replicates DNA) makes about 1 in 10,000 base pairing errors. After other enzymes "proof read"- the mistake count is 1 in 1 billion. Keep in mind, that there is a lot of "junk DNA." junk DNA is DNA that does nothing, but a lot of mistakes are made in the junk DNA and the introns (parts of the junk DNA that do nothing) are cut out and we only keep in exons. Now I have another very important point to make. Errors in base pairing, also known as mutations- are usually very very good. Why? Because 1/3 of errors are bad, 1/3 do absolutely nothing, and 1/3 are good and provide benefits. That means 2/3 of the time- mutations do nothing or help the organism. So, I guess I am saying I think you should expect a different result =p. Mutations are good!
- hristov 17y agoSuppose the one in a billion number is right. But that thing has to have at least several billion cells. So each transformation will ensure that there are several cells that go wrong. I mean people live a limited time and do not have to have their cells do these complex transformations, yet a large part of us still manage to get cancer before we die. Also, I do not believe that stuff about mutations being just as likely to be good. If you have a complex organism any change is far more likely to be detrimental than positive. When you hit your watch with hammer, it is very unlikely you will get a better watch. It is much more likely you will get a broken watch.
- MattSimmons 17y agoIn that case, they'd better be delicious, in order to keep the population down...
- kissickas 17y agoWhat about Hydra? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality#Hydra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality#Hydra
- Groxx 17y agoYeah, I think there are a few animals like that. So while it's not likely the only "immortal" animal, this jellyfish does definitely seem to have a unique kind of immortality.
- sambeau 17y agoMost living things are 'immortal' in that they do not age. This is true of bacteria, fish, lobsters, birds etc. It just happens that most creatures we have close contact with - i.e. Mammals, do. What is unusual about this Jellyfish is not it's lack of ageing, but it's ability to return to "childhood" at times of stress and then become an adult once again, later. It's a weird and fascinating concept for us Mammals. Although I am pretty sure I wouldn't want to repeat my teenage years over and over.
- whyenot 17y agosays Dr. Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute. There is not Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute. The author of this article meant the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. http://www.stri.org/english/research/facilities/marine/bocas_del_toro/postdocs.php http://www.stri.org/english/research/facilities/marine/bocas...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- stevejohnson 17y agoThis is a decidedly time lord-like form of immortality.
- JCThoughtscream 17y agoBut /how do they taste/?
- paraschopra 17y agoLike most living systems, Jellyfishes are self organizing systems. But the difference is that a jellyfish is quite minimalistic in structure and their neural system is simple too. And most certainly, it lacks emotions of any kind. That is what amazes me about jellyfishes: a very, very simple system genetically programmed to for reproduction lacking any "purpose". And, now they say it can even go back to its proto stage. Wow, evolution is fascinating.
- woadwarrior01 17y agoBiologically speaking, the only "purpose" of every organism is to just to reproduce. I've always been fascinated by the idea of how our brain acts like a higher level abstraction on top of the rather slow process of evolution, since ideas evolve a couple of orders magnitude faster than plain old evolution.
- edo 17y agoWhat purpose is lacking in jellyfishes, that isn't in cats or dogs?
- hac 17y agoAs some already noted, there are other animals like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence
- gort 17y agoIt's worth noting that there's probably no fundamental reason why animals that live forever couldn't evolve. Sadly though, evolution favours whatever genes multiply fastest. There are trade-offs between living forever and reproducing as quickly as possible; and selection favours the latter.
- donaq 17y agoWe need to capture one and feed it for a couple of centuries to see if it is truly immortal.
- khelloworld 17y agoSomeone should start a business that breeds/sells those 'immortial beings.'
- albertcardona 17y agoPlanarians (flatworms) have many immortal species as well. They are able to grow and degrow, changing their cell populations to the proportions found in juveniles. They are able to divide by fission, where the head remains and the tail grows a new brain from scratch.