Meet the jellyfish that can reverse ageing and live forever | Pets-animals News
In humanity’s endless quest for immortality, we’ve explored religious concepts, scientific advancements, and mythical solutions like the fountain of youth. Yet remarkably, the secret to cheating death may have been drifting in our oceans all along, embodied in a tiny, translucent jellyfish barely the size of your little fingernail.
An extraordinary life cycle
The hydrozoan Turritopsis dohrnii, commonly known as the immortal jellyfish, possesses a biological capability that defies our understanding of natural life cycles. As Miranda Lowe, a museum curator at Natural Hory Museum explains, most jellyfish follow a predictable path. She says, “They have eggs and sperm and these get released to be fertilised, and then from that you get a free-swimming larval form. The larva will move about in the current until it finds a hard surface to establish itself. It will then start to mature and grow. Larvae mature into polyps, which will then bud off and mature into young jellyfish.”
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What most of us recognise as a jellyfish is actually the final stage of their life cycle, known as the medusa stage. According to BBC Earth, “When we think of a jellyfish, what most of us picture is the ‘Medusa stage’, the second stage of jellyfish life. They spend this part of their lives as opaque drifting balloons with trailing tentacles.”
The death-defying transformation
What makes T. dohrnii truly remarkable is what happens when these tiny creatures face death. As BBC Earth mentions in its article, “If the start of jellyfish life wasn’t extraordinary enough, its death is where things get really exciting.”
When stressed starvation, physical damage, or other environmental threats, instead of dying, the immortal jellyfish undergoes an astonishing transformation. The Natural Hory Museum article describes this process in detail. It explains, “When the medusa of this species is physically damaged or experiences stresses such as starvation, instead of dying it shrinks in on itself, reabsorbing its tentacles and losing the ability to swim. It then settles on the seafloor as a blob-like cyst.”
Within just 24-36 hours, this blob transforms into a polyp — an earlier life stage — essentially reversing its development. BBC Earth describes this phenomenon vividly, “When the medusa of the immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) dies, it sinks to the ocean floor and begins to decay. Amazingly, its cells then reaggregate, not into a new medusa, but into polyps, and from these polyps emerge new jellyfish. The jellyfish has skipped to an earlier life stage to begin again.”
This would be comparable to a butterfly, instead of dying, transforming back into a caterpillar and then metamorphosing into an adult butterfly once again.Story continues below this ad
Transdifferentiation: The science behind immortality
The biological mechanism behind this remarkable transformation is called transdifferentiation — an extremely rare cellular process. The Natural Hory Museum article explains that this process “reprogrammes the medusa’s specialised cells to become specialised polyp cells, allowing the jellyfish to regrow themselves in an entirely different body plan to the free-swimming jellyfish they had recently been.”
What makes this particularly extraordinary is that medusa cells and polyp cells serve different functions and create different structures. Yet somehow, T. dohrnii can convert one specialised cell type into another completely different type — a biological feat that has captured the imagination of scients worldwide.
Dr Lisa-ann Gershwin, a jellyfish researcher quoted BBC Earth, emphasises the significance of this discovery, noting, “This was a real mind blower for all of us. It’s one of the most amazing discoveries of our time.”
