The world's only immortal animal

http://green.yahoo.com/blog/guest_bloggers/26/the-world-s-only-immortal-animal.html

by ph0rque • 16 years ago

153 65 16 years ago

green.yahoo.com

bh23ha• 16 years ago

What 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?

pyre4• 16 years ago

There are a number of things that lead to cell mortality in multi-cellular organisms.

steveitis2• 16 years ago

It's my understanding that certain turtles don't exhibit telomere shortening, and are effectively 'immortal' as well in that they don't age.

zackattack2• 16 years ago

Do they not get cancer?

steveitis2• 16 years ago

I 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.

Groxx2• 16 years ago

There'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.

glhaynes2• 16 years ago

Because 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• 16 years ago

I think they got eaten instead.

Biological immortality no good if you get ate pretty soon.

glhaynes2• 16 years ago

If it's not one thing it's another.

hristov3• 16 years ago

Good point. This might have something to do with global warming and extinction of predators.

CUViper• 16 years ago

According 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.

jared314• 16 years ago

That sounds similar to the C. taxifolia Algae threat. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/algae/chronology.html

biotech• 16 years ago

Good observation. A spike in population implies a recent change in the organism or its environment. Since most multicellular organisms cannot evolve that quickly, it's more likely that there was a change in the environment which this organism was able to take advantage of. I doubt that their numbers are spiking because "they are bale to bypass death".

daniel-cussen• 16 years ago

They are jellyfish, and jellyfish thrive on the recent development that is large amounts of nitrates in the oceans. Think greenhouse gases, but instead of heat in the atmosphere, it's algae and jellyfish in oceans.

andr• 16 years ago

Overfishing is the culprit here. With less fish in the seas jellyfish - immortal and regular - can procreate much more easily, and have access to more food. Here's a relevant article: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/273850

I am surprised the tourism lobbies are not fighting the fishing lobbies on that one.

by• 16 years ago

Although the subject is interesting the page, published on 16th March 2010, is poorly researched blog-spam. It is essentially just copied from one of the numerous pages that say the same thing, such as this one published on 27th January 2009

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4357829/Immortal-j...

The picture is not of Turritopsis nutricula, but T. rubra according to this page

http://www.ville-ge.ch/mhng/hydrozoa/hydrozoa-directory.htm

This is Maria's page

http://www.personal.psu.edu/mum31/

and the related journal article about ships' ballast is here

http://www.springerlink.com/content/81747575j2707j4g/

jdunck• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turritopsis_nutricula

itistoday• 16 years ago

This form of immortality displeases me. I'd rather not turn back into a fetus for the sake of immortality.

tyler• 16 years ago

Personally, I'm not particularly picky about my forms of immortality.

boucher• 16 years ago

Seems like immortality without memory is useless, so really that's the question.

ph0rque• 16 years ago

Presumably, if we can apply this kind of immortality to humans, we would tweak it so that we become e.g. 18-year-olds instead of fetuses...

j_baker• 16 years ago

Personally, I like the doctor who model. I think that regenerating 12 times would be enough for me.

javajones• 16 years ago

So is this animals natural predator diminishing in numbers, which is why they are spiking?

pyre4• 16 years ago

It 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.

hristov3• 16 years ago

What 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• 16 years ago

It 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• 16 years ago

I 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.

dbz2• 16 years ago

In 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!

hristov3• 16 years ago

Suppose 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.

mwerty• 16 years ago

> That means 2/3 of the time- mutations do nothing or help the organism.

Imagine you have a series of integers being multiplied. Each step, you increase 1/3 of them and decrease 1/3 of them - you leave the remaining 1/3 untouched.

After enough steps, you have zero.

obfuscate• 16 years ago

"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."

This is the same sort of reasoning as "either I win the lottery or I don't, so there's a 50% chance". More mutations are neutral, than harmful, than beneficial.

rue• 16 years ago

A single animal is not a self-contained system.

MattSimmons• 16 years ago

In that case, they'd better be delicious, in order to keep the population down...

kissickas• 16 years ago

What about Hydra? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality#Hydra

Groxx2• 16 years ago

Yeah, 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• 16 years ago

Most 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• 16 years ago

says 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...

stevejohnson• 16 years ago

This is a decidedly time lord-like form of immortality.

JCThoughtscream• 16 years ago

But /how do they taste/?

paraschopra• 16 years ago

Like 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• 16 years ago

Biologically 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• 16 years ago

What purpose is lacking in jellyfishes, that isn't in cats or dogs?

donaq• 16 years ago

We need to capture one and feed it for a couple of centuries to see if it is truly immortal.

gort• 16 years ago

It'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.

khelloworld• 16 years ago

Someone should start a business that breeds/sells those 'immortial beings.'

albertcardona• 16 years ago

Planarians (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.

hac• 16 years ago

As some already noted, there are other animals like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence

The world's only immortal animal

Related Stories