Turritopsis nutricula is a type of jellyfish, just big enough to see with your naked eye, and it’s considered by scientists to be an animal that cheated death.
Turritopsis nutricula managed to find a way to beat that. What these
little folks do is they revert completely to a sexually immature,
colonial stage after they reach sexual maturity. They’re even cooler
than that. When they’re young they’ve got only several tentacles, but at
a mature stage, they get to 80-90 of them. They’re able to return
to polyp stage due to a cell change in the external screen (Exumbrella),
which allows them to bypass death. As far as scientists have been able
to find out, this change renders the hydrozoa virtually immortal.
to read more about them: Turritopsis nutricula in Wikipedia
I wonder if these jelly fish have a singer like Tom Leher. If so, they may have a song with the words, "two-four-six-eight, now it's time to transdifferentiate!"
ReplyDeleteI noted another interesting thing in the description. I forget what the words are called that have meaning but are forms of words that aren't often used...words like postpone and prepone. The description has the following: "and then the tentacles and mesoglea get 'resorbed'". That's the first time I've ever seen "resorbed".