Jellyfish that cheats death and gets young again

this little guy can rewind its entire life cycle. pretty neat, huh?

By Smartasaurus· 1 min read Curious

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The short version

this little guy can rewind its entire life cycle. pretty neat, huh?
In practice it still dies — eaten by fish, hit by disease, crushed by surf.
The frustrating part is that we still don't really know how it works.

There's a jellyfish that, when injured or starving or simply old, sinks to the seafloor, melts into a blob, and grows back as a juvenile.

It's called Turritopsis dohrnii. About the size of a fingernail, transparent, unremarkable to look at. But under stress, its adult cells reverse course — a process biologists call transdifferentiation. Muscle cells become nerve cells. Reproductive cells become structural cells. The jellyfish reabsorbs its tentacles, collapses into a featureless mass of tissue, and a few days later sprouts back as a polyp, the larval form. Then it grows up again.

It can, in theory, do this forever. No other known animal can rewind its own cells like this. Most cells, once they've committed to being a heart cell or a skin cell, stay that way until they die. Turritopsis cells appear to ignore that rule entirely.

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