Can anyone explain the Turritopsis Dohrnii to me? The “immortal jellyfish, and one of the only immortal animals that we know of, but how? If it’s considered living then how does it not die?
In: Biology
These things are cool, but they aren’t nearly as special as pop science makes them out to be in terms of immortality.
First off, the species is possibly immortal but that doesn’t mean invulnerable, you can still kill them easily, and in the wild the die all the time from running out of food or getting eaten, things like that.
What makes the species special…well to explain, jellyfish have two lifecycle stages, first as little anemone-like things stuck to rocks, then as drifting jellyfish. In this species, the drifting jellyfish can turn itself back into the anemone-shape even after being a jellyfish, which is like a person being able to turn back into a baby, or a frog turning back into a tadpole or a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar. Which is pretty sweet.
That’s how they get reputation for being immortal…after all, if they can rewind their age they can live forever right?
Well…the truth is how long you can live has more to do with how your _cells_ are aging rather than what shape your body is, so merely being able to revert to juvenile shape doesn’t necessarily mean you can live forever. But on the other hand, this species _and_ many of its relatives (which can’t do the shape-revert trick) don’t seem to really age much or at all on the cellular level, so it’s likely that this species (but also quite a few other cnidarians) are basically immortal in the sense that they’ll just go on living indefinitely if nothing happens to kill them.
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