As you may have noticed,
I tend to be a pretty easy going guy.
But like most people,
I occasionally get somewhat irritable,
and that usually happens when one of two things happen:
Either I'm hungry, or I'm really stressed out.
Note that you do not want to be around me when I'm both hungry and really stressed out.
There are a number of ways that I can deal with these situations:
I eat, I exercise. Sometimes I just scream.
One thing I cannot do, though,
it would be really nice,
would be to revert back to a simpler time,
back to when I was eight-year-old Hank.
But there is an organism, in this great wide world of ours,
that can do that very thing.
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This, my friends, is Turritopsis Dohrnii.
Otherwise known as Turritopsis Nutricula.
Other, otherwise known as The IMMORTAL JELLYFISH.
You heard me correctly; this little guy is the only animal that we know of
that is capable of reverting back to a younger version of itself.
And it does this, you've probably guessed,
when it's facing starvation or other stresses in its environment.
The question, though, is how does this happen,
and how can I get me some of it?
Okay, so because I know you are super curious, here is the typical life cycle of a jellyfish.
We've got the fertilized egg, which becomes a larva,
which sinks to the bottom of the ocean,
attaches itself to something and becomes a polyp,
which over time transforms itself into a free-swimming bell-shaped Medusa,
AKA a jellyfish, with 80 to 90 tentacles. Simple, right?
Since our friend, The Turritopsis, is a kind of Plankton...
Plankton is, by the way, a word for anything that doesn't really move itself around in the ocean;
it just gets moved around by the ocean:
Drifting organisms.
And Turritopsis is a source of nutrition,
so it often gets eaten by other organisms
or, you know, killed off by disease,
so it's technically not immortal if it gets eaten.
But the amazing stuff happens when this dime sized jellyfish
somehow avoids getting eaten but then can't find enough food or is injured or
is otherwise stressed by the environment this is the point that the jellyfish
goes all benjamin button on is throwing its life cycle into reverse the bell and
all those tentacles deteriorate and it eventually becomes assist this cyst has
the ability to reactivate genetic instructions from earlier in its life
cycle and actually starts creating new polyp cells and from there the life
cycle process begins again as the polyp through the beauty of asexual
reproduction releases many identical copies of itself scientists have said
that in theory this process could repeat indefinitely making the jellyfish
technically immortal it may seem like science fiction like there could be only
one jellyfish
what's actually happening here as the jellyfish transformed cells into a
younger state is called transdifferentiation this is one mature
cells that have already been assigned to function like lung cells or skin cells
become different kinds of cells in the case of this jellyfish that might mean
converting a muscle cell into a nerve cell or even a sperm and egg cell among
animals transdifferentiation is not
unique to these jellyfish for example if you take the lens out of the eye of a
chicken
the iris cells will actually develop into Lens cells unlike the jellyfish
though the chicken cannot revert its entire body back into an egg
though yeah that would be pretty awesome. the story of the turritopsis is important to
scientists because we're constantly looking for ways to regenerate new
tissue
usually that process involves stem cells or unassigned cells that haven't been
given genetic instructions to become a nerve cell or a bone cell or a liver cell
turns differentiation doesn't require that the problem is we have no idea what
signals are being sent to these cells to to change their type we just don't
understand how it works and it's not entirely clear that even possible
in mammals like us of course that doesn't mean that studying this
jellyfish isn't going to be tremendously useful for us if this thing has cells
that can switch themselves on and off when they're in peril prove very useful
for cancer research
imagine if we could isolate a cancer cell and just turn on their young and
healthy cell instructions again for now the turritopsis remains the only animal
that we know of that can regenerate its entire body which might go a little ways
to explain why the population of this jellyfish is exploding worldwide of course it is
it's practically immortal always so much good information here youtube.com slash
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goodbye!
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