The Facts on the Immortal Jellyfish
When the Turritopsis dohrnii, later known as the Immortal Jellyfish, was discovered in the late 19th century the researcher/scientist must have taken one look at the 4.5mm/.18in creature and said, “eww gross,” before tossing it aside.
Why do I think this? Because it would take another 100 years before two students would accidentally discover that the Turriropsis dohrnii was functionally immortal.
Honestly, I get it, it’s gross
Discovering Immortality
In the 1980s two students, Christian Sommer and Giorgio Bavestrello collected several very small creatures that resemble jellyfish and brought them to a laboratory because that was considered hilarious in the 80s. These small creatures belonged to the hydrozoa taxonomic class and were closely related to jellyfish, you saw the picture, you get it.
What was supposed to happen was the matured jellyfish, called the medusae, would produce eggs and sperm leading to multiple fertilized eggs. These eggs would eventually grow into polyps that latch themselves onto a hard surface, and where they use their small tentacles to grab food and eat.
The polyps continue to grow, eventually becoming a stack of jellyfish that float out into the ocean one by one. From here, the cycle repeats with the original medusae eventually dying. It’s the circle of life, we’ve all seen The Lion King.
How do you say ‘hakuna matata’ in jellyfish?
But, when the students returned to look at the hydrozoa, they found some medusae missing and a bunch of polyps. The medusae couldn’t have grown legs and walked away, that would have taken at least a millennia!
Confused, the students watched the hydrozoa vigorously as they entered the medusae stage and had to reproduce asexually. After some performance anxiety, they saw something unbelievable.
It turned out that when the medusae were close to biological death, they weren’t producing eggs or sperm. Instead, through a process called transdifferentiation, they themselves converted into blobs, settled on a hard surface, and turn into polyps. From here the cycle continued as normal with the new stack of jellyfish each being clones of the original medusae.
The students presented their findings at the Hydrozoan Society, a place where, before today, I wouldn’t have believed was a thing. It just sounds made-up. But, disbelief is something I share with the folks at the society since they could not believe the student’s findings, labeling it impossible.
Luckily, since the medusae to blob process is pretty quick and the students knew that they could trigger the transdifferentiation response simply by causing the medusae stress, it was pretty easy to prove. But, it was impossible to explain.
Pretty easy to stress out humans too
Essentially once your cells are genetically coded to be a specific cell, like skin, lung, heart, etc. you can’t change them, it’s not naturally possible. But, when the Turritopsis Dohrnii goes through transdifferentiation, not only is it happening but it’s happening to every cell in that jellyfish.
Eventually, word spread, and other scientists including Japanese scientist Shin Kubota replicated the experiment multiple times with the same set of jellyfish. Kubota especially has dedicated his life to trying to figure out just how this process works.
Word then spread like wildfire when it was time for the findings to be released to the press. Professor Federico Di Trocchio from the University of Lecce in Italy (today the University of Salento) decided to use the word ‘immortality’, which allowed the media to create the nickname the Immortal Jellyfish.
Can We Learn Immortality?
During the research for this article, I realized that almost every article/paper kept glossing over one pretty big piece of this ‘immortality’ process. When the medusae revert to a polyp, it grows into multiple new jellyfish that are clones of the first and when going through transdifferentiation, every cell is redifferentiated. So, are the new jellyfish created actually the same as the original?
It’s sort of like the thought experiment ‘The Ship of Theseus’, if every part of you is replaced, are you the same person you were before?
If humans were somehow able to go through the same process as the immortal jellyfish it would mean the cells in your brain would also go through transdifferentiation. You would most likely lose all your memories and be someone completely new. Can you call that immortality?
Related Article: Are You The Ship of Theseus?
That sort of question is probably the reason no one used the term ‘immortal’ prior to the press release to the media. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn anything from the ‘immortal’ jellyfish. Once we figure out exactly how it’s able to trigger the transdifferentiation process, we might be able to do the same for specific cells in our bodies.
Today scientists are forced to use stem cells which are notoriously difficult to get and require several ethical hoops to use since they mainly come from embryos. But what if by learning how the immortal jellyfish transdifferentiates with every cell in their body, we could do the same with certain cells?
Who is going to raise an ethical complaint if scientists can take fat cells and make them into lung, liver, or heart cells to repair damaged organs? Unfortunately, that revelation seems pretty far away but maybe one day we’ll accidentally discover that too.
Quick Facts
Japanese scientist Shin Kubota has written songs about the Immortal Jellyfish. Seriously, they’re on YouTube
Even though the Immortal Jellyfish might be biologically immortal they are still susceptible to death via prey or certain diseases that kill them before they can revert to the polyp stage.
