This Jellyfish Can’t Die, It Simply Resets Its Age And Starts Over

What if you didn’t have to age at all, and in fact as soon as you started getting older, you could just hit the reset button and start again from your childhood. There’s a species of jellyfish that can do exactly that. Known as Turritopsis dohrnii, this tiny, almost transparent jellyfish can revert its body back to an earlier stage of life and begin again. This characteristic has earned it the reputation for being “biologically immortal”. Most jellyfish follow a fairly straightforward life cycle. They start as larvae, develop into polyps, and eventually mature into free-swimming adults. Once that cycle is complete, they get old and die like with most living organisms. But Turritopsis dohrnii does not exactly do that. When this jellyfish faces

stress, injury, or even old age, it doesn’t follow the usual path towards death. Instead, it does something almost unbelievable. It goes through a process called transdifferentiation, where its cells essentially reorganise themselves, allowing the adult jellyfish to revert back to an earlier stage of life, the polyp stage. From there, it can grow all over again into a new adult, almost like starting its life from scratch. In theory, it can do this forever. That is why scientists refer to this jellyfish as “immortal” despite the fact that there are some things that can kill it like predators, diseases, and harsh environments. But what sets this organism apart from other organisms is its unique ability not to die due to the process of aging. This phenomenon has got scientists very excited. If a living organism can reset its own cells in this way, it raises obvious questions about how ageing works at a deeper level, and whether even a small part of that process exists in other species. The jellyfish was first identified in the Mediterranean Sea, but over time it has spread to other parts of the world, often carried unintentionally by ships. Even so, it remains tiny and easy to miss, usually only a few millimetres wide.