Lighthouse jellyfish can reverse the cells of their bodies toward rejuvenation
This "reverse growth" is conditional and occurs only when they suffer from starvation, physical damage, or other sudden crises.
Usually, they also live and die in the traditional way.
Jellyfish are the only creatures that theoretically live forever as long as they are not eaten or die of disease.
In 1988, a marine biology student discovered a small bell-shaped lighthouse jellyfish with a diameter of only 4 to 5 millimeters in shallow waters off the northwest coast of Italy.
In shallow water, its transparent body is not dazzling, with only small tentacles and slightly reddish, lighthouse-shaped gonads that stand out (people tend to think of the gonads in the center of the jellyfish's body as their brains). The student put the lighthouse jellyfish in a container filled with seawater, originally intending to put it in the refrigerator and freeze it as a specimen, but he forgot to put it in the refrigerator after busy going home for the weekend. When he returned on Monday, he found that the jellyfish in the container had mysteriously disappeared!
In fact, this jellyfish did not disappear, it just changed into a different form, that is, from the [jellyfish type] back to the [water daughter-in-law type].
Those mature jellyfish that can float freely in the ocean are called [jellyfish type] by biologists, and jellyfish in the previous stage of [jellyfish type] are called [water hydra type].
The marine biology student was puzzled. In general, the normal life cycle of a jellyfish is carried out in the following order: first, the fertilized egg grows into a hairy larvae with cilia on the surface, which is scientifically called [floating wave larvae"; after that, the larvae will metamorphose into [water daughter-in-law type]; then, [water-daughter type] will grow into a mature [jellyfish type] swimming in the sea; finally, [jellyfish type] will produce eggs or sperm and then die.
But apparently, two days is not enough time for this jellyfish to complete the three stages of the entire life cycle in the container - laying eggs, and then through the larval stage to become a water daughter-in-law. Because normally, this process takes weeks.
Therefore, if this jellyfish wants to change from jellyfish type to water daughter-in-law type in two days, there is only one possibility, it must return to childhood like the protagonist of some mythological stories, reverse time, and reverse the life cycle.
This process, like a butterfly turning back into a caterpillar, is a completely counterclockwise transition.
Recently, scientists have discovered that the characteristics of "immortality" may not be limited to lighthouse jellyfish. A sea moon jellyfish (30 to 50 cm in diameter) that is significantly larger than the lighthouse jellyfish entered the field of vision in 2016.
At that time, He Jinru, a graduate student in marine biology at Xiamen University, raised a sea moon jellyfish in the laboratory.
After the same fate of being forgotten for several days, the sea moon jellyfish sank to the bottom of the tank, stopped swimming, and shattered into several pieces.
Usually at this time, the average person will think that the jellyfish is dead and will flush it into the sewers.
But He Jinru did not do so, and he continued to observe the fragments. After a few months, the sea moon jellyfish began to reborn like a phoenix. The tentacles appeared!
Later, healthy hydra bodies [jumped] out of the fragments of these jellyfish bodies. At this time, everyone realized that this sea moon jellyfish did not simply break and die, but reversed its life cycle and retreated from the jellyfish type to the water daughter-in-law type.
This suggests that lighthouse jellyfish aren't the only ones — jellyfish that can reverse the course of life after injury— but also moon jellyfish.
Jellyfish are not a living thing, but a collection of a class of organisms
In the first place, the original form of life was nothing more than a few simple prokaryotic cells.
Later, prokaryotic cells gathered into a whole, in which they performed their respective duties, evolved into complex eukaryotic cells, and later, some eukaryotic cells gathered into a whole, internal differentiation, evolved into multicellular organisms
The spiny animals, in turn, gather multicellular living individuals into a whole, and internally produce individual differentiation.
The spiny animals seem to have quietly opened a new chapter in the evolution of life on Earth in a higher dimension
Immortal beings should not be able to achieve self-evolution.
But with the change of the environment, immortal creatures can not adapt to the new environment, will die in large numbers.
Therefore, organisms began to evolve towards death, because only death and reproduction can better promote the evolution of organisms, ensure the adaptation of organisms to the environment, and ensure the continuation of species. If a species is to evolve towards immortality, only by getting rid of the constraints of environmental change can species evolve towards immortality.
If immortality is achieved, will the function of reproduction be degraded?
If the function of reproduction is degraded, then the species cannot continue, and eventually it will die.
Therefore, eternal life is not necessarily the best way.
Source | a small free star
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