Immortality is real!

The idea of immortality is absurd, and as part of our world, we humans have accepted that every living organism has one thing in common: they will eventually die. As a result, many myths and legends revolving around our mortality have become pretty common. To name one, the fountain of youth.  But what if I told you nature has granted some of her creatures with the ability to survive for centuries if not indefinitely. To clarify I should say that scientists like Thomas Bosch consider the word immortality stupid because it implies that you can't die when that's not the case. These creatures are not gods and are susceptible to disease, predators, or drastic changes in their environment but unlike humans and many other species, they don't die from old age. To begin talking about dying from old age we should tackle it in palpable terms. In humans, grandpa and grandma are not going to live forever, sorry. They are getting older and older and as such, their bodily systems are getting weaker, specifically, their ability to fight illnesses and they are more likely to suffer from health complications.  Because of this reason, diseases and long term health issues hit the elderly much harder than a 21-year-old. 

But these creatures that possess immortality don't seem to age in the sense that it doesn't affect their means of survival as a factor on its own.

Turritopsis dohrii medusa

The pinky sized jellyfish deemed the "immortal jellyfish" (Turritopsis dohrnii) has no average lifespan because of its unique ability to age backward. The jellyfish is brought into the world and chances are it will die to a predator or something that it injures it beyond repair. But in cases of lesser physical damage and starvation it can, "Benjamin Button" itself. It turns its pre-existing cells into younger versions of themselves. How? It turns itself into a blob-like cyst that mimics the early stage of its life called the polyp stage. In the process, it changes all of its cells. It can go from muscle cells to nerve cells to even sex cells. Only in this stage, it can asexually reproduce and buds off into other polyps that are near genetically identical copies of the original. THIS IS AMAZING. Typically jellyfish follow a standard cycle of reproduction that follows something like the image below.

Throughout their lifecycle, jellyfish take on two different body forms: medusa and polyps. Polyps can reproduce asexually by budding, while medusae spawn eggs and sperm to reproduce sexually. 

The Turritopsis dohrnii can altogether skip an extremely complicated and delicate process of reproduction and just age backward to survive INFINITE TIMES. Granted, it does this in emergency situations but this creature has no average life span because of this amazing mechanism. Let's look at something more stoic: bristlecone pines. This BBC article describes a study in which multiple tissue samples from pollen and seeds from different age gaps spanning up to 4700 years were measured.  The result? The vascular tissue functioned exactly the same as it did in the youthful samples. Unlike jellyfish, the reason for this longevity is not as well explored but Thomas Bosch says it, "probably comes down to a special property of the trees' meristems" Meristems are areas of roots and shoots that possess a large number of stem cells.

Bristlecone Pines can live for thousands of years(Credit: Jack Dykinga/NPL)

The idea that these creatures could survive indefinitely with no interference from predation or other factors and a little bit of luck is amazing and goes to show that we could stand to learn something from nature's fountains of youth. Some of these creatures are being studied and applications to medicine are being used to keep us healthy for a long time. Look like there's some hope for grandpa and grandma.

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