I thought that these creatures are amazing. It is fascinating how they age to a certain amount of years then start aging backwards to hydroids again, then age to full age, and so on. Perhaps in the future scientists can find the gene that makes them do this so that they can somehow make people immortal in the same way as these jellyfish. People and most animals age at a cellular level, so presumably whatever the jellyfish is doing is happening within the cells. This can imply that we might be able to battle diseases like cancer within cells using whatever scientists can learn about how these jellyfish are able to do this.
I am very impressed. Although, it makes me wonder. Maybe we can extract the DNA and use it to our advantage. If you think about it, Dr. Maria Pia Miglietta could be right. We could be looking at a silent invasion and we won't even notice. I do hope these animals aren't territorial because if they are, they might push other animals out of their habitats and mess up the food chain. I am probably overthinking this but it might be a possibility.
This is very interesting. I agree that it could be a good idea to extract DNA from these remarkable creatures to make us immortal.Can this animal live through getting eaten? I was just wondering because it says that this animal is immortal and that means it cannot be killed.
I think this is an amazing article and that it would be interesting for marine scientists as well as lab researchers to study this animal more closely. Still, I think the style that the article writers chose to write the documentation made me suspicious. It was very casual and made the article look untrustworthy. Even so, I do disagree with JP in his idea to extract the animal's DNA to make humans immortal. Why, you ask? Well in short, humans evolved (or were created depending on how you want to look at it) to die. So far that is the same with most organisms. If some hotshot scientist decided to come out with the immortality pill, my humble hypothesis is that things would not go well at all. I mean we will all die at some point, weather or not we can live forever. When the world ends, so will we.
This article was very interesting. I can't believe an animal is smart enough to do something like this. In my opinion, it is amazing. I think its really cool how this jellyfish releases gametes and makes them into tree form. Furthermore, I think it is amazing when the dig back into the ground and makes a new colony of hybrids.
This was a very intriguing article. I have some ideas of my own, but first I want to adress some interesting things that were written in the above comments. I respectfully disagree to extracting DNA from the jellyfish to make us immortal. First of all, these jellyfish have a system to help them. Second, wouldn't the earth become overpopulated? To answer JP's question about them being eaten, they cannot survive being eaten. I think that they will live perpetually as long as nothing happens to them (storm, shark, starvation). If I understood the article correctly, it sounds like these amazing jellyfish are released from hydroid colonies. Something very interesting about these jellyfish is how tiny they are. The largest jellyfish spotted, a Lion's Mane Jellyfish, had a bell of 7 feet 6 inches, and 120 foot long tentacles. But this jellyfish is only 4.5 millimeters, though they do sting. However, this puts them near the bottom of the food chain (except for plankton), an unfortunate barrier to their immortality. It is weird that their cells can change from juvenile ones to adult ones. These jellyfish certainly are amazing creatures, but how long do they take to reproduce? If they take a long time, then couldn't that make up for the length of their lives? When I researched this question, I didn't find anything, but if anyone does find anything, I would be delighted to know. When I was researching, I noticed a word that kept on reocurring in all of the articles I read. That word was "theoretically". So though it reverts back to a juvenile, is it possible that after a few rounds of this, it will die? Overall, this was a great article and I hope to learn more about the immortal jellyfish.
Turritopsis nutricula is an amazing jellyfish, to be able to change from a fully mature adult to a juvenile form and back again. Two things caught my interest about this behavior. First Imagine how advanced and useful a survival trait it would be has a juvenile the jelly probably requires less food than that of the adult form. Second It would be interesting to see is the DNA that allows these jelly fish to change from adults to juvenile forms has any similarities to the DNA in Human stem cells. According to the National Institutes of Health website, "stem cells have three general properties: they are capable of dividing and renewing themselves for long periods; they are unspecialized; and they can give rise to specialized cell types.” To change form this jellies must be able to change it’s cells. Studying how these jellies change forms may allow use to more easily change human stem cells which might let us better clone human body parts. Using their cells could be both a good and a bad thing for us. We could live forever because the jellyfish can alter the state of its cells, transforming them into another cell type. (This is called transdifferentiation). Current research shows that aging happens because of a change in the DNA of a living creature that tells the body to slow down or stop the regeneration of cells, until it dies. If we could alter the human DNA in this way, we would be theoretically immortal. While being immortal sounds wonderful, the world would suffer from over population and we wouldn't have enough resources for everyone. In this way jellyfish populations are spiking because they are theoretically immortal. Though predators have traditionally kept the population in check, as overfishing has depleted the numbers of predatory fish, jellyfish populations have grown. It would be interesting to study how jellyfish compete amoung themselves for resources, is it possible that their immortality might ruin them?
Regarding JP's comment, immortality means that the jellyfish's cells don't have a built in "clock", but they can be killed by external factors including predators and disease.
This is an amazing species. It is so fascinating that there are small sea creatures who can live longer than humans. However, there are a few drawbacks. A while from now, those jellyfish could invade the sea and painfully sting other sea animals. They could also invade our beaches and divers could no longer discover underwater. We may however be able to figure out how we can use their DNA and be immortal.
This is an amazing jellyfish. It is amazing how these jellyfish can avoid the clock. The only thing that can kill them is external causes such as predators. As many other peopel said, this can lead to immortal life by extracting their DNA, but this would probably not go well. Who would want to live until the end of the world? But maybe we need to control jellyfish also. They could invade our beaches and crowd the ocean. And as the article said, this may be a silent invasion of the ocean.
I thought this article was fascinating, It is so cool thast the jelly fish are imortal. They could totally take over the world, that would not be good, but it might be possible. WHat I did not like about this article is that it was very confusing and I thought that they could have explained it a little more. I would give this article a 7 out of 10.
Loran, going off what you said, if we took their DNA it would probably mess us up and turn us into jelly fish kind of like in spiderman with the cross species genetic thing. Plus if we lived forever we would over populate the earth and it would mess up the eco system and stuff like that. Also, it would be really boring living forever I definitely would not like it.
Goodness! I wonder how that is even possible. They can get older and younger. boy, I wish I could do that. I would go back to being a two year old again in preschool with no worries at all whatsoever. Anyways, off topic. They can live for as long as possible Jeez. That's cra cra. We could take their DNA and put it into a human and maybe the human could become immortal. I mean that's hoping a little bit to far but still, it could be possible. A human could live to be like 200 years old.
13 comments:
I thought that these creatures are amazing. It is fascinating how they age to a certain amount of years then start aging backwards to hydroids again, then age to full age, and so on. Perhaps in the future scientists can find the gene that makes them do this so that they can somehow make people immortal in the same way as these jellyfish. People and most animals age at a cellular level, so presumably whatever the jellyfish is doing is happening within the cells. This can imply that we might be able to battle diseases like cancer within cells using whatever scientists can learn about how these jellyfish are able to do this.
I am very impressed. Although, it makes me wonder. Maybe we can extract the DNA and use it to our advantage. If you think about it, Dr. Maria Pia Miglietta could be right. We could be looking at a silent invasion and we won't even notice. I do hope these animals aren't territorial because if they are, they might push other animals out of their habitats and mess up the food chain. I am probably overthinking this but it might be a possibility.
This is very interesting. I agree that it could be a good idea to extract DNA from these remarkable creatures to make us immortal.Can this animal live through getting eaten? I was just wondering because it says that this animal is immortal and that means it cannot be killed.
I think this is an amazing article and that it would be interesting for marine scientists as well as lab researchers to study this animal more closely. Still, I think the style that the article writers chose to write the documentation made me suspicious. It was very casual and made the article look untrustworthy. Even so, I do disagree with JP in his idea to extract the animal's DNA to make humans immortal. Why, you ask? Well in short, humans evolved (or were created depending on how you want to look at it) to die. So far that is the same with most organisms. If some hotshot scientist decided to come out with the immortality pill, my humble hypothesis is that things would not go well at all. I mean we will all die at some point, weather or not we can live forever. When the world ends, so will we.
This article was very interesting. I can't believe an animal is smart enough to do something like this. In my opinion, it is amazing. I think its really cool how this jellyfish releases gametes and makes them into tree form. Furthermore, I think it is amazing when the dig back into the ground and makes a new colony of hybrids.
This was a very intriguing article. I have some ideas of my own, but first I want to adress some interesting things that were written in the above comments. I respectfully disagree to extracting DNA from the jellyfish to make us immortal. First of all, these jellyfish have a system to help them. Second, wouldn't the earth become overpopulated? To answer JP's question about them being eaten, they cannot survive being eaten. I think that they will live perpetually as long as nothing happens to them (storm, shark, starvation). If I understood the article correctly, it sounds like these amazing jellyfish are released from hydroid colonies. Something very interesting about these jellyfish is how tiny they are. The largest jellyfish spotted, a Lion's Mane Jellyfish, had a bell of 7 feet 6 inches, and 120 foot long tentacles. But this jellyfish is only 4.5 millimeters, though they do sting. However, this puts them near the bottom of the food chain (except for plankton), an unfortunate barrier to their immortality. It is weird that their cells can change from juvenile ones to adult ones. These jellyfish certainly are amazing creatures, but how long do they take to reproduce? If they take a long time, then couldn't that make up for the length of their lives? When I researched this question, I didn't find anything, but if anyone does find anything, I would be delighted to know. When I was researching, I noticed a word that kept on reocurring in all of the articles I read. That word was "theoretically". So though it reverts back to a juvenile, is it possible that after a few rounds of this, it will die? Overall, this was a great article and I hope to learn more about the immortal jellyfish.
Turritopsis nutricula is an amazing jellyfish, to be able to change from a fully mature adult to a juvenile form and back again. Two things caught my interest about this behavior. First Imagine how advanced and useful a survival trait it would be has a juvenile the jelly probably requires less food than that of the adult form. Second It would be interesting to see is the DNA that allows these jelly fish to change from adults to juvenile forms has any similarities to the DNA in Human stem cells. According to the National Institutes of Health website, "stem cells have three general properties: they are capable of dividing and renewing themselves for long periods; they are unspecialized; and they can give rise to specialized cell types.” To change form this jellies must be able to change it’s cells. Studying how these jellies change forms may allow use to more easily change human stem cells which might let us better clone human body parts. Using their cells could be both a good and a bad thing for us. We could live forever because the jellyfish can alter the state of its cells, transforming them into another cell type. (This is called transdifferentiation). Current research shows that aging happens because of a change in the DNA of a living creature that tells the body to slow down or stop the regeneration of cells, until it dies. If we could alter the human DNA in this way, we would be theoretically immortal. While being immortal sounds wonderful, the world would suffer from over population and we wouldn't have enough resources for everyone. In this way jellyfish populations are spiking because they are theoretically immortal. Though predators have traditionally kept the population in check, as overfishing has depleted the numbers of predatory fish, jellyfish populations have grown. It would be interesting to study how jellyfish compete amoung themselves for resources, is it possible that their immortality might ruin them?
Regarding JP's comment, immortality means that the jellyfish's cells don't have a built in "clock", but they can be killed by external factors including predators and disease.
This is an amazing species. It is so fascinating that there are small sea creatures who can live longer than humans. However, there are a few drawbacks. A while from now, those jellyfish could invade the sea and painfully sting other sea animals. They could also invade our beaches and divers could no longer discover underwater. We may however be able to figure out how we can use their DNA and be immortal.
This is an amazing jellyfish. It is amazing how these jellyfish can avoid the clock. The only thing that can kill them is external causes such as predators. As many other peopel said, this can lead to immortal life by extracting their DNA, but this would probably not go well. Who would want to live until the end of the world? But maybe we need to control jellyfish also. They could invade our beaches and crowd the ocean. And as the article said, this may be a silent invasion of the ocean.
I thought this article was fascinating, It is so cool thast the jelly fish are imortal. They could totally take over the world, that would not be good, but it might be possible. WHat I did not like about this article is that it was very confusing and I thought that they could have explained it a little more. I would give this article a 7 out of 10.
Loran, going off what you said, if we took their DNA it would probably mess us up and turn us into jelly fish kind of like in spiderman with the cross species genetic thing. Plus if we lived forever we would over populate the earth and it would mess up the eco system and stuff like that. Also, it would be really boring living forever I definitely would not like it.
Goodness! I wonder how that is even possible. They can get older and younger. boy, I wish I could do that. I would go back to being a two year old again in preschool with no worries at all whatsoever. Anyways, off topic. They can live for as long as possible Jeez. That's cra cra. We could take their DNA and put it into a human and maybe the human could become immortal. I mean that's hoping a little bit to far but still, it could be possible. A human could live to be like 200 years old.
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