Does Jelly fish undergoes aging and death? Or it will only be harmed by predator?
Alenjandra, thanks for the feedback, any other related species that is inmortal too? :)
Hi Kok, together with Maria Pia Miglietta we have just completed a 2 week course on hydrozoans at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Bocas del Toro (Panama), where I gave also a lecture on reverse development. Although media named Turritopsis as the "immortal jellyfish" there is no immortal organism on Earth and its oceans, otherwise all world oceans would be filled by such an organism(s). However, Turritopsis and other species exhibit a powerful potential of reverse development, leading to temporary back ontogeny. This potential is shared with other organisms (eg Laodicea indica, another hydrozoan - see De Vito et al 2008 in Marine Biology - by other cnidarians (scyphozoans, but also anthozoans) have also the potential of backward reversal at least in some stages of their life cycle. I send you herein a couple of pdfs. This potential allow these species to achieve exponential population growth in short time by the clonal amplification of the number of individuals. The cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying reverse development are of high interest to understand cell differentiation and how cells can transform back to multipotent states. We are near to complete genome and transcriptome sequencing in Turritopsis, we believe it will produce a new boost of work on these species.
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