When you look in the mirror and wish you were a decade younger, what you’re really asking for is reverse development, or reverse aging. Though most animals, including humans, are born, age, and eventually die, some species can break away from this traditional lifecycle: they seemingly defy age and revert to younger versions of themselves. Turritopsis dohrnii , dubbed the immortal jellyfish, is the best-known of such species.
A recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , however, has revealed a new member of this exclusive club with extraordinary abilities: the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi , also called the comb jelly. Now, scientists are wondering how many more “time-traveler” species there might really be. “The work challenges our understanding of early animal development and body plans, opening new avenues for the study of life cycle plasticity and rejuvenation.
The fact that we have found a new species that uses this peculiar ‘time-travel machine’ raises fascinating questions about how spread this capacity is across the animal tree of life,” Joan J. Soto-Angel, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen who co-wrote the study, said in a statement . An unintentional discovery is at the origin of this study.
Soto-Angel began investigating the topic after a larval ctenophore suddenly appeared in the place of an adult ctenophore in a tank in his lab. As it turned out, however, it was the same individual. Soto-Angel and his c.