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Most animals, including humans, are born, grow old, and eventually die. But some species are able to break out of this inevitable life cycle: they defy their age and revert to younger versions of themselves, reliving the cycle over and over again. The most famous of these species is Turritopsis dohrnii, or “immortal jellyfish”. But a recent investigation has revealed that this exclusive club has a new member with extraordinary abilities, Channel 24 reported, citing phys.org.

The scientific name of this particular species of animals is ctenophore or rib fin. This particular individual belongs to the species Mnemiopsis leidyi. These are also called “comb jelly”. Clams are very ancient animals; some studies even suggest they may have been the first animals in existence, appearing around 700 million years ago. This leads researchers to believe that reverse development may be a primitive ability.

New research challenges our understanding of early animal development and body plans and opens new ways to study life cycle plasticity and rejuvenation. The fact that we have found a new species that uses this type of “time travel machine” raises interesting questions about how widespread this ability is in the animal tree of life. Can we find traces of this in other animals today that do not exhibit this behavior?.

This research is based on an accidental discovery. University of Bergen doctoral student Joan J. Soto-Angel, who later became co-author, began researching this topic after a larva suddenly appeared in the laboratory aquarium instead of an adult finned fish. At first the scientist thought that it was an adult who put him down, but later it turned out that it was the same creature.

Soto-Angel enlisted the help of his colleagues, and together they began playing out scenarios to find the scenario that might trigger adverse development. They found that an adult had a rib fin. Mnemiopsis leidyi can indeed revert to the larval stage when under severe stress.

Within a few weeks, they not only changed their morphological characteristics, but also acquired a completely different feeding behavior typical of larvae.
says Joan J. Soto Angel.

Paul Burkhardt, a researcher at the University of Bergen and one of the study’s authors, says scientists now want to find out the molecular mechanism that enables this reversal and what happens to the animal’s nervous system during this process.

They will also try to find out how many other types of “time travelers” there might be. Scientists suggest that life cycle plasticity, that is, the ability of an organism to change some aspects of its biology under the influence of certain environmental stimuli, may be inherited in animals to a greater extent than scientists imagined. However, the question of whether this ability can be transferred to a person will definitely not be on the agenda for many years.