Turritopis

Four thousand years after Utnapishtim told Gilgemesh that the secret of immortality lay in a coral found in the ocean floor, man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it on the ocean floor. The unwitting discoverer was Christian Sommer, a German marine biologist student in his early twenties. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Fredrich Nietzsche conceived ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again.” - 251

Sommer (Christian Sommer, a German marine biologist) was staying at the home of a fellow graduate student Giorgio Bavestrello, who traced his interest in the sea to his relationship with his uncle Banito, a local fisherman. As a child, Bavestrello would marvel at the peculiar species that snagged on his uncle’s line, luminescent calms, boring sponges, gorgonians, and jelly fish

The students kept their hydrozoans in petri dishes on a table in the guest bedroom. After several days they noticed that the ‘Turritopis’ was behaving in a peculiar manner, for which they could hypothesize no earthly explanation. Plainly speaking, it refused to die. In fact, it appeared to age in reverse, growing younger and younger until it reached its earliest stage of development, at which point it began its life cycle anew. ~ Page 252

The publication of “Reversing the Life Cyc le” barely registered outside the academic world. On might expect that having learned of the existence of immortal life, humankind would dedicate collosal recourses to learn how the jellyfish performed its trick. One might expect that biotech firms would vie to copyright its genome; that a global coalition or research scientists would seek to determine the mechanisms by which its cells aged to reverse; that pharmaceutical firms would try to appropriate its lessons for the development of human medicine; that governments would broker international accords to govern the future use of rejuvenating technology. But none of this happened ~ Page 252

You would expect more interest in this creature although (according to Wiki) the gene has been recognised

This was also on Wiki:

"Keeping Turritopis i in captivity is quite difficult. Currently, only one scientist, Shin Kubota from Kyoto University, has managed to sustain a group of these jellyfish for a prolonged period of time. The plankton must be inspected daily to ensure that they have properly digested the Artemia cysts they are being fed. Kubota reported that during a two-year period, his colony rebirthed itself 11 times. Kubota regularly appears on Japanese television to talk about his immortal jellyfish and has recorded several songs about them, often singing them at the end of his conference presentations".

I like the idea singing a song at the end of presentation!

Thanks for reading -- I came across all this information in the book presented above. Thank you

My brain is too lazy to read all of this but it loves the colourful image !

Thanks for sharing, Dinesh!

Thanks ye all

Superbe !
HFF et Bon weekend. Amitiés

splendid capture !!!

mooie kwall

very well presented!

A beautiful image.