Jellyfish have been working their way through the Earth’s waters for 600 million years. That is before the dinosaurs, before flowers or fungi. They have survived five mass extinctions.
They don’t have a brain or heart, just a nervous system. Is that part of the way they have survived? I am so hung up on the idea that our nervous system is intimately connected to our heart and brain, I cannot grasp their separation.
They exist in every ocean, from cold Arctic waters to the tropics and in freshwater ponds and lakes. Very adaptable.
Have you heard about the immortal jellyfish? Not truly immortal but when something bad happens to it it reverts to an earlier stage. (For a moment, I thought about rolling back your operating system to an earlier version because the current one is broken in some way. But that is a crude comparison.) The jellyfish is hurt, has an illness, or becomes too old, it can revert to an earlier stage of development.
How amazing that it can transform its own cells so that it goes from its fully grown, sexually mature state back into its fetal form (which is a colony of polyps). And then, it starts over again. It is some wild version of time travel, except it is still in the same time.
Theoretically, the jellyfish can do this forever, so scientists consider it biologically immortal.
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