Picture of the day: the immortal jelly fish

The Immortal Jelly Fish or Turritopsis nutricula is the oldest living animal one of the strangest in the animal kingdom. You may think that the name is just for fun or that the animal can boast of living for perhaps a few hundred years. You’d be surprised to know that the name is literal and the immortal jelly fish can theoretically live forever.

Most jellyfish species have a relatively fixed life span, which varies by species from hours to many months. But not the immortal jelly fish. This organism has the ability, at any stage in its life, to completely transform back into a polyp, its earliest stage of life through a process called transdifferentiation. The immortal jellyfish doesn't die; it merely regenerates its cells in a younger stage, then ages naturally again.

That doesn't mean all Turritopsis nutricula can go on living forever; the species is a small invertebrate in the ocean, and can be a victim to any of the horrible things that can befall such creatures, from being eaten or succumbing to disease. But it does not erase the fact that it is biologically capable of immortality.