Talk:Turritopsis dohrnii/Archive 1

Grammar
In the opening summary, it says: a animal

Also, is it possible to rephrase this: "The reverted medusa then attaches itself to the substrate by the end that had been at the opposite end of the umbrella and starts giving rise to new polyps to form the new colony"? Maybe "the end that had been at the opposite end of the umbrella" has a specific name?

Bulbulfish (talk) 07:31, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

please clear external links
first this link http://www.eol.org/pages/1015922 is twice in the external links and has NO KIND of information thus it has to be deleted http://scienceray.com/biology/scientists-are-close-to-finding-a-way-to-be-immortal/ this link also has to be deleted since it contains no information that this article doesn't have, and the images :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tzampex (talk • contribs) 11:34, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Understandability
Regardless of whether these talk pages should be restricted to considerations as to how we can improve the article, the extent of such comments does demonstrate that this article is interesting to a broad base of readers - far more so than most wiki articles on small jellyfish. I contend that such an interest should be reflected in the presentation of the article. The jellyfish reverts to a colonial polyp stage. I am not sure what this means, and the article does not tell me. I am not the article writer's lecturer, nor the article writer's student. I am not a budding biologist nor a full-fledged 'biologer'. I do want to know exactly what occurs at this stage. Does the animal revert to one polyp or to several? I actually can't tell. I previously thought one, but colony seems to mean several. Or it a colony containing only one polyp? I don't know. I am not a biologist. If I was, I would go to the relevant section in my library and find out from the technical information there. This is an encyclopedia. It therefore should speak to a broad base of people. Therefore there should be enough information about jellyfish, contained in this article, to make this the manner of the creature's 'immortality' legible. This is a common problem in biology pages here. I have often read very interesting information about a creature's eating/breeding habits in an article that does not mention the creature's distribution - where it lives. To the non-biologist - or even to the ecologist - this kind of thing is important. Wasn't Open Systems Theory developed by a biologist after all? (It was. By Ludwig von Bertalanffy.) Take creative writing lessons if you have to. But please start to educate people other than yourselves in the areas that you study. That's called teaching. It does not make the article common or popular. It makes it informative, rather than simply true. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.97.217.134 (talk) 14:35, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Also, according to talk below, these guys only revert when the conditions are unfavourable. But hydras/hydrae according to their article reproduce asexually (and live on) when the going is good and only reproduce sexually (and die) when conditions are harsh. Is there any reason why they do the opposite things? Is it just like that because that's they way it is? It is mad to think that these creatures only live on when they absolutely have to, if that is true. They are conditioned toward death like we are toward life I guess. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.97.217.134 (talk) 14:52, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

DNA replication
It is claimed that this jellyfish does not die of senescence, but this leaves me wondering: if one would leave this animal in captivity, feeding it properly and protecting it from viruses, bacteria and predators, wouldn't it succumb to the inevitable buildup of copy errors in its DNA? Wouldn't there be something similar to cancer ultimately causing its death? And shouldn't that be seen as senescence? --tijmz (talk) 19:56, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Do not worry. There's no experimental evidence that the polyp stage which deleveloped directly from jellyfish can produce other jellyfishes. Nobody maintained Turritopsis in cultural conditions enough long to prove there's some ground under this "immortality" idea. Jellyfishes of this species are capable to reproduce in normal sexual way. Mithril (talk) 22:34, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

It's Immortal!
OMG! An immortal animal! That gene must be transplanted into our DNA immediately!!!Not sure how we are going to just transform into any embryo again... Nescio sed Scio 04:18, 3 March 2007 (UTC) OMG I CANT BELIEVE IT IT'S IMMORTAL!

I agree, I can't understand why there is an immortal life form and no one (as far as I've heard) has attempted to apply this ability to humans or at least use the jellyfish for some kind of medical science. However, it sounds too good to be true, like if we could become children again, would we lose our memories?24.118.227.213 14:18, 9 September 2007 (UTC)


 * We wouldnt lose our memories, we'd just die.

We will not lose our memories in my opinion. First of all we would not seek to reduce ourselves back to a single cell again only hyper-accelerate the gene back to it's first stage form in-which is the point of base energy point 0.0. Memories are a completely different process.
 * If these things don't die, and reproduce, doesn't that the ocean should be full of them by now? If they've been multiplying for thousands of years without dying, their numbers should be huge? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.109.92.160 (talk) 18:06, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

that's assuming none of them are eaten, killed or die of other means. Solar Flute (talk) 16:29, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
 * ditto -- Andersmusician  NO  22:48, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

"Turritopsis typically reproduces the old-fashioned way, by the meeting of free-floating sperm and eggs. And most of the time they die the old-fashioned way too. But when starvation, physical damage, or other crises arise, "instead of sure death, [Turritopsis] transforms all of its existing cells into a younger state," said study author Maria Pia Miglietta, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University." Found that here. Assuming that is the case then it is understandable that the oceans aren't literally flooded by them. Woodcutterty (talk) 19:20, 10 November 2009 (UTC) - Memories are contained in our brains through electric pulses (at least, I think that's how the brain works), and as the brain regresses back to an earlier state some pluses might be lost as our brains change; even if they aren't, our brains might eventually forget much of our previous lives the longer we live. We might also change in behavior when we become younger, and we would eventually become insane from the changes to our bodies and memory overload as time went on.24.118.227.213 (talk) 09:56, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh, by the way, I undid the revision to the talk page because someone revised it into nothing. The reason they did this is because "talk pages are for discussion about the article, not it's subject". Pardon me, but isn't discussing the article also discussing it's subject? I guess I'm being a bit sarcastic, because the answer is obviously yes. One more thing, no one cares or if they do, no one should care what the users put on talk pages, just what they put in the article itself, because Wikipedia is not only for encyclopedic information but also for entertainment purposes.24.118.227.213 (talk) 15:09, 23 November 2007 (UTC)


 * What the deleter meant was that talk page discussions are now confined to how an article should be written, which rarely includes a discussion of the subject itself, because Wikipedia isn't a source (so there's no way for our opinions on the subject to be relevant to article content).
 * Please read: 4. Discussion forums which summarizes this policy:
 * "talk pages exist for the purpose of discussing how to improve articles; they are not mere general discussion pages about the subject of the article".
 * For example, my opinion that the Turritopsis nutricula genes are irrelevant to most human asperations of immortality shouldn't be discussed here, but my suggestion that ''we cite researchers arguing this point'Lolzorg' should be written on this page.
 * However, the person that deleted this discussion probably also violated the Wikipedia guideline to assume good faith, and Please do not bite the newcomers since it's rude and off-putting just to delete an enthusiastic thread without a more detailed explanation. After all, this policy is counter-intuitive to the new-comer.
 * If a contribution isn't directly about textual changes in Wikipedia article content it should by politely redirected to a Wiki IRC channel.
 * --Wragge (talk) 13:41, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

isaac stop vandalizing wikipedia. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.92.46.181 (talk) 00:09, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

This entire section should be deleted - WP:NOTFORUM - and probably a few others. Much of the discussion is between anonymous users, anyway. - LesPaul75 talk 03:00, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Picture
I feel like this is a really cool article that could benefit from a picture. I have never really added a picture to a wiki, and am not sure how to do it.. But I think it could use one. p337 ( talk ) 06:33, 18 February 2008 (UTC)
 * to answer the IP above, the oceans are actually not filled up with these animals, even if immortal because of the natural predators on the sea + global warming. But, I cannot find a proper source for this on the web.-- Andersmusician  NO  04:31, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

this blog post that has a good image 88.218.156.213 (talk) 03:36, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

The jellyfish in the lovely photo in the blog above is Polyorchis penicillatus (not Turritopsis). I pointed to a very nice photo of Turritopsis within the article (see link in reference 10), but it isn't mine to add. Leuckartiara (talk) 04:59, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

There is an image on [|this site] and a nice little write-up. I do not see any attribution for the image on that page, so I don't know if it is available for Wikipedia. Nutster (talk) 16:57, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Turritopsis nutricula ?
According to Maria Pia Miglietta of the Pennsylvania State University ( and her publication, together with Hallaos Lessios of the Smithsonian Tropical research Institute in Panama (Miglietta M.P., Lessios H. (2009) A Silent Invasion. Biological Invasions 11 (4): 825-834), this cnidarian is actually Turritopsis dohrnii (a long time mistaken for T. nutricola). See also the article in National Geographic "Immortal" Jellyfish Swarm World's Oceans. See also the excellent article (in French) in the magazine "Science et Vie" of september 2009 : L'étonnante invasion de la méduse immortelle" . JoJan (talk) 12:59, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

On Understandability
This page, like most in Wikipedia, was started and largely written by people who did not do the original work, and I think were not even biologists, but perhaps students. One of the reasons it was so hard to understand, is that the people writing the page are fascinated by the idea of immortality, even in a jellyfish, but they didn't read (or at least understand) the original work, and don't understand hydrozoan life cycles. It isn't a matter of scientists not being able to communicate with the public, so much as a case of novices writing about things that they think are fascinating but don't really know much about (Wikipedia is full of this, as well as articles written by experts of various kinds). I stumbled onto this article and since I work in a closely-related area and know the original authors, I have just reread the two papers that report the original information, and have modified this article so that it is accurate and maybe easier to understand. Going back in and modifying Wikipedia articles, while respecting what someone has already taken the trouble to write, turns out to take a huge amount of time and I've already spent two or three hours tonight trying to make this short article more accurate and readable. Few scientists I know, who also teach university classes and are generally swamped, will take the hours of time necessary in order to correct things written in Wikipedia.

As for the comments above about whether or not this is really Turritopsis nutricula, the original papers report it under this name, from material collected in two locations on the Italian coast. Since then, additional taxonomic work has revealed that what used to be called T. nutricula worldwide is actually several different species. It doesn't seem like this is the place to go into the fine points of speciation, as revealed by gene comparison (and also I can't get more than the Abstract of the original paper tonight, in order to figure out what the 2010 name (these change with additional study) of Turritopsis collected in the Mediterranean should be). I also decided that since this entry is already titled Turritopsis nutricula, not to throw the whole thing out of alignment.

Picture: Yes, it would be nice. In spite of the "immortality" potential of this species, it is actually pretty hard to find, and so there just aren't many pictures available. Note also that the medusae are only 4-5 mm tall at the largest. The sea is not filling up with Turritopsis. I've collected it one time only in San Francisco Bay, but I didn't take a picture. A couple of scientists have good photos - maybe one of them will add it to this article. Leuckartiara (talk) 08:27, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Benefits for Humans?
Somebody needs to find out how it manages to replicates it's DNA an infinite amount of times without deteriorating the telomeres and eventually the DNA itself. If there is a way for a eukaryote to duplicate the lagging strand in DNA without having to leave out the small bit at the end every time, we need to find out how! This could mean defeating ageing! 81.210.236.67 (talk) 18:26, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

Response to Benefits for humans
Unfortunatly I do not believe humans would ever be able to achieve immortality. Especially not in the same way as this animal, as people have pointed out that memories would most likely be lost as it regresses to a one cell stage -although it could be argued that newborns automatically inherit instincts such as how to breath and therefore why should memories not be retained- there is the problem of being a one cell stage, we'd be incredibly vulnerable to everything. Also one could argue that because human's are meant to age and that their cells are meant to multiply, by regressing back to a single celled organism stage would damage or restructure the cell we regress too. Also we would need to be inside our mother's wombs again for this "rebirthing" process to occur. This would be easy to simulate, but not on a mass scale. Also it would be more than likely that we would have to regress to our child status, which leaves our body with more than one cell. I do believe that means that existing cells would be multiplying rapidly for growth, correct me if I am wrong, but this could lead to the obvious problem, cancer. So I believe that human's would be unable to ever defeat the ageing effect because our cells simply are not designed to regress and in doing so would most likely leave us open to many things. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.14.212.205 (talk) 21:42, 8 May 2010 (UTC)

You do not get the point. It can stop un-aging at teenager. that means you can be a teenager forever, a baby forever, an adult forever et cetra. It just reverses. It does not restart. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.154.209.16 (talk) 20:59, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh the perfect irony of it all...
Yes, there is a creature that has achieved immortality, and it is a jellyfish. What a weird world we live in. Myles325a (talk) 02:29, 12 November 2011 (UTC)

Is it biologically immortal?
Just wondering: the fact that this jelly fish can return to its immature polyp stadium doesn't necessarily mean that its DNA gets intact again. So if the creature re-enters the cycle, it may do so slightly harmed and thereby get older all the same. Steinbach (talk) 19:34, 30 November 2012 (UTC)
 * So in other words, it's a time lord jellyfish from Gallifrey? Only twelve regenerations? 81.99.126.231 (talk) 19:30, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

Abbreviation
The article Turritopsis nutricula is being proposed for deletion so the bottom of the end of the introduction should not give the abbreviation T. nutricula because people will not be able to open that article to see what the full name is. Blackbombchu (talk) 05:01, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Proposed for deletion is not deletion, and the prod was indeed removed. Also, red links are ok. --&mdash;  Rhododendrites talk |  04:50, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Clarification regarding Turritopsis nutricula
The present article mentions that the immortal jellyfish is actually dohrnii whereas it was once a label applied to nutricula? Could someone with more knowledge than me add more about this to the article? I can't tell by reading it why that label would have changed, and several sources clearly make the reference to nutricula. It would also be helpful to add similar information to the nutricula article, where a bunch fo text about the immortal jellyfish has just been removed. --&mdash;  Rhododendrites talk |  04:50, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Turritopsis genus was long considered to be monospecific and cosmopolitan. In the last revision which took place in 2006 they changed their opinion and posulated that Turritopsis nutricula inhabits NW Atlantic only. Studies of medusa reversion were first conducted on Mediterranean populations. See also . As far as I remember there were a few studies of reversion with similar results in Japan where Turritopsis dohrnii obviously do not live is not the only species. P.S.: To my mind the fact of reversion shouldn't be called an evidence for inmortality since it is completely based on odd idea that polyp is a larval stage. In the tradional metagenetic concept medusa is a new organism appeared through polyp budding that's why the reversion is just a way of prolongation of asexual stages. Nevertheless the fact of cells dedifferentiation is curious. Mithril (talk) 08:04, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Wrong Picture?
The picture looks like a Turritopsis rubra. Can anyone confirm the picture is correct? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 155.254.6.51 (talk) 23:59, 26 December 2019 (UTC)