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Comment by glhaynes | Hacker News Reader

Because they are able to bypass death, the number of individuals is spiking.

Did they like ... just evolve or something? You'd think they'd have spiked before now and reached equilibrium.

Although the subject is interesting the page, published on 16th March 2010, is poorly researched blog-spam. It is essentially just copied from one of the numerous pages that say the same thing, such as this one published on 27th January 2009

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/4357829/Immortal-j...

The picture is not of Turritopsis nutricula, but T. rubra according to this page

http://www.ville-ge.ch/mhng/hydrozoa/hydrozoa-directory.htm

This is Maria's page

http://www.personal.psu.edu/mum31/

and the related journal article about ships' ballast is here

http://www.springerlink.com/content/81747575j2707j4g/

According to one of the linked articles, they are suspected to be hitchhiking in the ballast of large ships, so their habitat is unnaturally expanding. There could always be other factors too, like an over-fished predator.

That sounds similar to the C. taxifolia Algae threat. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/algae/chronology.html

I think they got eaten instead.

Biological immortality no good if you get ate pretty soon.

If it's not one thing it's another.

They've reached true immortality when they can go in one end of an animal and come out the other still alive.

Lots of animals can do that, although the ones that can survive in a body—for example, tapeworms—usually start preferring to survive in that body (it relieves you of all the work of creating a biological equilibrium of your own), so they evolve to hold on inside instead of coming out.

Overfishing is the culprit here. With less fish in the seas jellyfish - immortal and regular - can procreate much more easily, and have access to more food. Here's a relevant article: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/273850

I am surprised the tourism lobbies are not fighting the fishing lobbies on that one.

They are jellyfish, and jellyfish thrive on the recent development that is large amounts of nitrates in the oceans. Think greenhouse gases, but instead of heat in the atmosphere, it's algae and jellyfish in oceans.

Good observation. A spike in population implies a recent change in the organism or its environment. Since most multicellular organisms cannot evolve that quickly, it's more likely that there was a change in the environment which this organism was able to take advantage of. I doubt that their numbers are spiking because "they are bale to bypass death".

Good point. This might have something to do with global warming and extinction of predators.

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