Turritopsis dohrnii: Immortal jellyfish

I'll consider throwing him vote, but I would need to see his polyp stage first before committing.

well i never seen that before, but its been mentioned on HN a few times (to name two)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842492

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39805077

It's a good quality show, my kid can now read and is looking up plot lines from the show in his science and nature books and really enjoys the idea that so much of the show is actually true to life

Not all jellyfish, just this one.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2335495-immortal-jellyf...

Part of this species' transdifferentiation process in the cyst stage is increased expression of various DNA repair mechanisms include telomerase [1].

> Transcripts associated with telomere organization and maintenance, DNA integration, repair, and damage response were among those that showed high expression in the cyst relative to medusa and polyp.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8480191/

If the epigenetic drift theory of aging is correct, it's because when the jellyfish becomes a polyp again its epigenome is reset to factory defaults, erasing the effects of aging.

According to this theory, the reason the epigenome accumulates damage is because while the dna strand is static through the life of the organism, and therefore has all sorts of error correction mechanisms, the epigenome changes on a per-cell level as the organism grows according to hormonal signals and so on. That's how a nerve cell and a muscle cell can have the same dna strand but act almost as if they are from totally different species. Therefore it has to be flexible and can't be error checked in the same robust way. So aging is a consequence of multicellular life cycles.