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Do jellyfish mate for life

Updated: 10/6/2023
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9y ago

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Short answer: both but it's a bit more complicated than that. There are several stages of jellyfish reproduction. They first release sperm and eggs into the water in a sexual medusa stage. Once fertilized, the eggs become planula larvae which settle onto a substrate and grow into a polyp stage. This stage resembles a sea anemone. It is only during this stage that asexual reproduction occurs. The polyp now has two options: The first being reproduction by budding, in which case more polyps are created. The second is called strobilization, which is where the polyps elongate and buds to create a strand of disks stacked upon one another. Each disk then detaches from the polyp, and is now called an ephyra. This ephyra is what grows into an adult jellyfish, and the cycle repeats.

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9y ago
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8y ago

That is a loaded question that the scientists are still debating, but one thing is clear- no, they do not live forever in the sense of a specific individual jellyfish that can 'Benjamin Button' its way to eternity. The process by which the species, Turritopsis dohmii, is claimed by the exploitation press to be 'immortal' is a process that only a handful of other species are capable. That process is better described as reverse ontology, or cellular transdifferentation.

Normally, most jellyfish go from a sexually fertilized zygote, which develops into a larval form called a planula which attaches itself to the marine floor, and then develops into a polyp that asexually buds off many free swimming medusae. These medusae are clones of the the original zygote, so they are either all males or all females, and of course share the exact same dna. Think Dolly the sheep, over and over (but don't fall asleep). To sexually reproduce, both a male gamete and a female gamete from another mature individual medusa is required.

Here is where the story goes relatively unique on us. In the lab, when an adult T. dohmii jelly is under duress, it can revert to the polyp stage of its life and reproduce asexually once again. Does this represent immortality? Well, if you really want to claim that, you probably can get away with it, in the sense that normally the original polyp eventually must die, and all of the clones that become sexually reproducing adults also must die, so most species only allow a finite (although sometimes a very large number) of clones. T. dohmii can rinse and repeat that cloning stage, and therefore an infinite number of clones are theoretically possible.

However, I see at least two problems with a claim of true immortality. Are infinite clones the same as the infinite life of one individual? Only if you loosely define an individual as all organisms with identical dna. I think that identical human twins would argue that they are not one individual. The second problem is that many scientists believe that asexual reproduction is subject to genetic fatigue which probably rules out a truly infinite quantity of clones.

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15y ago

they have it every 1to 10 monts in bed === ===

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14y ago

when ever they are ready they mostly mate in the winter.

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9y ago

yes they do

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14y ago

yes

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