posted on Sep, 11 2010 @ 11:31 PM
Originally posted by Maybe...maybe not
reply to post by CHRLZ
CHRLZ.....
senescence is cooler
Now there's a massive topic.....!
Oh really??
While I was 'marine sciencing', there were two things that absolutely intrigued me - the ageless (and reverse aging!) creatures, and also, brine
shrimp. Ironically I became an expert on neither. Too much other stuff to deal with...
Yeah, brine shrimp - 'sea monkeys'! (And sadly I'm old enough to remember them being advertised in comics, along with xray glasses...) Even then,
as a kid, I was a bit skeptical, so I disbelieved BOTH of them. Then in later life I found out that the seamonkey thing was.. sorta real! Indeed, I
used to look after a stock of brine shrimp eggs - we would hatch big batches of them on a rotating basis, to feed the seahorses we often had - they
LOVE brine shrimp..
Anyway, I gather that the record for brine shrimp egg longevity is some thousands of years, although there is some dispute on this..... They can
certainly sit dormant for many decades - yet toss them in water and three days later you have thousands of tiny shrimp.
With regard to the hydra, they are moderately primitive animals, so perhaps their lack of aging is not that big a deal.. but a brine shrimp is
actually quite a sophisticated little creature, if tiny... It really gets me that an egg of such a creature can lie completely dormant for a huge
length of time..
Wouldn't it be great to see the wonders of an *alien* ecology/food chain...