Animals and Plants that Defy Aging Prove that Life'll Kill You

There's good news and bad about the fountain of youth. The good news is that evidence of it's been found, in plants and animals that appear to defy the aging process. The bad news is it's doubtful humans will ever share their timelessness because it's living itself that seems to do us all in. Wasn't it British rock band Queen that sang, "Who Wants to Live Forever?" Music may live on through oldies radio stations, but people, alas, kick the bucket.

The secret to not aging for some organisms is being sedentary. If you lay on a couch forever, you'll just rot. A very simple freshwater animal called the Hydra, however, appears to have indefinite generational lengths. British researchers Patrick Doncaster and Robert Seymour found that this creature, along with some types of trees, like the English Yew and the Rocky Mountain Bristlecone Pine, live to extreme ages by postponing the onset of senescent aging. In other words, they almost never show signs of getting physically old. Sort of like Pee Wee Herman before his arrest.

Doncaster said, "'It evolves through many generations of ancestors "crowding out" young individuals of the same species that attempt to grow to adulthood alongside them." "Repeated reproduction," on the other hand, seems to make senescence inevitable. We reap the early benefits of populating the planet, but we aren't around for very long to catch the scenery. In contrast, some Rocky Mountain Bristlecone Pines can produce viable cones at the age of 4,000, and at least one existing English yew was recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086.

And what's with Hydras? It was a fluke that I made reference to another type, the fictional Lernaean Hydra, yesterday. In today's case, these are radially symmetrical animals that can be just 1 millimeter long. They feed using impossibly tiny tentacles. When attacked or otherwise provoked, the ageless beauties utilize a clever technique. The entire hyrda body retracts to become a small gelatinous sphere, leaving their investigator probably wondering, "Is that a blob of Jello or some person's green mucus?" It's no wonder the attackers then often pass on the Hydra.

Comments

[signs of aging]

Many people are trying to fight off the signs of aging by using anti aging medicine, but whether or not they are succeeding is often a grey area. It may seem pointless to try to fight the signs of aging skin when wrinkles are inevitable.Anti-aging promoters fight obvious signs of aging and help keep you fit and looking younger.

[Jen Viegas]

Keeping fit is always a bonus, but I'm not so certain about attempts to get rid of wrinkles. I often think people look better au natural. Robert Redford comes to mind. The same holds true for animals. A lot of show dog owners, for example, will have surgery done on their pets to get rid of excess facial hairs and other "unwanteds." Happy are those with mutts that still have all of the unique canine features, whiskery faces and all.