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Scientists have revived a handful of small, multicellular freshwater creatures known as bdelloid rotifers after they spent 24,000 years frozen in Siberian permafrost.
The findings, published Monday in the journal Current Biology, suggest that the creatures can survive a state of pericoronosis — in which the animal responds to environmental stresses by essentially drying itself out and entering a dormant state — for much longer than previously known. . Previous studies have found that bdelloid rotifers can survive extreme cold in a cryptobiotic state for at least six to 10 years.
“Our report is the strongest evidence to date that multicellular animals can withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, a state of almost completely stopped metabolism,” said Stas Malavin, a co-author of the study and a researcher at the Russian Institute of Chemical Physics and Biological Problems in Soil Sciences, In a press release.
Michael Plewka A rotifer recovered from 24,000-year-old permafrost.
In this new study, scientists took 11.5-foot-deep core samples from the Alazeya River in northeastern Siberia, where isolated microbes, including rotifers, were found frozen and dormant.
Carbon dating of the core indicates that the rotifers were about 24,000 years old and have been trapped in permafrost since the Pleistocene era, which ended nearly 11,700 years ago.
Once dissolved, the organisms came back to life and began to reproduce by parthenogenesis, an asexual process that creates a clone of the original.
“We’ve resurrected the animals that saw the woolly mammoth, which is very impressive,” Malavin told the New York Times.
Although there is no doubt about the durability of the spinner, the title of the longest nap goes to nematodes. In 2018, scientists revived some microscopic worms — also plucked from Siberian permafrost — that had been frozen for 42,000 years.
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