\n The severed tissues, however, didn\u2019t develop into whole new individuals \u2014 a process that can occur under certain conditions in some species of sea cucumber<\/a> \u2014 bringing up some philosophical questions. \u201cWe lovingly call these tissue explants \u2018our zombies,\u2019 because they seem to ride the line between dead and alive,\u201d said Jobson, a doctoral student of ocean sciences at Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThey\u2019re not regrowing into a whole new organism \u2014 as far as we can tell, they seem to be their own entity that\u2019s maintaining cellular function, but not a reproducing individual. Why would these small tissue chunks maintain the ability to heal and survive without any reproductive purpose? What\u2019s the evolutionary driver that allows that to happen?\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Many animals are able to amputate tissue voluntarily and regrow it, most famously lizards that sacrifice their tails<\/a> to escape predators. But the lost tail itself doesn\u2019t do anything, Jobson noted. To draw a parallel with the sea cucumber, it\u2019s as if a lizard tail healed itself and then wiggled around in the woods, gaining its own nutrients and surviving for years.\n <\/p>\n \n What\u2019s even more surprising is that the severed tissue has been going strong for more than three years. \u201cAs far as we can tell, there weren\u2019t any signs of death, degradation or necrosis,\u201d Jobson added, referring to cell death. \u201cIt seemed to be able to go on forever. We just had to cut ourselves off at some point and put the study out there.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n In the long term, such work could help researchers better understand regeneration, wound healing, tissue maintenance and aging, said Veronica Hinman, director of the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience at the University of Florida, via email. She did not participate in the study. \u201cI think the bigger finding, though, is that this work tests assumptions about what it means to be \u2018alive\u2019 and how this depends on the whole organism, rather than on the local self-organizing properties of tissues themselves.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The discovery that prompted the study was accidental, according to Jobson. \u201cWe work right on the coast, and we\u2019re able to keep live animals in our lab,\u201d she said. When a sea creature is needed for research, it\u2019s usually pulled from its tank, she added, but some of the animals strongly attach themselves to their rock habitat or the aquarium itself. In this case, when a researcher removed the sea cucumber, some of its tube feet were left behind and stuck to the glass. This is normal, as the animal can detach them in the wild when under duress or attack from a predator and easily regrow them.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe noticed that they were still there after a couple of days, and then weeks, and then months, and they were still stuck on,\u201d Jobson said. \u201cThey were healing, and they even grew a little bit. They were surviving in their natural environment.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n The body parts also thrived without being in a sterile environment but in natural seawater, which is \u201cincredibly unclean,\u201d as Jobson put it, and teeming with bacteria and microorganisms. The fragments absorbed amino acids, which naturally occur in the sea cucumber\u2019s habitat, without the need for a mouth or gut. The tissues not only kept producing cells and showed signs of an active immune system but continued to move and respond to being poked, even after months of being detached.\n <\/p>\n \n If the sea cucumber tissues were confirmed to be immortal, they would have applications in medical research and cell biology, Jobson said. The cells could potentially replace or supplant HeLa cells<\/a>, a naturally occurring immortal line of human cells originally taken from Henrietta Lacks, a patient with cervical cancer, in 1951. These cells can grow indefinitely in a lab but require highly controlled, sterile conditions. Moreover, scientists took the cells without the patient\u2019s consent, raising serious ethical questions<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n Researchers have long earmarked cells from invertebrates such as sea cucumbers, Jobson added, as holding potential for research that would benefit mammals and humans, and they don\u2019t have the same ethical constraints as human cells around being able to use them.\n <\/p>\n \n The sea cucumber tissue could also be useful for ocean health research, by testing rising temperatures or pathogens in seawater. The cells\u2019 ability to heal and survive without external help suggests that something is keeping them healthy and clean. There would be interest, Jobson said, in identifying exactly which processes or chemicals the cells are using.\n <\/p>\n \n The next step would be to examine the DNA structure of the cells to see whether they are aging after replicating, Jobson added. \u201cThat would confirm whether or not they are truly immortal,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n \n Echinoderms, the group that includes sea cucumbers, starfish and sea urchins, have remarkable regenerative abilities known to scientists for a long time, according to No\u00e9 Wambreuse, a postdoctoral research fellow at England\u2019s University of Southampton, who studies these animals but was not involved with the paper.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cSea cucumbers can expel their digestive organs as a defence mechanism to distract predators, and some species can also reproduce asexually through fission, a process in which a single individual splits into two parts that each regenerate into a complete cloned organism,\u201d Wambreuse wrote in an email. \u201cHowever, while regeneration itself is not new in these animals, what this study demonstrates \u2014 something that could be described as \u2018tissue immortality\u2019 \u2014 is entirely novel.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n This discovery is important because it could provide a promising new model for tissue biology research, notably with potential applications in studies of tissue repair and aging. \u201cUltimately, such \u2018immortal tissues\u2019 could help uncover fundamental mechanisms of tissue behaviour and dynamics that are shared across animals, including humans,\u201d he added.\n <\/p>\n \n What makes the study compelling is that biologists usually think of tissues as dependent parts of a larger organism, according to the University of Florida\u2018s Hinman. \u201cA liver survives because the body maintains blood flow, immune protection, nutrients, signaling molecules, waste removal, and structural organization,\u201d Hinman said. \u201cOnce tissue is removed from the body, it normally deteriorates quickly.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n These sea cucumber tissues seem to violate some of those assumptions. \u201cThey are not becoming whole organisms, but they are not simply dying tissue either,\u201d she said. \u201cInstead, they appear to shift into a simplified but self-maintaining state. This seems to imply that some tissues may contain enough internal organization to sustain themselves far longer than we realized.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summary Severed body parts from a sea cucumber survived for over three years in a lab, healing themselves…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-700556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Tube](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/live-tube-foot.jpg\")
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