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Weird but Wonderful: The Immortal Jellyfish
Nature is a gift, so vast and varied that none of us can fully know or appreciate it. Some aspects of the natural world — the warmth of the sun, the cooing of a dove, the pitter-patter of rain drops on our roof tops, are quite familiar. Others we may find weird but wonderful, bizarre but beautiful — or downright astonishing and sometimes terrifying. This is the third in a series. Please join me on Mondays as I share some observations about aspects of nature that may be less familiar to many.
Eternal life … the hope of escaping death … this yearning has captivated the human mind and soul for centuries. The instinct for self survival is the most powerful drive that many of us will ever experience. Every religion and school of philosophy must address this hope. They do so by offering assurances that are supported solely by faith — or by advising us to bravely embrace one brutal but undeniable truth: we are born to die.
And that would appear to apply equally to every organism on the planet. There are trees that can live for centuries, or in some cases millennia — the Bristlecone pine grows so slowly that even a single needle will live for thirty years or more, while the tree itself may reach a very respectable age of five thousand. At the other end of the spectrum, the adult mayfly lives for twenty-four hours, at best. In the span of a day, the…
