14 DAY TRIAL // Though they did not multiply in some 30 million years, organisms known as bdelloid rotifers manage to endure. Scientists say that this ability stems from the fact that the tiny invertebrates can simply dry themselves up, and then blow away.
Paul Sherman, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, says that these creatures can best be described as microscopic escape artists. They can fend off pathogens and microbes with extreme efficiency.
“These animals have evolved a way to avoid parasites and pathogens by drying up and blowing away. The animals are essentially playing an evolutionary game of hide and seek,” Sherman explains.
“They can drift on the wind to colonize parasite-free habitat patches where they reproduce rapidly and depart again before their enemies catch up,” the researcher goes on to say.
“This effectively enables them to evade biotic enemies without [intercourse for the purpose of reproduction] using mechanisms that no other known animals can duplicate,” he adds.
Though they can technically be considered dead when they dry up, the bdelloids immediately spring back to life when they are exposed to fresh water again, the team reports in a paper that will appear in the January 29 issue of the top journal Science.
The reason why science is so fascinated with these animals is because they are completely asexual, and yet some how able to avoid being driven to extinction by parasite and pathogens that permeate their environments, Daily Galaxy reports .
Rather than going extinct, bdelloids have diversified into more than 450 species over the past tens of millions of years. The creatures reproduce exclusively by cloning, which means that they have quite a fixed gene pool, Daily Galaxy reports.
In the study, Cornell PhD candidate Chris Wilson and Sherman, his supervisor, infected bdelloids with deadly fungs, and saw how the organisms were wiped out within a few weeks. But when the organisms were dehydrated, the microbes perished,whereas the small invertebrates did not.
The team now plans to continue this research, in order to get more insight into how the creatures obtained this ability, which basically allows them to elude death on a regular basis.