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JAThis is an amortal hydra with its unicellular cleaning crew, polishing its gorgeous tentacles.
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Hydras are incredible organisms. They don’t go through something so fundamental in our lives: senescence. They don’t biologically age. A hydra stays as young as the first day of its life. No knees to crack, no hair to whiten, no eyes to show wisdom; their bodies simply do not experience the same aging our bodies do.
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They are, however, not immortal; hence one of my favorite words, “amortal,” fits them perfectly. I often find hydras in my samples alongside aquatic snails. Let me tell you, those snails go to town munching on these remarkable animals, and they don’t give a dime whether the hydras age or not. 😂 I spend a few hours removing snails from my sample jars if I have hydras in there too, or the next day there is no hydra left to admire.
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The unicellulars moving back and forth on the hydra’s body are called Kerona; they have a very close relationship with hydras. I really don’t know exactly why they prefer to live on hydras, but it may simply be that the hydra’s body creates a surface where these unicellulars can crawl and feed on smaller organisms that grow on the hydra. They seem to sense the hydra as well. Whenever I separate Kerona from a hydra, the Kerona quickly find it in the water and start crawling on it, which indicates that Kerona are sensitive to chemical signals hydras release into the environment.
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If you can, please support me for the cost of a cup of coffee a month; links are in my bio and your support helps me create more content. If you cannot financially, I’m still very grateful for you being here, for being kind, well, even defending me against science deniers, people who call my writing or content “AI,” or people who are just unkind under my posts. My Instagram audience is well established after eight years, but my posts are crossposted on Facebook, and people can be unkind there, and it gets very tiring to see. So if you are new to my content, please be kind and remember that there is a human behind this whose brain was never meant to meet more than a few hundred people in its life.
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Thank you for reading!
Best,
James Weiss
@jam_and_germs
