A female microscopic roundworm that spent the last 46,000 years in suspended animation deep in the Siberian permafrost has been revived and has started having babies in a laboratory dish.
“We need to know how species adapted to the extreme through evolution to maybe help species alive today and humans as well,” Schiffer wrote in an email.Scientists have long known that some microscopic critters are able to hit pause on life to survive harsh environments, slipping into the deepest of sleeps by slowing their metabolism to undetectable levels in a process called cryptobiosis.
The previous resuscitation record for a nematode was set by an Antarctic species that started wriggling around again after just a few dozen years.Article content This new species of nematode, dubbed Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, breaks that dormancy record by tens of thousands of years. The frozen soil the nematode was embedded in came from an ancient gopher hole, excavated from about 130 feet below the surface. Scientists used radiocarbon dating to determine that the soil was 46,000 years old, give or take a thousand years.
Scientists have continued to raise more than 100 generations from this single nematode, which reproduces without a mate through a process called parthenogenesis.
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