This Jellyfish Can Heal Its Wounds in Mere Minutes — What This Could Mean for Wound Healing in the Animal Kingdom
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Learn about the amazing wound healing process of a tiny jellyfish, in which cells "walk" toward each other to close wounds.
Jack Knudson is an Associate Editor for Discover Magazine who writes articles on space, ancient humans, animals, and sustainability, and manages the Planet Earth column for print.View Full Profile. A minor cut or scrape on our skin takes at least a few days to heal, but for one jellyfish, small wounds can close in mere minutes. This unbelievable healing ability of the jellyfish Clytia hemisphaerica has caught the eye of scientists, who have now identified the reason why this species can patch itself up so quickly.
If you were to spot the transparent adult form of Clytia with a wound, you’d be able to see the wound heal in real-time. This is made possible by the intricate movements of structures that allow protective cells to “walk” across a wound, a process that researchers describe in a new study published in Molecular Biology of the Cell. Wound healing in Clytia may even shed light on how other animals beyond jellyfish heal.
“This is a truly elegant mechanism where the system can rapidly adapt to heal all the kinds of wounds that might occur in nature,” said Jocelyn Malamy, an associate professor in molecular genetics and cell biology at the University of Chicago, in a statement. When you picture a jellyfish, you probably imagine a floating creature that looks somewhat like an underwater apparition. But not all jellyfish start out looking like this.
Many, like the dime-sized Clytia and other hydrozoans, start as polyp colonies attached to submerged rocks or other hard surfaces. Eventually, the polyps release medusae, the free-swimming umbrella-like forms that we usually associate with jellyfish. Adult medusae live only for a few months, but the polyp colonies that spawn them stay around indefinitely.
Even though Clytia medusae don’t live for long, their wound healing is remarkable. Small wounds heal in minutes, and larger wounds heal in less than an hour; the wounds also don’t leave scar tissue. Walking to Repair WoundsThe new study found that epithelial cells — which line the body’s surfaces in jellyfish and humans alike — heal wounds in Clytia through two structures.
The first, called lamellipodia, are foot-like feelers that move with a fluid motion, like amoebas. These structures extend out of cells at the edge of wounds and move across the basement membrane, which is the protein sheet that lies underneath all epithelial cells.
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