Sunday, February 02, 2014

Life suited to interstellar travel, perhaps?

This Leech Can Survive A 24-Hour Submersion in Liquid Nitrogen | Australian Popular Science

Apart from the surprise that you can freeze and reanimate a small parasitic fish leech in liquid nitrogen, there is this remarkable ability it has:

Every single leech placed in -130°F (-90°C) storage survived for nine
months. In other words, these leeches can easily survive at
temperatures lower than those ever measured by a thermometer on Earth, for
as long as it takes to conceive and give birth to a human child. Some
of the leeches survived at this temperature for 32 months, or more than
2.5 years.

They also don't appear to need any time to acclimate to cold, unlike other
cold-tolerant creatures. And they can survive being rapidly chilled to
-321°F and then being thawed to room temperature, repeated up to 12
times over a couple minutes. Some of the leeches put through this
torture, which according to the study no other species could tolerate,
survived for more than a month in a water bath, and apparently died due
to starvation - not because of injuries due to freezing.

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