A joint team of Russian and American helminthologists encountered an incredible find while studying soil samples from permafrost. Zoologists have discovered ancient nematodes. Comparative morphology and 18S rRNA analysis of worms showed that they belong to this species, which was considered extinct. The journal Doklady Biological Sciences came out with an article devoted to the sensational discovery, and the publication was also published in the domestic "Reports of the Academy of Sciences".
In the early 2000s, numerous samples of frozen soil were delivered from the Duvanny Yar reserve in the lower reaches of the Kolyma to Moscow. Soil nematodes were found in two out of three hundred samples. But scientists were struck by something else: the thawed worms suddenly came to life! They functioned and looked for food in the same way as their modern counterparts. What's more, nematodes from a batch discovered in 2015 near the Azalea River have also come back to life, allowing researchers to reflect on a sustainable trend. The Kolyma worms, according to helminthologists, are about thirty thousand years old, and the Azalean worms are about forty. Thus, the "finds" lived in the Pleistocene era.
It is known that many worms reproduce exclusively through parthenogenesis. Perhaps that is why only females were found. Individuals looked different from each other, and scientists concluded that they were facing more than one nematode family. Ribosomal analysis has identified specific genera of "girls": Panagrolaimus and Plectus.
Of course, the most interesting thing about the find is the very ability to survive and wake up in a fully functioning body after tens of thousands of years (which, by the way, makes the nematodes found the oldest women on Earth). Of course, the resistance of worms to low temperatures is not a surprise to scientists. But no one expected such results, of course.
Examples of such longevity exist in botany: in the same place, in Kolyma, in the holes of ground squirrels, the seeds of the carnation family were found. The seeds, which were also tens of thousands of years old, later grew into full-fledged plants. So what is the secret - in plants, animals, or is it in the ground? If in the latter, the joke "Come to our Kolyma" - it seems that it is no longer a joke …
