THIS IS FINE! Russian Scientists Have Revived 24,000 Year-old Worm Who Is Now Reproducing

Russian scientists have revived a 24,000 year-old microscopic worm that had been frozen in Siberian permafrost, and now the creature is reproducing. What could go wrong?

The creature — called a “rotifer” — has “a brain and everything” and can reproduce without a partner, which is exactly what it did after being revived, according to the scientists who thawed it out and fed it:

While simple organisms like bacteria can often survive millennia in permafrost, “this is an animal with a nervous system and brain and everything”, says Stas Malavin at the Pushchino Scientific Center for Biological Research RAS in Russia. It isn’t quite a record – nematode worms have purportedly been revived from permafrost after 30,000 years – but no rotifer has been known to endure for so long.

Malavin and his team drilled into permafrost near the Alazeya river in north-east Siberia, Russia, in 2015. They found a single rotifer, a worm-like creature less than a quarter of a millimetre long. When the researchers warmed it up and gave it food, it became active. It also reproduced, because it is a bdelloid rotifer that can clone itself without the need for a sexual partner.

“We are quite confident that this is a new species for science,” says Malavin. He and his team sequenced the rotifer’s genome and found it was most similar to a species called Adineta vaga, which is thought to include multiple subspecies that haven’t been properly identified.

The team published their findings this week, which apparently included experimenting on the poor old worm by slowly refreezing and unfreezing it. “Experiments demonstrated that the ancient rotifer withstands slow cooling and freezing (∼1°C min−1) for at least seven days,” the team wrote.

Rotifers are super-tiny, topping out at about one-fiftieth of an inch, and modern rotifers spend a lot of their time getting eaten by other orgnisms, but who knows what being thawed out after 24,000 years and then messed with by Rusian scientists does to a worm?

Learn more about our future rotifer overlords above, via Journey to the Microcosmos.