Imagine you are bdelloid rotifer. You’ve been taking a good long nap for the past 24,000 years and then some pesky scientists come along and wake you up. The meddlesome jerks. You couldn’t be blamed if you reacted kind of grumpily to this.
But now you’re awake, what is your first priority? A nice warm shower? A hearty breakfast? Some sunbathing, perhaps?
Nope. If you are a rotifer that has spent the past 24,000 years frozen in the permafrost of Siberia, the first activity you want to get right at is sex. I guess 24,000 years of no sex might make a tiny, multicellular, freshwater creature such as a rotifer kind of randy.
In fact, once revived, these little guys got busy reproducing right away. Not much foreplay was witnessed.
“We revived animals that saw woolly mammoths,” Russian scientist Stas Malavin told the New York Times. “Which is quite impressive.”
However, the poor revived rotifers came close but are in second place when it comes to longest frozen creature. The title of longest nap goes to the nematode. In 2018, scientists revived some of the microscopic worms – also yanked out of the Siberian permafrost – that had been frozen for 42,000 years.
Woken up against their will, my guess is the nematodes took a look around at the world in 2018 and begged to be allowed to go back to sleep. A few, however, might stick around to join extreme right-wing political movements, the views of which, coincidentally, have been underwater and frozen, also for 42,000 years.
Give or take a thousand years.
©2021 Jim Hagarty
