These 6 Animals Basically Refuse to Die

There is a shark under the Arctic ice that was already old when your great-great-grandparents were born, and it is not even close to the hardest animal on Earth to kill. In Part 1 we climbed the animal kingdom by size and found the tardigrade, the creature you can boil, freeze, crush, and fire into space. This time we climb again, and it gets stranger the smaller we go: a fish that buries itself alive for years, a rodent that runs on plant fuel and forgets to age, a worm you can cut into a dozen living copies, a creature that came back from 24,000 years frozen in ice, and, at the very bottom, a little tube of stem cells that may simply never grow old. The pattern is the thing that gets under your skin: the harder death is to make stick, the smaller and simpler the animal gets, until "dying of old age" starts to look optional. So settle it for me: if an animal never has to die of old age, is that a gift, or is it a trap? Tell me in the comments. Part 3 is loaded — the level where "unkillable" stops meaning survives and starts meaning cannot be stopped. 👉 Subscribe (there is a new one every week): @bonefolks ▶ Watch next — Part 1: The Unkillable Animal at Every Size: The Unkillable Animal at Every Size ⏱ Chapters 0:00 The shark that won't die 0:57 The Greenland shark (400 years old) 1:57 The lungfish that buries itself alive 2:54 The naked mole rat 4:01 The worm you can't kill 5:01 Back from 24,000 years in the ice 5:50 The one that may never die 7:13 Look back up the ladder 7:55 Gift or trap? + Part 3 greenland shark, lungfish, naked mole rat, planarian, bdelloid rotifer, hydra, immortal animal, biological immortality, animals that don't age, unkillable animals, hardest animals to kill, tardigrade, regeneration, animal facts, weird animals, nature documentary, science explained, faceless animation, at every size