June 1, 2016 — Sea urchins don’t appear to age, and researchers from Maine and Bermuda are trying to find out why.
The answer might help unlock the secrets of how to slow the aging process in humans, scientists say.
“We don’t really know how (long) sea urchins can live,” James Coffman, a scientist at the MDI Biological Laboratory in Bar Harbor, said of the spiky ocean floor dwellers. “They may be living hundreds of years.”
But when they do die, it’s not of old age, according to Coffman’s research.
That’s because sea urchin cells do not degrade, like the cells in humans or most other creatures.
“A lot of things can kill you. Old age is just one of them,” Coffman said.
He and Andrea Bodnar, a scientist from the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Studies, recently published an article on their research, “Maintenance of Somatic Tissue Regeneration with Age in Short- and Long-lived Species of Sea Urchins,” in Aging Cell, a scholarly journal. The research was funded by a two-year, $275,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health.
Coffman and Bodnar studied the differences between red sea urchins, which can live to be more than 100 years old; the purple sea urchin, with a lifespan of about 50 years; and the green sea urchin, which dies after four to five years of life. Bodnar said the sea urchin lifespans are based on observations by fishermen.