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Turritopsis nutricula is an immortal jellyfish. That isn’t hyperbole – it really is immortal.

After reaching sexual maturity, this jellyfish is able to reverse its aging process and become a polyp again. The ability to reverse the life cycle is probably unique in the animal kingdom, and allows the jellyfish to bypass death, rendering the Turritopsis nutricula biologically immortal. Lab tests showed that 100% of specimens reverted to the polyp stage.

Like the Brad Pitt movie character, the immortal jellyfish transforms from an adult back into a baby, but with an added bonus: Unlike Benjamin Button, the jellyfish can do it over and over again—though apparently only as an emergency measure.

How the Jellyfish Becomes "Immortal"

Turritopsis typically reproduces the old-fashioned way, by the meeting of free-floating sperm and eggs. And most of the time they die the old-fashioned way too.

But when starvation, physical damage, or other crises arise, "instead of sure death, [Turritopsis] transforms all of its existing cells into a younger state," said study author Maria Pia Miglietta, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University.

The jellyfish turns itself into a bloblike cyst, which then develops into a polyp colony, essentially the first stage in jellyfish life.

The jellyfish's cells are often completely transformed in the process. Muscle cells can become nerve cells or even sperm or eggs.

Through asexual reproduction, the resulting polyp colony can spawn hundreds of genetically identical jellyfish—near perfect copies of the original adult.

This unique approach to hardship may be helping Turritopsis swarms spread throughout the world's oceans, she added.

Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090130-immortal-jellyfish-swarm.html

that reminded me of George carlins one stand up , where he said,

Life should start old, and as we grow older, people should become younger and younger and Life should endup as Orgasm,

And it perfectly applies here. Wow...Carlin you were ahead of times

Yeah, Ruud, man. You know better than the scientists that studied this animal.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to isolated systems. The jellyfish is not an isolated system - it is absorbing energy from its surroundings. Thus it can reduce its entropy, at the expense of increasing the entropy of its surroundings. (Entropy is a measure of the disorder in a system.)

It absorbs energy which it can use to decrease its entropy - it expels waste products thus increasing the entropy of its environment. This is how living organisms are able to exist in a universe where the TOTAL entropy is always increasing.