In a new and unprecedented discovery , a team of scientists from Tel Aviv, Israel, discovered an animal that does not need to breathe oxygen to survive .
The paper published in PNAS describes a jellyfish- like parasite , which is the first known multicellular organism that is perfectly capable of surviving without oxygen .
And oddly enough, we didn’t find this strange living being in some inhospitable corner of the world, nor on another planet, but inside a salmon!
The little parasite’s name is ‘ Henneguya salminicola ‘, and it inhabits the muscle of salmon, having only about ten cells.
It is part of the Myxozoa class, a group of marine parasitic animals , and although it looks like a tadpole, it is actually more closely related to jellyfish and corals.
This advance opens up unthinkable possibilities and poses important questions not only about life on Earth , but also about the possibility of life on other planets .
We now know that oxygen is not an essential prerequisite for life , making it possible that extraterrestrial environments that were previously discarded due to lack of oxygen could be harboring organisms we didn’t even know could exist.
