Can These Animals With Extraordinary Powers Help Us Live Longer?

A sea slug that can rebuild its body, a hydra that doesn't seem to age, a whale that repairs its DNA remarkably well. What if the next breakthroughs in longevity came from these animals?

By Valérie Orsoni — Biohacker & Longevity Expert
Valérie Orsoni is a biohacker, author of 56 books, and founder of biohacker.fr. She has been tracking her biology through N=1 self-experimentation protocols since 1998. She holds a certificate from the Stanford Genetics Longevity Research Lab, and is currently enrolled in the Stanford Medicine nutrition science program.
She was named in the Top 50 Longevity Leaders by Life Spanning magazine and is currently the #1 on the Longevity Cup Leaderboard (chronological age -23 years).

Imagine a head separated from its body.

It has no heart. No kidneys. No reproductive organs. Almost no digestive system.

And yet, it keeps moving forward.

A few hours later, it even starts eating again. Then a wound closes. A heart reappears. A new body gradually forms beneath the head. Three weeks later, the animal is whole again.

No, this isn’t science fiction. It’s the astonishing power of a small sea slug called Elysia cf. marginata.

In 2021, Japanese researchers described this phenomenon of “extreme autotomy” in Current Biology: some young individuals voluntarily shed almost their entire body, then regenerate a new one. The decapitated body can still move for a while, but it never regrows a head and eventually dies. The head, however, survives and rebuilds everything it’s missing.

This discovery fascinated me. Not just because it’s spectacular, but because it raises a dizzying question: how many solutions to aging, cancer, and degeneration already exist in nature without us yet knowing how to adapt them for humans?

Evolution has been running experiments for hundreds of millions of years. It has created animals capable of regenerating a limb, repairing their heart without scarring, resisting radiation, continuously renewing their stem cells, or living two centuries while keeping cancer at bay.

We obviously won’t become sea slugs, hydras, or whales. But we can study their mechanisms, identify the molecules and biological pathways that make them extraordinary, and then try to reproduce them in humans.

And this transfer is no longer just theoretical. In several cases, it has already begun.

In several cases, it has already begun — and the results are fascinating!!!

A little further down in this article, I share a still-overlooked peptide that reproduces one of the longevity mechanisms of one of these animals (and yes, I inject it myself, of course!).

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