Sandy Ong

speaker

279 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 11 Sep

Sandy Ong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Unexpected Elements · Science bears fruit · 5 Jun 2026 podcast

And we said, you know, we need to grow them, put them aside and see how long they will actually be maintained, looking very fresh and all that.

And so that went on for several months and eventually several years.

And we said, you know, there's something weird there.

That's probably the main question that we have right now.

So now that we're sure that there's no doubt about the fact that they do survive, in what form is it really alive or not?

That's why we kind of fondly call them zombies, because we're not sure exactly what type of life this is.

Some of these fragments actually grew.

So we're like there's metabolism of some sort happening there.

They were also integrating some nutrients from the seawater, so absorbing nutrients.

nutrients.

Y is probably a multi-layered, and we've not discovered the full underlying mechanisms yet.

We've studied them for three years and beyond.

So it doesn't seem like a means of reproduction, but it's probably an artifact of a really remarkable capacity that this particular species has.

They do have the capacity when they expel their internal organs to regrow them.

They have the capacity to split in two and then each half will become a new individual, a clone, two clones.

We know that sea cucumbers are long-lived.

They have been proposed to not necessarily die of old age.

There's this story going on about sea cucumbers, especially the northern cold water species, where it's hard to see any of these actually dying.

So they live long, so in the order of decades and probably beyond a century.

They're remarkable in many ways, but to have actual bits of tissues continue to live on their own, that was kind of another thing altogether.

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