A jellyfish that ages backward, a war the emus won, and a town the jungle took back

Most animals develop in one direction. A cell that has become muscle stays muscle, and an adult that has bred and aged goes on to die.[3] When a Turritopsis medusa is starved, injured, or badly stressed, it instead shrinks, draws in its tentacles, and sinks to the bottom as a featureless blob, which over a day or two reorganizes into a polyp, the stalked juvenile stage that normally comes first.[1] The specialized cells of the adult are reprogrammed into the different cell types the polyp needs, a rare reshuffling that researchers call transdifferentiation.[1] From that polyp, new medusae bud off, each genetically identical to the animal that had seemed to be dying.[4]

The biologist who has watched this most closely is Shin Kubota, who has kept the jellyfish in culture at Kyoto University’s Seto Marine Biological Laboratory since the late 1970s.[5] He has coaxed a single individual through the cycle a dozen times, nicking its bell and waiting the roughly two months it takes to grow back into a swimming adult.[5] The species itself has been quietly conquering the oceans, carried between ports in the ballast water of ships and now recorded from the Mediterranean to Japan to both coasts of the Americas.[4]

What the animal is not is deathless. A reverting jellyfish still has to survive, and most are eaten by fish or sea slugs, or lost to disease, long before they ever get the chance to start over.[4] In 2022 a team sequenced the Turritopsis genome and set it beside that of a mortal cousin, finding extra copies and unusual variants of genes tied to DNA repair, to the upkeep of chromosome ends, and to defense against the wear that accumulates inside a cell.[2] The authors were careful with the word immortal: what they had found was a capacity to rejuvenate after breeding, not proof that any single jellyfish lives forever, and not a recipe that would carry over to an animal built as differently as we are.[2]

The farmers were mostly veterans of the earlier war, settled on hard country under a scheme that had promised more than the land could give.[3] Wheat prices had collapsed with the Depression, a promised subsidy had failed to arrive, and then about twenty thousand emus arrived instead, trampling crops and knocking gaps in the fences as they came.[2] A deputation of settlers asked the Minister for Defence, Sir George Pearce, for the loan of machine guns, and he agreed.[5]

The expedition was small: Major G. P. W. Meredith of the Seventh Heavy Battery, two gunners, two Lewis light machine guns, and ten thousand rounds.[5] On the fourth of November the gunners waited by a dam where perhaps a thousand birds had gathered, opened fire, and watched the flock scatter into small fast groups as a gun jammed after about a dozen kills.[2] The emus, it turned out, would not mass in the open and wait to be shot. They ran, at close to fifty kilometres an hour,[5] and kept running when they were hit.[4]

Meredith moved his guns around the district for another month, at one point mounting one on a truck that could not keep pace with the birds over rough ground.[2] He came to admire his enemy, reporting that the emus could take machine-gun fire with the indifference of tanks and that a division of men as hard to kill would face any army in the world.[4] How many birds actually died is genuinely uncertain: Meredith claimed nine hundred and eighty-six for nearly ten thousand rounds, while less generous estimates put the toll in the low hundreds, and neither figure can now be checked.[5]

In Canberra the affair became a joke, and one member suggested that the medals belonged to the emus, who had won every round.[2] The soldiers were not sent back, and the state turned instead to a bounty on emu beaks, which quietly killed more birds in a single season than the army had managed in six weeks.[2] The war is remembered now for its absurdity, but it began as something plainer, which was a group of broke farmers watching a drought-driven animal eat what was left of their year.[3]

Rubber then came almost entirely from Southeast Asian plantations, and a British scheme to prop up its price, the Stevenson plan, had American tyre makers paying whatever London chose to ask.[5] Ford meant to break free of that by growing latex himself, on his own land, to feed his own factories.[1] In 1927 the state of Pará handed him a concession of roughly two and a half million acres, an area the size of a small country, in exchange for a share of profits that never came.[1]

The land undid him, and the reason is a small irony of plant biology.[2] The rubber tree is native to the Amazon, and so is the fungus that ruins its leaves, the South American leaf blight.[4] In wild forest the trees grow only a few to a hectare, spaced too thinly for the blight to spread, but Ford’s men set them close together in tidy rows, which is exactly the crowd the fungus needs to erupt.[4] The same species had thrived in Malaya and Ceylon precisely because it had been carried there without its enemy; brought home and bunched together, it sickened.[4]

Ford also tried to plant a piece of the American Midwest in the tropics.[2] The town had bungalows and sidewalks, a golf course, and rules to match: no alcohol, wholesome food, and the whistle and time-clock discipline of a Detroit assembly line.[2] Workers used to the rhythm of the sun resented being told when to eat and how, and in December 1930 a switch to a self-service canteen touched off a riot in which the men smashed the time clocks and drove the managers into the woods.[1]

By the time the trees might have paid off, the world had moved past them.[3] Synthetic rubber and a world war had changed what latex was worth, and in 1945 Henry Ford’s grandson sold both plantations back to the Brazilian government for a small fraction of what had gone in.[3] Fordlândia’s ruins still stand above the river, some of the houses lived in again, a monument to the belief that a place could be run like one of its owner’s factories, and a reminder of how completely a rainforest declines to cooperate.[1]