Sea cucumbers found near Canada seem to have ‘zombie’ flesh that doesn’t die when lopped off

ST. JOHN’S — A scientist in St. John’s, N.L., has found that bits of flesh amputated from scarlet sea cucumbers can heal themselves and carry on in a state somewhere between life and death.

Sara Jobson is a doctoral student in the ocean sciences department at Memorial University in Newfoundland and Labrador, and she is a co-author on a paper about the phenomena recently published in Science Advances.

Jobson noted that typically, if someone lops off a chunk of flesh from an animal, the tissue will die — and it will be pretty obvious that it’s dying.

But things are different for the scarlet sea cucumber, or psolus fabricii, which is found in the North Atlantic Ocean.

When Jobson and her colleagues amputated bits of a cucumber’s tube feet, the pieces quickly healed themselves and grew into spherical blobs — and they stayed that way for years.

She describes the tissue as “zombie”-like because it didn’t regenerate like living tissue would, but it also didn’t die.

“It was just existing as this blob,” Jobson said in an interview. “Is it alive? It’s not reproducing, it’s not regrowing into (another sea cucumber), but it’s not dead.”

“Our little lab zombies are on that line between life and death,” she added.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 7, 2026.

Sarah Smellie, The Canadian Press