Watch: Frozen Tortoises and Fish Are Reanimated by Intrepid Chinese Netizens

Watch: Frozen Tortoises and Fish Are Reanimated by Intrepid Chinese Netizens
Tortoises frozen in ice blocks (Sina Weibo); frozen fish springs to life. Screen shot/Sina Weibo
Larry Ong
Journalist
|Updated:

Warm water. That’s how Chinese citizens are reanimating frozen fish and tortoises.

A video of a Chinese man taking an icy white, motionless fish from a freezer and placing it into a metal basin of what appears to be warm water has been making the rounds on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent.

As a group of men watch on, the fish floats lifelessly for about a minute, slowly turns a healthy grey, then wriggles to life after spouting a few bubbles.

“Its’s alive!” said a spectator. It’s unclear where or when the video was shot.

Some Chinese netizens joked that cryonics—freezing people and bringing them back to life—might soon be a reality.

“Soon I will have eternal life,” wrote “Murong Bull.”

“No More Lost Teeth56912” wrote: “Can we freeze people?”

A netizen using the alias “Jieghii” offered a scientific explanation: “Liquid nitrogen was probably used to freeze the water molecules in the cells. But this type of ”freezing“ is different from the regular sort, so the integrity of the cells was preserved. That’s why the fish was resurrected when placed in hot water.”

Meanwhile, in the eastern Chinese city of Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, tortoise owners find their pets embedded in ice in their bowl homes as winter sets in, and have started circulating photos of the tortoises’ plight on Chinese social media.

(Screen shot/Sina Weibo)
Screen shot/Sina Weibo
Larry Ong
Larry Ong
Journalist
Larry Ong is a New York-based journalist with Epoch Times. He writes about China and Hong Kong. He is also a graduate of the National University of Singapore, where he read history.