Super-powered jellyfish – can merge with another and become one: NPR

A little over a year ago, while biologist Ki Gokura He was in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and routinely walked to the water, searching for comb jellies.

“They look like jellyfish, but they’re completely different,” he says. It is a silver dollar-sized blob with tiny hairs rippling along the edges of its mostly transparent body. Gokura says it’s possible that the first nervous system to ever evolve on Earth existed inside an ancient comb jelly, a distant ancestor of the creatures he was scooping up from the water.

He likens the search to an exciting kind of treasure hunt. “You certainly can’t miss it,” he says, but his trick is to look for sunlight reflecting off their bodies.

Gokura took the comb gel he found to the laboratory at Woods Hole and placed it in a tank. One day, he went to check on them and a particular comb gel caught his eye – which led to a paper just being published in the journal Current biology.

“I was surprised that there was a strange shape there,” he recalls. He was fatter. It had two heads, two mouths, and two anuses. “Oh, I think these two fit together,” Gokura thought to himself.

He took off at a sprint, carrying a fat jelly in a cup, to show his lab mates. “I was like, ‘What?’ “This is strange,” says the neurobiologist. Mariana Rodriguez Santiago From Colorado State University. “So I went to see him and said, ‘Oh, he’s into it. “Oh, and it moves together.”

This was a striking observation. If this being had once been two individuals, it now behaved as one.

The next thing Rodriguez Santiago did was poke him. “I mostly poked it to see if it would fail,” she says. “But instead, the muscles contracted at the same time.” This suggests that it had a common nervous system.

The researchers tried to find out if this small, translucent fatty substance was an anomaly or if they could recreate it. “So we did some experimental Frankenstein experiments,” Rodriguez-Santiago says.

They cut the comb jelly into strips in different places, and when they cut them along their edges and placed them close together, in the space of an hour or two, they merged them nine times out of ten.

In addition, the team fed brine shrimp a fluorescent dye so they could track food particles. “One of the comb jellies ate it and passed through their intestines, while the second one excreted it,” Rodriguez-Santiago says.

“I thought this paper was really interesting to read,” he says. Allison Edgaran integrative biologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. Comb jellies have been observed before, but this is the first time scientists have documented the behavior of the individuals as a single individual, she says.

Edgar is excited about what this discovery could mean for humans. “If comb jellies have this amazing mechanism of regeneration and healing, it means you can have an organ transplant without any consequences, and you will recover from it very quickly,” she says.

She says that given how quickly the metatarsal jelly’s two nervous systems become one, it could teach humans how to allow someone to regain full control of an implanted limb, for example. But she admits that this kind of progress is still a long way off.

In other words, comb gel may be transparent, but it holds secrets that remain largely opaque.