Jellyfish are an undeniable evolutionary success story, having survived in the Earth’s oceans for at least 500 million years. In fact, although they do not have a central brain like most animals, they are well prepared to cope with climate change in some parts of the world.
Despite the lack of a central brain, trained Caribbean box jellyfish can potentially remember past experiences in the same way flies, mice, and humans do, and can learn to detect and bypass previously encountered obstacles in a tank. The findings were published in a study published Sept. 22 in the journal Current Biology.
Jellyfish can learn from their mistakes.
Caribbean box jellyfish can remember past experiences, just like flies, mice, and humans, and can detect and learn to avoid obstacles they’ve encountered before.
It achieves all this despite not having a central brain.
University of Copenhagen neurobiologist Anders Garm, one of the authors of the study published in the journal Current Biology, says it was already assumed that jellyfish once mastered the simplest forms of learning, such as the ability to habituate to a particular stimulus, such as sound or touch.
What makes this study special is that it shows that jellyfish have a much more refined learning ability and can actually learn from their mistakes.
As a result, they can change their behavior. This is a very impressive feature, considering that some people cannot learn from their mistakes.
SOLVED IN 7.5 MINUTES
In the study, the team used a round tank with gray and white stripes to mimic the jellyfish’s natural habitat. The gray lines mimicked mangrove roots that appeared distant at the beginning of the experiment. The team observed the jellyfish in the tank for 7.5 minutes. Initially, the jelly swam close to these seemingly distant strips and bumped into them frequently. But by the end of the experiment, the jelly had increased its average distance from the wall by roughly 50 percent, quadrupled the number of successful turns to avoid colliding with the fake tree, and cut its contact with the wall in half.
The findings suggest that jellyfish can learn from experience and acquire the ability to avoid obstacles through a process called associative learning. In this process, organisms make mental connections between sensory stimuli and behaviors.
“Learning is the peak of nervous system performance,” Jan Bielecki, co-author of the study and a neuroscientist at the University of Kiel in Germany, said in a statement.
To teach a jellyfish a new trick, Bielecki says, “it’s best to take advantage of its natural behaviors; it’s something that’s meaningful to the animal, so it can reach its full potential.”
The team then sought to pinpoint the process underlying the jellyfish’s associative learning by isolating the animal’s visual sensory centers, called rhopalia. Each rhopalia has six eyes that control the jellyfish’s pulse rate. The frequency of this movement increases when the jelly moves away from an obstacle.
They showed that the fixed rhopalium moved the gray rods to mimic how the jellyfish approached objects, and that the rhopalium did not respond to the light gray rods, apparently interpreting the rods as distant. The researchers then trained the rhopalium with some weak electrical stimuli that mimicked the mechanical impulses that occur when it collides with an object. Following electrical stimulation, the rhopalium began to produce obstacle avoidance signals in response to the light gray rods as they approached.
2023-09-30 07:51:40
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