No brain? No problem for Caribbean box jellyfish. Their seemingly simple nervous systems can learn to avoid obstacles on sight, a study suggests.
despite having no central brain, researchers report September 22 in. This is the first evidence that jellyfish can make mental connections between events — such as seeing something and running into it — and change their behavior accordingly.
Weaving between roots is no simple feat. Caribbean box jellyfish judge a root’s distance based on how dark it appears relative to surrounding water — that is, its contrast. In clear waters, only distant roots fade into the background, or have low contrast. But in murky waters, even nearby roots can blend into their surroundings.
But those collisions seemed to lead the jellyfish to treat the gray stripes more like close roots in murky water, and the animals started avoiding them. The jellies’ average distance from the tank wall increased from about 2.5 centimeters in the first couple of minutes to about 3.6 centimeters in the final couple of minutes. Their average bumps into the wall dropped from 1.8 per minute to 0.78 per minute.
In other experiments, Bielecki and his colleagues snipped rhopalia off jellyfish and placed those eye-bearing nerve bundles in front of a screen. Sort of like that scene in, Bielecki says, except jellyfish eyes don’t have eyelids to hold open. The screen displayed low-contrast, light gray bars, while an electrode gave the rhopalia a weak electrical pulse, which mimicked the sensation of bumping into something.
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