Even without a central brain, jellyfish can learn from past experiences like humans, mice, and flies, scientists report for the first time. They trained Caribbean box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) to learn to spot and dodge obstacles. The study challenges previous notions that advanced learning requires a centralized brain and sheds light on the evolutionary roots of learning and memory.
Even without a central brain, jellyfish can learn from past experiences like humans, mice, and flies, scientists report for the first time on September 22 in the journal. They trained Caribbean box jellyfish to learn to spot and dodge obstacles. The study challenges previous notions that advanced learning requires a centralized brain and sheds light on the evolutionary roots of learning and memory.
"Learning is the pinnacle performance for nervous systems," says first author Jan Bielecki of Kiel University, Germany. To successfully teach jellyfish a new trick, he says"it's best to leverage its natural behaviors, something that makes sense to the animal, so it reaches its full potential." "If you want to understand complex structures, it's always good to start as simple as you can," says senior author Anders Garm of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark."Looking at these relatively simple nervous systems in jellyfish, we have a much higher chance of understanding all the details and how it comes together to perform behaviors."
The team showed the stationary rhopalium moving gray bars to mimic the animal's approach to objects. The structure did not respond to light gray bars, interpreting them as distant. However, after the researchers trained the rhopalium with weak electric stimulation when the bars approach, it started generating obstacle-dodging signals in response to the light gray bars. These electric stimulations mimicked the mechanical stimuli of a collision.
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