Scientists have discovered that comb jellies, marine creatures often mistaken for jellyfish, have the remarkable ability to fuse their bodies and even their nervous and digestive systems. This discovery, published in the journal Current Biology, raises numerous questions about the nature of individual identity and the underlying genetic mechanisms.
Late one summer night in 2023, Kei Jokura entered the marine biology lab at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts excitedly carrying a blob in a beaker. The biologist had just come from the first floor, where tanks held a colony of gelatinous comb jellies.The blob was bigger than others, and it looked as though two of the jellies had merged into one. 'I couldn't believe my eyes at first,' recalled Jokura, who was then a postdoctoral researcher at the UK's University of Exeter.
Mariana Rodriguez-Santiago, a postdoctoral researcher at Colorado State University, was working on her own project when Jokura appeared. 'We were all amazed and astonished, thinking, 'How can they fuse and still be swimming and moving around like a unit?'' she said. She grabbed a pipette and gently poked one of the jellies. It squirmed. Simultaneously, so did the one to which it seemed to be attached. 'We thought, 'Are they able to feel the same thing? Are they one individual? Two individuals? How can we disentangle this?'' she recalled. Over the next few weeks, Rodriguez-Santiago helped Jokura combine multiple pairs of the comb jellies, scientifically known as Mnemiopsis leidyi, to see what happened. The findings of the investigation led by Jokura, published October 7 in the journal Current Biology, showed that not only could two jellies fuse their bodies, but their nervous and digestive systems fused as well.'The fusion phenomenon has definitely brought up many interesting questions, such as which genes are involved in fusion, what happens to neural signaling, and what defines 'self' and 'nonself,'' said Jokura, now a postdoctoral researcher at Japan's National Institute for Basic Biology.Comb jellies are found all around the world in coastal waters and the deep ocean. Though they look similar to jellyfish, they don't sting and belong to a different phylum, Ctenophora, which is Greek for 'comb-bearers'
COMB JELLIES FUSION MARINE BIOLOGY NEUROSCIENCE GENETICS
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