Image courtesy of Jan Bielecki.
Joel Kontinen
“Caribbean box (Tripedalia cystophora) jellyfish
can learn from experience, even though they lack a central brain.”
Researchers thought that the jellyfish was one of the simplest kinds of animals,
so this discovery sheds new light into the so-called evolution of learning,
Here the researchers “ used grey
stripes, rather than black, so that the “roots” would look further away than
they were – an optical illusion that initially caused the jellyfish to bump into the tank walls. But after a seven-and-a-half-minute
session in the striped tank, each of the 12 jellyfish they tested began
pivoting to avoid the walls, suggesting they learned from the collisions
and changed their behaviour accordingly. By the end of the experiment, the
jellies had cut their crashes in half and quadrupled their successful swerves.”
Source:
Wetzel, Corryn. 2023,. Jellyfish can learn from experience even though they lack a brain. , New Scientist 22 September,
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