A beautiful marine animal with a jelly-like body surrounded by iridescent combs. The most likely candidate for the earliest branched-off animal lineage. And now, an impossible nervous system. Comb jellies may be too small to even cause ripples in the water as they swim, but their unique features are creating shockwaves in the scientific community.
A recent study, published in Science, looked closely at the comb-jelly nervous system and found something unexpected in its nerve net. The nerve net is a diffuse nervous system made up of interconnected neurons, most commonly found in simple marine animals like comb jellies and jellyfish. The researchers found that instead of being connected by synapses – junctions between neurons in all other animals, including humans – nerve-net neurons are continuously connected by a single plasma membrane.
