Who Needs All Their Arms Anyways? A recent discovery made by biologist Michael Abrams has found a fa
Who Needs All Their Arms Anyways?A recent discovery made by biologist Michael Abrams has found a fascinating new way that some jellyfish species heal themselves. He removed two arms from a moon jellyfish (Aurilia aurita), expecting them to regenerate. Instead of growing back the two missing arms, the jellyfish was able to rearrange its remaining arms evenly around its body. This allowed the jellyfish to retain radial symmetry, which is integral to locomotion and feeding. Abrams and his team named this newly discovered process symmetrization. This process began immediately after amputation and took anywhere from 12 hours to four days to complete. The jellyfish was able to regain normal functioning after the rearrangement, except with two fewer arms. Later experiments amputated differing numbers of arms and the results were always the same, the jellyfish would eventually regain symmetry. The researchers went on to observe symmetrization in three other species of jellyfish in the Scyphozoa class but exactly how common this process is remains to be seen.It was predicted that cellular regeneration played a part in this process, as it does in limb regrowth, but this was found to be untrue. It was discovered that the process is driven by the propulsion musculature within the jellyfish, which pushes and pulls the arms of the jellyfish around the body in order to evenly space them around the body. When muscle relaxers were given to the jellyfish, symmetrization was hindered or stopped entirely, showing that regaining symmetry is started by a different process than that of limb regeneration.Symmetrization is completely new to scientists but it is predicted that it exists as a less resource intensive process than that of limb regeneration, which occurs at the cellular level. Future research into symmetrization will focus on whether other radially symmetric invertebrates share this ability.JRAImage Credit: Hans Hillewaert http://bit.ly/21NXU3e Note: This is a false color image of a moon jellyfish in an aquarium.Sources:http://www.pnas.org/content/112/26/E3365.fullhttp://bit.ly/1dGDsPM -- source link
#jellyfish#science#muscle#symmetry#evolution#symmetrization#ocean#planarian#biology#research