A little more than a year ago, while biologist Kei Jokura was in Woods Hole, Mass., he routinely walked down to the water, scanning for comb jellies.
“They look like a jellyfish,” he says, “but they’re completely different.” It’s a blob the size of a silver dollar with little hairs that ripple along the edges of its mostly see-through body. Jokura says it’s possible that the first nervous system to ever evolve on Earth was inside an ancient comb jelly — a distant ancestor of the ones he was scooping out of the water.
He likens the search to a thrilling kind of treasure hunt. “You can definitely miss it,” he says, but his trick is to look for sunlight reflecting off of their bodies.
Jokura took the comb jellies he found back to the lab in Woods Hole and put them in a tank. One day, he went to check on them and a particular comb jelly caught his eye — one that led to a paper just published in the journal Current Biology.
“I was surprised because a weird shape was there,” he recalls. It was fatter. It had two heads, two mouths, and two anuses. Jokura thought to himself: “Oh, I think these are two individuals fused together.”
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