The comb jelly, one of the oldest animals on Earth, can fuse with another
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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.
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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.
