ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
And now, news of a tiny, transparent creature that can pull off a stunning trick - two individuals can fuse to become one. Here's science reporter Ari Daniel.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: A little more than a year ago, biologist Kei Jokura was in Woods Hole, Mass. He'd go down to the pier or the dock and gaze into the water, scanning for comb jellies.
KEI JOKURA: Look like jellyfish but completely different.
DANIEL: It's a blobby thing, the size of a silver dollar, with little hairs that ripple along the edges of its mostly see-through body.
JOKURA: So you can definitely miss it. You can more look carefully to see slightly like a reflection from the sunlight.
DANIEL: Jokura is with the National Institute for Basic Biology in Japan, and he 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 then took the comb jellies back to a 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.
JOKURA: I surprised because a weird shape is there.
DANIEL: It was fatter. It had two heads, two mouths and two anuses.
JOKURA: I understand, oh, I think this is that two individual is fused together.
DANIEL: Jokura took off at a sprint, fat comb jelly in a beaker, to show his labmates, including neurobiologist Mariana Rodriguez-Santiago of Colorado State University.
MARIANA RODRIGUEZ-SANTIAGO: And I was like, what? That's weird. And so I went to see it, and I was like, oh, it is fused. Oh, and it's moving together?
DANIEL: That was the thing. If it was once two individuals, it was now behaving as one.
So you poked it?
JOKURA: Yeah, poked it. She poked it.
RODRIGUEZ-SANTIAGO: I did (laughter). And so I poked it mostly to see if they would get unstuck. But instead, the muscle contracted at the same time.
DANIEL: Suggesting it had a shared nervous system. So they went about trying to see if this little translucent fatty was an anomaly or whether they could re-create it.
RODRIGUEZ-SANTIAGO: So we did some Frankenstein pilot experiments.
DANIEL: They sliced comb jellies in different spots, but when they snipped them along their edges and placed them near one another, within an hour or two, they fused 9 out of 10 times. And get this - they fed the fused jellies brine shrimp, dyed fluorescent, so they could keep track of the food particles.
RODRIGUEZ-SANTIAGO: One comb jelly ate it, and it traveled through the gut of both of them, and the second comb jelly pooped it out.
DANIEL: The results are published in the journal Current Biology. Allison Edgar is an integrative biologist at the New Jersey Institute of Technology who wasn't involved in the research.
ALLISON EDGAR: Well, I thought this was a really fun paper to read.
DANIEL: She says comb jelly fusion has been observed before, but this is the first time that scientists have documented the individuals behaving as one. And Edgar is excited by what this discovery might mean for humans.
EDGAR: If comb jellies do have this great mechanism for regenerating and healing, that would mean you could have an organ transplant with no consequences, and you would heal from it very quickly.
DANIEL: She says, given how rapidly the two comb jellies' nervous systems became one, it could teach people how to allow someone to regain full control over a transplanted limb, say. But she admits that's a ways off.
EDGAR: Oh, extremely far down the road.
DANIEL: Comb jellies may be transparent, but they hold secrets that are still very much opaque.
For NPR News, I'm Ari Daniel.
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