Comb jelly heals wounds

“At first, I thought we had discovered something completely new. No one had known that ctenophores could attach to each other. But then, we started doing literature research and found a paper published by PR Coonfield in 1937, where he showed the results of adhesion experiments done with ctenophores,” Jokura said. .

Coonfield, a scholar in the biology department at Brooklyn College, performed those experiments and proved that ctenophores do exist. A special kind of symmetry in their anatomical features.

Coonfield used the grafting method, which is mainly used in botany to join two different plants together, to see if the anatomy of the xenophores was indeed symmetrical. He didn’t give much thought to their ability to survive the graft, only making a note that it had occurred. Jogura, on the other hand, made it the main focus of his work.

Synchronizing comb jellies

First, Zogura and his team selected 10 pairs of healthy-looking xenophores, cut them up, and kept them close together. “Individuals were immobile, there was little room for movement and a small gap between them. Gradually, we saw that gap closing, and finally, the individuals interacted with each other,” Jokura said.

Originally, comb jellies fused their membranes and epidermis into a two-cell-deep barrier that protected the animal’s interior from the environment. Once this was done, their nervous systems also began to merge. “The nerves connected and the electrical connection was made. The muscle contractions started synchronizing. After 30 minutes, they were synchronized. [to] 50 percent. After two hours, they were fully synchronized,” Jokura explained.

But not every structure in these comb jellies is seamlessly integrated. “The timing of bowel movements depends on the individual because each person has their own metabolism that dictates when you want to have a bowel movement,” Jokura said. The digestive systems in the attached comb jellies continued to work independently of each other, with food entering one mouth or the other and waste being extracted from two separate anuses at different times.