Jellyfishes and the creation of the nervous system

Kimmo Huosionmaa

The stories of the "real sea monsters" might be a little bit different, what you expected. The thing is that sometimes waves would push the polyps in the line and push them to the beach. In fact, those jellyfishes can really kill and injure people very badly, and there is not much new about this kind of things. Some jellyfishes are not the single animals, what means that they are colonies.

That kind of jellyfishes or polyp colonies can be very large, and they can actually coalesce, and there are other animals, what are really dangerous. Those animals are actually the polyp animal colonies, what can break themselves in the small pieces, and then return in one piece. The size of those colony polyps is not well known. In the ocean is also the polyps, what are looking like plastic bags. In the ocean, those colonies can grow in the very large scale and the polyps can also be very lethal because they tentacles involves cell and neurotoxin, what cause death even by the small touch with those animals.

The creation of neurotoxin can be used to track the origin of the nervous system because the protozoans are immune for the neurotoxins like botulinum toxin. The cell poisons are effective against amoebas and jellyfishes, but if the jellyfish is creating the botulinum toxin, there must find the animals where botulinum will take an effect. And the chitin core, what the mussels have protects the animal against the cell poisons, but the slime, what covers jellyfishes does actually the same thing.

But when we are thinking about investigating the fossils of jellyfishes, we are facing one thing. There is problems to find the fossils of the jellyfishes. And mussels can use their core in many other purposes because it stands also the mechanic stress, and that mean that those mussels are not necessarily made their core against the cell poisons, it has the effect against volcanic heat or other chemical stress.

The problem is that there is a very difficult to find the fossils of the jellyfishes because those animals have so soft structure, that those animals would totally disappear during the volcanic eruption. But in fact, we don't know much about those animals, what is feeling like some kind of slime bag, and they can actually live forever because the animals what are breeding budding can live forever by its cells.