Jellyfish Have Human-Like Eyes

Most jellyfish drift freely in the ocean current but the dangerous box jellyfish is an active swimmer. To help it navigate, the box jellyfish has 24 eyes that dangle from their cube-shaped bodies. One set of eyes is remarkably well developed and can detect color, size and shape, similar to our own eyes. At Lund University in Sweden, researchers recently set up a jellyfish obstacle course to test their vision and were surprised by how deftly the box jellyfish were able to avoid objects in the tank. However, their ability to jump through flaming hoops left much to be desire


Clearly there will be a Eukenuba jellyfish competition in the near future. Box Jellyfish,
Class Cubozoa
Because jellyfish belong to one of the first groups of animals to evolve eyes (the phylum Cnidaria), understanding how their eyes operate will show scientists what eyes were like early in evolutionary time.

"Cubomedusae", from Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur, 1904

Tags

More like this

Most jellyfish drift freely in the ocean current but the dangerous box jellyfish is an active swimmer. To help it navigate, the box jellyfish has 24 eyes that dangle from their cube-shaped bodies. One set of eyes is remarkably well developed and can detect color, size and shape, similar to our own…
Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms of Nature) was a landmark in biological illustration. Published in 1904, it was lavishly illustrated with 100 exquisitely detailed lithographic plates, including this one, showing nine different species of cubomedusae, or box jellyfish. It has been…
Jellyfish aren't reknowned for specialized organs; they lack brains, guts, hearts, and lungs. But some of them have eyes in spades. Mo writes on Neurophilosophy that box jellyfish have "24 eyes contained within a club-shaped sensory apparatus called a rhopalium, one of which is suspended from…
This weekend, robot cars competed in a challenge that most humans would find trivial: drive 132 miles in 12 hours without crashing. Yet crash, they do. The difficult part isn't so much the steering and acceleration, it's determining the difference between an obstacle you must navigate around and a…