When it comes to taking evolutionary paths to hardcore, some animals don’t hold back. The common sea urchin, as it turns out, that flows to this point home-boasts a spiky nervous system scattered throughout its body, including human-sensitive cells that resemble human structures.

Think ordinary sea ​​urchins-Uroundish, spiky creatures mind their own business on the ocean floor. According to a recent Advances in Science Paper, this gathering is the whole body of Sea Urchin – or, rather, head. That is, sea urchins do not have a single body part, only a head, which is composed of a complex nervous system that forms a “brain of the body,” as researchers describe it in a statement.

Importantly, this nervous system is not a holding hodgepodge of neurons but a sophisticated network of cells similar to the brain structures of vertebrates. What’s more, Urchin heads have many light-sensitive cells, or photoreceptors, which indicate an unknown visual capacity for these creatures.

“Our results show that animals without a conventional central nervous system can still develop a brain-like organization,” Jack Ullrich-Lüter, study lead author and a researcher at the Natural Museum of Berlin in Germany, said in the statement. “This fundamental changes how we think about the evolution of complex nervous systems.”

The Life of Pubescent Sea Urchins

Many animals, including humans, are bilaterally symmetrical, which means they have bodies with right and left sides that generally change over each other. But urchins and their relatives, such as starfish or sea cucumbers, start bilaterally symmetrical and pass through a “radical symmetry – and five parts, a five-part symmetry, like a starfish.

Scientists have long puzzled over the unique evolutionary paths of these creatures, although genetic studies have thus far focused on their pre-metamorphosis, according to the paper.

And so, the team initially set out to investigate the mysteries of the Sea Urchin Genome during the extraordinary transition – that is, how does a genome that makes different body plans “? To that end, they conducted a full genetic analysis of the young urchins of the youth that have already finished changing, hoping to find out which cells have attracted such an enthusiastic glow-up.

Forget the aliens, sea urchins

In that process, the team found something even more extraordinary: an unexpectedly refined network of neuronal cells originating from the urchins’ bodies. In fact, the body itself is just a giant head; The genes that in other creatures define the internal organs are all internal, the paper noted.

But these neuronal clusters are more like “a network of interconnected neurons and ganglia,” according to the paper, like lakes that are “simple” because they don’t have a centralized brain.

The new analysis, however, revealed a surprising few families of neuronal cells and highly skilled neuropeptides. In addition, the team also identified photoreceptors that also appeared to contain different proteins to detect and process light stimuli.

Basically, sea urchins are a lot more sophisticated than we thought. They may also understand more than we believe. In fact, the latest results are probably the tip of the iceberg for sea urchins. I’m eagerly awaiting the next piece of sea tree lore.