Box jellyfish demonstrate learning ability

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/science/jellyfish-learning-neurons.html

by mhb • 3 years ago

88 75 3 years ago

esafak• 3 years ago

I think centralizing learning into a brain is smarter, if you pardon the pun. Retrieval becomes faster, which is adaptive, and the body can protect it more easily if it is concentrated in one area, which enables internal specialization. If you can't protect the organ, the adaptive response is to make it redundant, rather than specialized.

serf• 3 years ago

I think centralizing learning into a brain is smarter, if you pardon the pun.

even we humans don't really do that entirely. the gestalt of different nervous systems that interconnect between themselves and our brain appear to be responsible for a significant portion of the constellation of traits associated with learning.

dtgriscom• 3 years ago

Evolution doesn't care what seems smart or efficient; it just cares about what works.

l33t7332273• 3 years ago

That’s true, but it’s also true that what’s efficient generally works _better_ than what isn’t.

rbanffy3• 3 years ago

It also doesn't care too much about what's better when good enough is sufficient.

adrian_b• 3 years ago

If all the neurons of a brain would be distributed uniformly in the entire body, keeping the same connectivity, there would be no difference in the behavioral abilities of any animal (except the reaction speed), even if it would not have any recognizable brain.

There are two reasons why all animals with a great number of neurons concentrate them into ganglia, and eventually into a single big brain.

The first is that when moving most of the neurons close together the total length of the interconnections between them becomes much smaller, so a much less quantity of materials is needed to build them.

The second is that the speed of signal transmission on the interconnections between the neurons is quite low, so when the interconnections become shorter, i.e. the nervous system becomes more concentrated, the propagation times decrease and the speed of reaction of the animal increases.

The very low speed of signal transmission is why all animals have the main brain in the head, close to the most important sensors.

For a humanoid robot, the speed of light for signal transmission makes irrelevant where the brain is located. Instead of having the brain in the head, a better position is in the chest, where it can be better protected. So what is seen in many SciFi movies, where humans completely disable some killer robots by cutting or shooting their head, would be unlikely to work against a correctly designed robot.

_a_a_a_• 3 years ago

I disagree with you but more importantly, so what if you're right. Are you going to design a proper brain for these jellyfish, or advise them to evolve one? What you say is just so totally non-actionable and uninformative as to be entirely useless.

uoaei3• 3 years ago

That's a good point. But there are throughput considerations at the boundaries to the things that the brain wants to control. It makes most sense to centralize logic, and to delegate specialized control out to subsystems only where those specializations are relevant. Essentially making interfaces for control of appendages into APIs where the finer control logic is hidden from the main orchestrator. Exceptions exist where extra control at high levels is warranted (e.g. digits).

dang2• 3 years ago

[stub for offtopicness]

cushpush3• 3 years ago

Brainless != distributed brain

dang2• 3 years ago

Ok, we've made the title less brainless above.

Bootvis• 3 years ago

This has great possibilities for new and creative insults but surely something is doing the learning and that can be classified as a brain.

neonate• 3 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20230923200015/https://www.nytime...

https://archive.ph/vGJjh

runjake• 3 years ago

While box jellyfish are fairly simple creatures when compared to mammals, I’m waiting for the inevitable study “announcing” that animals have their own thoughts, dreams and emotions.

Something people who’ve been around animals will respond with “duh”.

ben_w3• 3 years ago

Edit: I clearly wasn't clear, this comment is focussing on the question as applied specifically to box jellyfish, not animals in general.

Emotions (at least the physiological part, not the qualia) wouldn't surprise me at all even for the simplest of neural structures. Might even be a pre-neural thing, given plants have a transmissible chemical signal to make other nearby plants more bitter in response to being eaten.

Dreams and thoughts?

I won't say "no", but I will say that if you can prove it, then we probably have to start caring about the welfare of even very small AI such as OCR systems made by second year university students encountering MNIST and python for the first time.

justrealist• 3 years ago

Not commenting on the ethical implications, but it's fairly obvious that dogs dream. We could tell our dog was chasing squirrels in his sleep by the running and yelping.

interstice2• 3 years ago

Most mammals clearly dream, they even do the twitchy thing in their sleep. Has no one done eeg studies or is that not considered proof?

thfuran2• 3 years ago

An actual neuron is far more complex than those in an ANN. I really don't think it follows that if an animal with a similar number of neurons or synapses has some quality related to their brain, so does the ANN.

PrimeMcFly5• 3 years ago

Not all animals are equal. While some have their own thoughts and dreams, most don't.

steve_adams_864• 3 years ago

Do we have solid evidence or proof of that?

Even fish appear to have excellent memories in some cases, ability to recognize individuals of other aquatic species, and they have exceptional environmental awareness. With I was a kid, just about everyone was certain that fish were no different from worms or fruit flies.

doctor_eval• 3 years ago

Great, as if box jellyfish aren’t bad enough, now it turns out they can think, too.

bsima2• 3 years ago

Why is this shocking? Evolution itself is a learning system

aranchelk• 3 years ago

Evolution is a process that blindly accumulates beneficial mutations, that seems somewhat different from learning.

It’s easy to prove that just because a process is driven by a characteristic doesn’t necessarily mean the output of that process would also. Example: when I grocery shop while hungry, that hunger may cause me to make irrational decisions, but the collection of items I buy aren’t themselves hungry.

argiopetech• 3 years ago

Learning is the mostly blind accumulation of knowledge that will hopefully be beneficial (and not detrimental to the excess of that benefit, which is not a given) in the future. Targeted study is the exception, even for humans.

This is also a somewhat better description of evolution than yours because benefit in excess of detriment is not a guarantee and the process is not blind (because animals breed selectively).

pizzafeelsright• 3 years ago

Evolution is alive? Learning? What exactly is evolution anymore?

uoaei3• 3 years ago

I am honestly surprised to see this downvoted on HN. Everything is a learning system in the thermodynamic sense.

Hint: ML is just thermodynamics re-implemented in software.

adolph• 3 years ago

I wonder how the mechanisms of learn and infer in box jellys can inform designs of low energy narrow focus ML, like a toaster that associates a specific person with a specific toastiness rather than operating by time.

matrss2• 3 years ago

Honestly, it would be enough if toasters could operate by "toastiness", instead of time, at all. We had that decades ago and then just stopped, I guess?

I have watched too much Technology Connections...

/rant

astrange• 3 years ago

Just get a Balmuda.

andrewstuart3• 3 years ago

FYI if you're not Australian ..... box jellyfish is one of the most deadly creatures on earth.

Because of box jellyfish you cannot swim at any beach in northern Australia - you risk death if you swim at any beach anywhere from Gladstone in Queensland upwards.

Same thing with saltwater crocodiles. Anywhere north of Gladstone you take your life in your hands if you swim cause a salty might eat you, literally.

Worst case you get stung by a box jellyfish then eaten by a saltwater crocodile. No swimming!

cushpush3• 3 years ago

Stay aground in Oz and all you have to fear is getting talked into drinking goon

andrewstuart3• 3 years ago

On land you'll very likely be bitten by a redback spider, fall over onto the nest of a funnelweb spider which will also bite you and as you roll away in agony you'll roll onto a nest of tiger snakes, death adders, taipans and brown snakes. Leaping up to run away you'll very likely run in a Gympie Gympie tree whose leaves are covered in fine, silica-tipped hairs that release a potent neurotoxin when touched. Australia is a dangerous place.

Best to stay inside programming.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

thought you can wear woman’s stockings and can be immune or was that a myth?

firecall• 3 years ago

Off the top of my head, it's possibly a partial myth.

Although they do have suits you can wear to protect against Jelly Fish stings. Clearly barrier protection is effective.

So I suppose the myth portion comes from the efficacy of different types of stockings.

Fishnets probably dont do much good.... Super thick ones of a quality material probably do work!

I'm not sure of the sting mechanism of jellyfish and what level of barrier protection would work.

andrewstuart3• 3 years ago

Wearing womens stockings may not protect you from box jellyfish but will certainly make you look nice.

throwaheyy• 3 years ago

Not a myth. The stinging cells work not by mechanical touch but in reaction to chemicals on skin. Pantyhose apparently prevent the contact with skin which would trigger the stinging cells.

zoklet-enjoyer• 3 years ago

I didn't know crocodiles were so big! https://maps.app.goo.gl/rnNRoK9gCwVBN3LUA

dwd3• 3 years ago

FYI if you're not Australian ..... box jellyfish is one of the most deadly creatures on earth.

..And sounding even worse now.

You can swim fairly safely outside of Summer/Autumn though advisable to still wear a stinger suit to minimise the risk. And salties are pretty rare even as far north as Cairns.

I spent a few fantastic days snorkling off the beach at Fitzroy Island one December and turns out I should have been more concerned about sharks after a marine researcher was bitten recently at the spot I was casually swimming around.

m3kw92• 3 years ago

It will be another 300 million years before it evolves to be like how moneys were

karim79• 3 years ago

"The box jellyfish actively hunts its prey (small fish), rather than drifting as do true jellyfish. They are strong swimmers, capable of achieving speeds of up to 1.5 to 2 metres per second or about 4 knots (7.4 km/h; 4.6 mph).[19] and rapidly turning up to 180° in a few bell contractions.[4] Some species are capable to avoid obstacles.[4]" [0]

So wasn't this already, sorta known? If they can do that, then surely they've some notion of what is worth chasing after, and have demonstrated the ability to differentiate between something nourishing (like small fish) from something like an iPhone someone accidentally dropped off of the side of a boat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_jellyfish#Australia

pvg• 3 years ago

These need not be learned behaviours. You don't learn to breathe or to not-breathe water, for instance.

zoky• 3 years ago

Not necessarily. Their nervous system could have simply evolved in such a way that it is hardwired to go after anything that seems like a small fish.

stevenwoo• 3 years ago

There was a classic study that showed what we humans might intuitively think how brains and vision should work was wrong, at least with frogs - TLDR - their eyes do processing/filtering (one channel - is this thing in field of vision possible prey?) on input before sending some higher level signal to the brain

https://phdcns.sissa.it/publication/what-frogs-eye-tells-fro...

Obscurity4340• 3 years ago

Oh, the puns that are to come. Its like God out of the box jellyfish.

intimidated• 3 years ago

Going further, the researchers removed visual neurons from the box jellyfish and studied them in a dish. The cells were shown striped images while receiving a small electrical pulse to represent collision. Within about five minutes, the cells started sending the signal that would cause a whole box jellyfish to turn around.
“It’s amazing to see how fast they learn,” said Jan Bielecki a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Physiology at Kiel University in Germany, also an author of the paper.

Could someone please explain this bombshell?

Did visual neurons learn all by themselves in a dish? And how did the researchers know that the visual neurons would interpret "a small electrical pulse" as a collision? (I'm surprised visual neurons "know" what a collision is.)

kmarc• 3 years ago

interpret "a small electrical pulse" as a collision

They don't interpret as a collision. IIUC current models of instinctive behaviors and learning are built up from the assumptions that

* if a source of event is "beneficial" (from a chemical, physical perspective, eg "food" / energy packet is there) then those cells, neurons, microorganisms are naturally selected which tend to approach / follow / capture that source

* if a source of event is non beneficial (threat / chemical incompatibility etc) then those survive which avoid that source.

Here it doesn't matter that the negative event is a "collision", eventually the organism('s building blocks) learn to avoid it.

Box jellyfish demonstrate learning ability

Related Stories