Scientists accidentally discover the first species that fuse together if injured

Mother nature truly is remarkable when you look closely enough, and a team of researchers has stumbled across another example of that as explained in a recently published study in the journal Current Biology.

Fused comb jellies' nervous system

The team was carrying out standard research on comb jellies, a group of more than 100 species of marine invertebrate creatures that inhabit seawaters around the world. The team discovered one of the test subjects was missing from its tank and then noticed the significant size increase of another test subject. The team further inspected the suspiciously large comb jelly and found it was made up of two individual jellies but didn't have any noticeable "separation between them."

The scientists began testing to see if they could replicate the previously unknown quality of the jellies. The team removed small sections from the bodies of 20 individual comb jellies and paired each of the pieces up. Out of the 20, nine pairs successfully fused. Researchers found the fusion process doesn't even take long either, as jellies were fully combined within 24 hours. More specifically, after just two hours some jellies bodies were completely fused and their nervous system demonstrated synchronicity.

What causes this? The team proposed the comb jellies are capable of fusing bodies after sustaining injuries, and while fused comb jellies aren't technically 100% fused as the single organism still contains two separate DNA strands, they appear and function as 100% fused by how they swim in the water. Most interestingly, the team wrote that this level of fusion has never before been seen in any other species on Earth.

"So far, there have been no reports of this type of fusion in other species," said study lead author Kei Jokura, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter in the U.K. and Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Okazaki in an email to LiveScience