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Sea Jellies Triple Swimming Speed Through Cybernetic Implants
It's going to be a very, very long time before robots come anywhere close to matching the power-efficient mobility of animals, especially at small scales. Lots of folks are working on making tiny robots, but another option is to just hijack animals directly, by turning them into cyborgs. We've seen this sort of thing before with beetles, but there are many other animals out there that can be cyborgized. Researchers at Stanford and Caltech are giving sea jellies a try, and remarkably, it seems as though cyborg enhancements actually make the jellies more capable than they were before.
[...] The researchers, Nicole W. Xu and John O. Dabiri, chose a friendly sort of sea jelly called Aurelia aurita, which is "an oblate species of jellyfish comprising a flexible mesogleal bell and monolayer of coronal and radial muscles that line the subumbrellar surface," so there you go. To swim, jellies actuate the muscles in their bells, which squeeze water out and propel them forwards. These muscle contractions are controlled by a relatively simple stimulus of the jelly's nervous system that can be replicated through external electrical impulses.
To turn the sea jellies into cyborgs, the researchers developed an implant consisting of a battery, microelectronics, and bits of cork and stainless steel to make things neutrally buoyant, plus a wooden pin, which was used to gently impale each jelly through the bell to hold everything in place. While non-cyborg jellies tended to swim with a bell contraction frequency of 0.25 Hz, the implant allowed the researchers to crank the cyborg jellies up to a swimming frequency of 1 Hz.
Peak speed was achieved at 0.62 Hz, resulting in the jellies traveling at nearly half a body diameter per second (4-6 centimeters per second), which is 2.8x their typical speed. More importantly, calculating the cost of transport for the jellies showed that the 2.8x increase in speed came with only a 2x increase in metabolic cost, meaning that the cyborg sea jelly is both faster and more efficient.
Low-power microelectronics embedded in live jellyfish enhance propulsion (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaz3194) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @05:49PM
Blasphemy!!!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Wednesday February 05 2020, @05:49PM (8 children)
Not two words I expected to ever see next to each other...
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by Mer on Wednesday February 05 2020, @06:44PM (5 children)
It kinda makes sense when you consider the physiology of cnidarians. They don't feel pain (like at all, they don't have a nervous system, none of this "chickens don't feel pain" bullshit) and they have no fluids that can be leaked by a permanent wound.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 05 2020, @07:00PM (4 children)
I believe that the perception of pain is a chemical process rather than a neurological one, and that even amoeba feel pain. The neural system is used to mediate the reaction to the pain in most (multicellular) phyla. So to say that they don't feel pain based on the lack of a neural system is, to me, incorrect. You'd need, instead, to observe how they reacted to the stimulus. If they actively avoid or retreat from it, then it's reasonable to say they experience pain.
How much pain is, of course, a much more difficult problem to evaluate.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 05 2020, @07:19PM (1 child)
My marine biology teacher rationalized it like this:
If the creature isn't reacting in a distressed manner like trying to escape, or other signs (depression?), then it's not in cognitive pain. You could also look for signs of wound healing, marked metabolic changes, etc.
These jellies are basically on a pacemaker that's acting as intended, just like in old people's hearts - making them pump faster.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday February 05 2020, @11:02PM
You are forgetting to account for the peer pressure
- Hi there jimmy... hey! WHERE YOU GOING WITH THAT DILDO UP YOUR ASS?
- Dunno really, ma'am... sorry but, gotta go. Literally.
- heh. Back in the day all you needed was a couple more earrings...
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Mer on Wednesday February 05 2020, @09:24PM (1 child)
Well, to continue on their simple physiology, they barely have enough differentiation to the point you'd call their body parts different organs and they have less than five different cell types. That, with the lack of a nervous system means that except for the propulsion pulses, every cell is just acting autonomously (firing stingers and absorbing nutrients) and even propulsion is coordinated only by a systemic chemical state. Since the implant is not impeding propulsion, I'd say even by your extremely broad definition of pain the jellyfish is alright, unless we argue the thing mentioned in later comments that faster propulsion is bad for nutriment aquisition and that the jellyfish would rather (already a silly concept to project advanced reasoning like that on it) pulse normally.
I get what you're saying about chemical pain, animals with primitive nervous systems will still experience the full hormonal mechanics of pain. But jellyfishes lack both a nervous system and a circulatory and lymphatic system.
Shut up!, he explained.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday February 05 2020, @11:10PM
I'm not arguing that they experienced pain, and certainly not extreme pain. I'm arguing against the definition. (I'd need to know a lot more to argue that they experienced much pain.)
OTOH, I don't think that it's arguable that this didn't decrease the survivability. That's quite obvious. They evolved a low energy motion system because that best suited their lifestyle. Increasing their speed is not a benefit (to the jellyfish). They're evolved to follow the plankton up and down as they do their daily migrations. They don't pay much attention to horizontal motion (except for phototropism).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday February 05 2020, @07:15PM
That's pretty much how cardiac pacing leads are attached to the human heart - it's an area of a lot of IP and "innovation" to make the best gently impaling lead attachment anchor.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday February 06 2020, @04:36AM
After "gently impaling" them, the researchers cranked up the voltage and frequency of electric shocks, to maximize speed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @05:59PM (4 children)
I would be willing to bet a large amount that the jellyfish is not optimized for speed, but more likely for a balance between enough water/nutrients passing through and being absorbed by its digestive system and the amount of energy expended.
Moving the water too quickly might decrease the amount of nutrition obtained by the jellyfish, and as they stated doubling its metabolic cost.
These record setting sprinter jellyfish cyborgs would likely starve to death over any long period of activity.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @06:11PM (3 children)
I actually RTFA and they admit this as a possibility themselves in the paper:
"higher speeds might limit the animals’ ability to feed as effectively"
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday February 05 2020, @06:43PM (2 children)
>I actually RTFA
bzzzzt! disqualified.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @06:45PM (1 child)
This is why I don't have an account here. Just sayin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @09:06PM
Get one so you can get booted out, then.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday February 05 2020, @06:40PM (4 children)
sciences impales jellyfish for futile research (same mechanism as those electro-trainers sold on TV), nobody bats an eye
religion wants to prevent the fetus to be snip-snipped in the womb and everybody lose their minds
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @08:08PM (3 children)
Morality? From you?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday February 05 2020, @10:52PM (2 children)
Got an upgrade. PAX ET BONVM.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 06 2020, @07:46PM (1 child)
Shitty Chinese parts explains your authoritative tendencies, your owners should just toss you in the local e-waste bin.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Friday February 07 2020, @12:20PM
>your authoritative tendencies
You meant authoritarian?
I advocate control back into the hand of the people, while e.g. socialists advocate a redistribution of wealth (implicit needing the authority to do so). So I should not even be talking about politics, because politics come after the new systems have come out and seek validation, but you should put ocasio cortez and friend two steps above me in terms of authoritarianism, on par with the no laws just market type. One step above me rest the old fashioned law and order types.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 05 2020, @08:30PM (1 child)
Similar to what has been done to mice
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_control_animal [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday February 06 2020, @11:20AM
As mentioned above this is closer to just sticking a pacemaker onto a heart, or an arduino onto the CAN bus connected to an engine management unit on an internal combustion engie.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves